Okay, it took a couple of tries, but I get what ya'll are going for and I like the idea. It's a 60 Seconds! meets Phasmaphobia. My thoughts (while keeping in mind that this is a game jam):
- Visuals and atmosphere and great. More would be nice (different researchers, etc) but you knew your scope and didn't over reach.
- Menu and day progression is good, though I think the bug where the "next day" overlays the "this is what happened during your chosen task" was pretty discombobulating, and while it's a GJ, would have helped the flow of the game tremendously.
- Task mechanics work fine, and I appreciate that when there's nothing left to do with a task, it gets greyed out.
- The journal and the entire goal of the game to figure out "what door is this" is neat, but wasn't obvious to me (probably because I skimmed some text tbf). That said, I think to help not-so-smart gamers like myself, forcing the player open the journal would be smart.
- My only hold up on the game is the fact that all the missions are just 100% luck/random and there's nothing you can do to prevent failure. Clearing out monsters was easy enough to figure out. But the fact that you can choose the researchers to send in, and that a researcher/guard can die right off the bat feels... bad? As a player I just feel I have little agency, and the best option is to clear out all the "safe" tasks, and then brute force the expedition until I have enough GREEN words to select a monster. This is pretty much the strat and while it was fun to figure out, it doesn't offer the player any agency or replay value mechanically (though there might be more story to it).
- Also, there's a bug that soft-locks the game. It's when it ask me to press space on some text, but space does nothing. At least it's happened to me a couple times now.
So, outside of the bugs, I think the biggest upgrade to the game is giving the player more agency in their choice (60 Seconds! has some simple but solid methods in how they achieve this). Obviously, it's a game jam, and there's never enough time to do everything you want. What you have is impressive, and you chose to keep things within scope and that's a talent not many of us have. Great job overall, and glad you submitted this great work!