Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(1 edit) (+2)

Unfortunately, I don't thing the game is working right for me. No matter what I do, I don't seem to be able to give anything to the  creature. No matter how much food or poison I bring, when I end the day and click "Feed", the hunger bar goes down and the rest stay the same.

Still, I'll say what I can about the rest. The idea of the game I think is really good. You don't know what's growing there, but you know you have to feed it if you don't want to be next, so you frantically search for food around. But, you also have the option to poison it and try to kill it (I'm guessing, couldn't try it.). All of this before nightfall. The premise is good.

The artwork fits the game really well. The pixelated little area looks cozy, which makes it contrast a lot with the creature shrieks. It has that uncanny feel to it, and I think it's really well achieved. I also like how as daylight goes down, it actually gets darker, though for some reason a lot of things are not affected by the light so they just look incredibly illuminated around the dark soil. One thing I would change is making the ambience sound effects a little louder. The wind, tree leaves rustling, the ocean, maybe some animals, etc. All this so that if you're away from the shed, it feels relaxed, but of course you have the creature in the shed. The false sense of calmness can be really spooky.

I'll keep trying to feed the creature for a while, or maybe you have some hints if I'm doing it wrong!

(3 edits) (+2)

I worked on this game for the jam, thanks for playing it and thanks for saying all the nice things. Unfortunately due to a mistake/unforseen act of god, the UI doesn't actually communicate anything about the game, which we realize now after watching other people play it. The "feed" screen UI for some reason has a white background to the inventory, which indicates that the food is selected (and thus, pressing the big "feed" button in the screen will do something). 

It actually doesn't- the idea is that you select which items to feed the monster by clicking on them one-by-one (you might have only found loads of poison and not want to use all of it, for instance). The "Feed" button just ends the day and feeds whatever you have selected (in your case, nothing). We, the three who made it, all "knew" how to feed it, so this in hindsight glaring player feedback issue never game up as we were making it.

Other issues we probably should have noticed but didn't, and I'm not sure if you encountered:

  1. unclear what the goal even is if you didn't read the itch.io page
  2. "hunger", "trust", "strength". We don't actually tell you what any of these bars do, nor do we animate them moving. We hint at their functions with notes, but nobody figured out that the effect of food scales with how much the monster trusts you, for example. Or that you run faster at higher trust.
  3. Also unclear what effect food has, even moreso with trust scaling their effect. The descriptions give you a hint--hedgehogs reduce its strength similar to poison, for instance--but only one person who wasn't us ever figured out their effects enough to make a meaningful gameplay choice about feeding strategies. And that involved us having to tell him the effect of trust on the bars.
  4. Forest is kind of barren- it has 3 spawners close together, but many players explored every corner as it's quite large.

Hope this helps you wring some enjoyment out of it.