Apologies in advance for what might be one of the most brutal SBIGJam reviews I've ever made.
This game had extreme mixed emotions for me. The whole concept was really exciting! One of my favourite memories as a child is having a 128-in-1 cartridge for my Game Boy Advance, filled to the brim of games and very obvious clones for said games (ones I specifically remember were mario & luigi: a clone of nuts and milk, as well as McDonalds Time, a clone of Burger Time!) There was so much to love about that cart and the whole idea of taking all 172 modifiers and turning it into a bootleg multicart is one of the most amazingly creative ideas I've seen!
My main problem for me though is with the execution: and I think that's because in my opinion it breaks rule one of SBIGJam, "it has to be fun to play". This might have been my fault more than anyone's, as I am a completionist when it comes to SBIGJam games, and when I see 68 stars to collect, I am going to try my very very hardest to collect all 68 stars. I played this game for well over an hour, and for every game I kinda thought "ooh it's cool how they handled this" for a few seconds before spending several minutes painfully trying to complete it. The platforming and the circle puzzle sections were the most frustrating of them all. With the platforming sections my jumps barely ever registered while I was moving, and the hitboxes were painfully inexact at times, making levels just really frustrating to play. While I loved some of the ways the levels were modified, I didn't love actually playing them at all. When it got to the "haven't we been here already" level, I thought "no they're not actually gonna make me complete the level 16 times" before having to complete the level 16 times. And you bet I completed it.
The most frustrating level, and the one level I couldn't complete, was the "Get out of my head" level. The rotating puzzles were obscenely difficult and I just couldn't do it. It got to the point where I just turned the sound off, listened to a podcast for a while and just went for it for 20 minutes, but even then I could not get past this single level.
The main thing to remember in these jams is there are a lot of games, and to a certain extent one needs to respect the players' time. It's a difficult problem to get right and one that I've definitely struggled with in plenty of my entries. However the main thing I've noticed over the years is that I've never seen a single complaint about a jam game being too easy, and I've seen countless complaints about jam games being too hard.
Overall though this game was brimming with creativity, and I loved seeing how every modifier was handled in a unique way! Thanks so much for submitting and well done 😀