This is the most retro dungeon crawler I've played this jam so far!
The artwork was nice, though admittedly I got sick of the wobbling after a while. Beside that, I liked how it was consistent throughout, and the enemy sprites looked good. The only areas I had a problem with the visuals, aside from wobbling, was the lack of visuals for stairs, and it made the mosquito enemies kinda hard to notice I found. I kept the mapper through the length of my run until my party kept getting wiped, but I imagine navigation without a map could be confusing with all the walls and floors looking the same.
The use of the multiple characters slowly disappearing was really neat! As my crew got widdled down the decision got harder and harder. I tried keeping the soldier as long as possible as I thought he was the only one with a gun. I learned from reading another comment that multiple characters have guns and you can find new weapons. I noticed the change weapon and tried it on the soldier and saw he had the SMG and Knife, and since the others all had a Knife equipped that it must be the only weapon they carried. I guess my own implicit bias of thinking of it as a default fallback weapon lol. In any case I never bothered selecting change weapon on any other character, and I never noticed any picked up weapons.
One thing I did find confusing with the characters being sacrificed was the soldier being dealt 2x damage as the option. I assumed that meant the Soldier could possibly survive, but of course they did not. The rest of the descriptions were clear, and the story moments were well written and fittingly cosmic horror.
The combat was like the turn-based dungeon crawlers of old, and while it controlled fine I did find the lack of feedback concerning the party health a bit confusing. I was probably playing it too fast, but I'd basically just press 1 to kill enemies as quickly as possible and heal between fights. And of course there'd be numerous times where I'd be in the middle of a fight and then be teleported somewhere randomly. Which I only realized after the second time it happened that my party all died 🙃. Or there was a couple times across my playthroughs where I'd be walking around and suddenly noticed I'm missing a character that I hadn't left behind. For idiots like me it felt like "I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, wait what happened?".
I will mention though the sounds and feedback when attacking enemies are good.
I also liked how punchy the sound effect for bumping into a wall is. Makes it impossible to ignore, AND doesn't deal damage to the player!
The level design I liked, providing the multiple paths and even the optional destructible routes was great! Never stepped on a trap as I didn't want to lose health, but that goes to show they were an effective barrier.
I guess the biggest issue for me playing it was there wasn't enough information regarding party status being broadcast to the player. Like a stock "AAAH!" sound when a party member dies would be helpful, and a more prominent notification of new items being collected would be great.
Overall a solid entry, I just don't think it's MY type of dungeon crawler so I wasn't prepared to play it the proper way I think. Or I could just be dumb, that is a viable option.
Good work!