Alright, wow, that’s not how a game jam game should look, play and feel. This is pretty amazing really.
I liked the density of secrets. There was a lot of design around that. And the areas had somewhat different feel in their layout too to reflect their setting. That said the combat system with full health restore made the intensity level quite even / casual and there wasn’t that much of elevated risk from having multiple enemy groups in the same area for example. That said, I’m not really complaining, I feel like the target was a casual strategy dungeon crawler and it nailed that perfectly.
It would be easy to make it much more scary if new party members didn’t automatically come to you after each fight, but again, I don’t think that was the aim.
Equally, not really saying it would be good but that there always was a constant symmetry for all dice options… it could have been interesting if there were 5 members and die value 1 and 6 only mapped to the first and last weapon while all other had 2 so that these could be a little extra special.
It probably made perfect sense, but it was a little obscure upon death, why some came back with elevated level and why some skills remained leveled up while others reset though they had icons that at least looked like what I had leveled up.
The mysterious prompts on getting sanity restored or increasing it out in the world. I liked those, even if I didn’t figure out what they were hinting at. I don’t feel like I wanted or needed to understand them though. They added to the uncertainty and hostility of the world.
There were a lot of nice text prompts too. I read them all, or most of them, and they added nicely to the world even if I often have a hard time to stop and read when gaming brain says explore, fight, come on! But the centered text combined with rolling out made them a bit annoying. I wanted to read at once but stuff kept jumping around until it all was visible. So I’d prefer instant show, some animation of perhaps transparency along the text, or left orienting the text and then let it roll out. Not jumping around text please.
I do have one strong objection though! PET THE CAT, I want to pet the cat. Should almost remove one star because of that :)
But seriously fantastic entry!
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/7ixT153CDvs