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Ah, yeah. You need to hold the space bar or 'sprint' button (the south most button on a gamepad) until the arrow is filled to start the game. We for sure need better feedback there as it is not the most clear in hindsight.

And sorry for the delay on responding! The past week was a bit crazy for us... 😩

If you still end up having trouble moving forward, def let us know!

Ah yeah, those are some nice ideas to play around with! We will have to play around with that a bit when we pick this up again :D

Thanks again!

Thanks for playing, and that's awesome that you were able to get through, haha :D

We were glad to be able to build the little algorithm to have a controlled randomization of the ritual recipes and the ingredients that were spawned in the house. Being able to play through more than one time was something that we thought was important for a small game of this type.

And yeah, the environment and the monster mechanics, because they were created simultaneously and building off of each other over the course of the jam, there ended up being some portions of the house that were less prone to monster navigation. Moving forward, we could spend some time making parts of the environment more uniform (both in size/shape and in their distribution in the rooms) to meld better with the gameplay.

The items definitely need a pass on how they feel in the world. At first they were modeled after larger world objects that would make sense to have a kind of heavy feel to them, but then we never got back around to cleaning those up. Spending some time to make them noticeable and have some affordance that they can be picked up, while also making them less of a hassle to move around, could help a bunch.

Thanks for playing, and for all of the feedback!

We were definitely going for a tense feeling and creepy atmosphere, so it sounds like we hit the mark!

Art, lighting, and atmosphere were for sure a major focus for us, so thanks for the praise :D 
Lighting, audio, and presentation are a huge part of good horror, so we knew we needed to focus a lot on those aspects.

For this jam, we wanted to explore how we could capture some of those horror feelings. Some of the player action mechanics likely suffered a little bit because of that focus on the art and atmosphere (jam games, heh) but with more time those could defiditely be massaged.

Thanks again, and we hope to take what we learned here and bring it into our future projects!

Thank you! Glad you like it :D

Thanks a ton for the feedback!

We really appreciate the time that you put into writing the response for sure; it was very thorough! And you bring up a ton of valid points that we will be looking into for sure for our future updates.

The discord channel is also a great resource. Thank you for providing it - we will definitely check that out!

😄 Thanks a ton for checking it out! Glad you had a good time with it. 

And you weren't bad at the puzzles! They were designed to ask you to explore in the space a bit. (And the demo moves a little faster than the full game).

Let us know if you have any suggestions to improve the game too! We are always looking for the feedback.