itch.io

Nice game with simple shapes and powerups - it serves are a good foundation or prototype for other work as well. Level design is fine but I’d have loved to see more shortcuts to get back up based on what powers you had available, especially the dash early on. A lot of time can be spent climbing up the initial ruin. The biggest issue I’ve had is that dashing (and moving can ‘bounce’ off surfaces instead of stopping, particularly if the surface is curved (wall or vase). The lighting setup does a lot of work in adding to the visual appeal - even if at some angles it can be hard to tell when an edge above you stops and a wall begins if the base colour is similar.

Making me jump on teeny tiny blocks in the shade was a bit mean though. I realise it’s the last set but I got jump fatigue and could see my progress decreasing.

Finished the game. The tablets were one or two too many clicks to get to, to feel like reading in the menu though.

Volume sliders are always good to add.

There are some instances where the character can get stuck between bits of rock/debris, softlocking since you’re unable to get out.

The jumping feels slightly stunted at the top of the jump arc some how. It might be solved by adding a small amount of hang time.

There’s a couple of edge cases where I accidentally walk off a ledge and so jumping immediately goes into a double jump. This is fine.. but if it’s something you felt would be good to rectify a coyote timer is useful for these kind of situations.

Title splash is pretty, and transitions are fairly simple and snazzy. For some reason the ‘Q’ prompt that appeared looked like it was trying to show another letter in the negative space for me and my brain was confused about the ‘F’. I appreciate the Coyote timer and generous hitboxes. Arm colours is a nice touch. Jumping sounds a bit like a small dog ruffing. There’s lots of nice little details.

I did find that a lot of the level design seems to encourage you to look before you leap, but I found the information just slightly lacking to do in single attempts, even if I managed to luck and thin slice my way through a lot of it. The backgrounds and level sprites are mostly nice. Maybe a bit too many metal bar/fences.

Got into the lab! Generally fun to play, but either I’m missing an interaction or it gets pretty hard from here on out!

Sound sliders and a pause menu would be appreciated to be able to have some control over audio levels.

Pressing F on NPC text freezes the text printer instead of completing it.

It’s not super clear that you’re supposed to spawn the clouds under the cameras, rather than on them, so it might be possible that some people miss this entirely early on unless they experiment intentionally.

There’s no indication between having smoke or another kind of pickup prepared. The ‘box’ type pickup spawns the box correctly but there the sprite appears to disappear once it gets within the correct camera zone, but still semi-persist even if you die.

I never figured out that it was the damage on the resonance hit that subtracted from the resonance meter - especially since the game said power doesn’t matter. I figured it was just the number of times you could trigger it. the game does get significantly easier once you backload the damage.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy and quick to complete once you know what you’re doing. Shame there’s no mobs to do a philo-stone victory lap on!

Compact short little game with an easily accessible gameplay loop. The 10/10/10 upgrade is quite powerful, but I really didn’t want to buy it a second time because I’d become too fast and harder to control. Graphics are nice and benefits well from the restricted use of colour. The bass solo in the BGM felt a bit repetitive.

Didn’t really have any problems duping the AI and running around them. Sometimes the red ones were a bit hard to shoot, but that was about it. The green mobs can also be convinced to stack ontop of each other making it easier to deal with them.

Played until the dual-colour boss-looking monster, then the game blackscreened or crashed.

Being able to adjust sound is always good especially if people are going to be listening to similar (or same) tracks for a while. I didn’t find any menu keys or options.

If you’re up against the wall it limits the angle you can shoot at to about 70 degrees, rather than the 90 degrees where the fireball could ride along the wall. This leads to a few small instances of not being able to fire at enemies approaching you.

This looks like a game made by a relatively new team, and I think there’s a lot of potential. Between platforming, pickups, conditional walls, mobs and boss patterns, you have most of the tools in your arsenal already - with the exception perhaps of moving platforms which is always a little difficult to deal with.

I thought some of the control decisions were a bit odd (mouseclick for staff attack for example), but no real issues with how the platforming feels and getting the player to hit the wall (and potentially jump off it) was a good design decision. The sign that says you can walljump and dash is definitely not needed or comes a little late by comparison. My natural instinct on the world map is to click on a level but that sends you into the level you were last in (since you don’t move on the map).

Gave up on collecting coins and beating mobs up after the second or third level and just breezed through and beat the boss - jumping up a single side of wall and waiting for dash to regenerate so I could get higher wasn’t really what I wanted to spend my time doing when exploring, so I just decided not to.

Finished the game.

It’s nice that you can turn off the music, but the ability to turn the sound down a bit instead of muting it completely would be nice. Some darker edging around terrain that you can walk through would be good. I was rather confused at first.

The dash defaults to Left after you walljump, regardless of which key you have already held down. This means you have to wait until you start falling to be able to dash to the right. This is likely due to checking for some kind of keypress rather than if a key is held down - which would often be the case during walljumping.

It’s not especially needed, but a small, tiny amount of grace time for walking off the corner of the ground is always nice. Same for walljumping grace periods.

Music is fine. Title splash is great. I’m unsure if the missing-texture for the head of the staff is intentional. Combat mechanics are interesting, though I struggled with the snails. Hover over information is generally good also. I had a lot more trouble with the puppies though - eventually you run out of AP for Salt Cure and they just howl at you. Played until I got knocked out by dog about two dozen times or so, since I couldn’t get to the next map. Overall an enjoyable game though.

There’s a slight lack of feedback in some interactions - most notably for buttons and objects that have no hover-over text - so they don’t appear to react when you mouse over them. It’s generally a minimal issue, though, but it’d likely improve how the game feels - in addition to highlighting glass vials when dragging spirits into them.

The ground hintboxes stay in the world so reappear whenever you walk over it.

The instructions given for higher residues are a little unclear - it implies you can drag elements on your table directly onto the enemy (or the residue you want to combine with). I although thought perhaps that since combining residues removes all stacks I could make a bigger stack to deal more damage - but after several attempts I found this wasn’t the case. There’s no real feedback here to figure that out easily. You also realise very quickly that higher material attacks just aren’t as great for attacking the resonance meter as a couple of cheap attacks that require less elements and deal less actual power damage. This seems to make the Morph Ferret and Bombardier Beetle much less useful.

There was some slight railroading with the snails - because I was having issues with capturing them, I wanted to find another Earth attack that dealt less damage so I headed west, but was told I had to capture the snails. I feel like there’s a really missed game interaction opportunity here you could work with.

I noticed the notes were unsorted - or rather, they are simply listed in the order you collected them. It might be worth having them sorted since the books are numbered.

The dog’s gaia howl hits for for 3~5x 40~60 damage, dealing anywhere between 120 and 300 damage (KO’d after 4~8 attacks). No amount of Salt Cure & Fly seems to work. There’s also Purify/Whip/Fly but that deals too much power damage and you get knocked out at roughly the same point. Hydrate doesn’t really work against Gaia Howl either. This seems rather luck based, unless I’m missing something obvious.

Game loading gets stuck at 229/256. Clicking sends me to main menu though. Nice splash menu. No volume slider, but fortunately some people appear to have put a surprising amount of effort into the BGM. Would have been nice to be able to turn it down slightly. Art is great. I jumped in the air and burned people down with the dragon in the end.

Some things are less clear - For example, wolf doesn’t appear to be able to Heavy Attack. And when a player is wedged into a corner it is difficult to hit them. Some of the hitboxes may benefit from some optimising.

A lot of the interaction feedback for this is quite good, with appropriate highlighting and SFX. The exception would be the building buttons in the resource gathering screen. Filled the quota almost 2 times, 40 zombies got nuked by tazers.

There’s no volume slider to adjust sounds or musics, which meant that the music drowned out quite a few of the sounds. It’s also unclear how much you should save up before you BATTLE at first, but thankfully the initial penalties for doing so aren’t s dire.. but waiting for the EXIT button no a timer is annoying. The window scaling issue also appears to be affecting cursor position - I noticed that the cursor was becoming increasingly desynced with the mouse (lagging behind) the higher x and y become. The click point is still where the in game cursor is, but it makes selecting buildings and units to place difficult.

There’s no sound volume sliders, but the visual presentation is still rather nice and simple. It was unclear for me when exactly I should be taking off.. so I just stacked all three cards I was given for 10 turns and then ended up taking off straight to the exit. Mechanically, everything seems fine - though I never had any damage to repair.

Some sound effect feedback for putting cards down or taking off would be great. It might be worth finding a way to stop players camping and immediately winning.. but I think this issue persists no matter how far along they are if they take a turn or two. It might be interesting to have events or effects that happen even if you sit in one place.

Being able to have different starting points was nice. The collection and colour of the elemental pickups is also satisfying. The empty spaces where circles could be in the element tree looked like there might be more upgrades to unlock, but combining the tier 2 elements didn’t give me anything new. Played a couple times.

There’s no real indication for when you take damage other than your health bar going down, so it can be hard to gauge how close to enemies you can get away with. It’s hard to say how valuable any of the upgrades apart from pickup radius I and the center one is.

First time around, I thought I was supposed to click on EXIT to continue, and didn’t think ‘proceed’ was clickable. I ended up at the main menu instead. Art style is nice. No volume sliders but the sounds aren’t too intrusive either. I had some issues with the Cappuccino minigame, since despite ramming my mouse up and down it’d sometimes still take like 20 to 30 seconds.

You can just click once on the coffee machine instead of holding it and it appears to just finish regardless of how long you held it down for. The game broke on day 3 after failing the customer during the cappuccino minigame. I can’t serve the drink or see any customers, and the espresso image is on the right half of my screen when I’m at the main counter.

Art style is excellent. Volume sliders got some good use out of them. Everything seems to seamlessly come together, but I found myself wanting to be able to move the source nodes around, or flip blocks instead of rotating them. The first grid size upgrade was a welcome sight, considering. Cross-pipes and x-pipes are the most valuable pieces. Played several times. Only managed to get the second +2 size upgrade once.

The title splash looks good but is very busy. You made want to fade it out a bit or overlay a semi-transparent colour over it to make the title buttons stand out more from it. I think the main issue with the actual gameplay loop is that the amount of health you need to start each round with increases - since enemies always manage to deal damage before you can put your defenses up. This is also why defense/healing is pretty much superior to any other combination, since it increases the health you have to start the next round with.

Impressive title splash. The game suffers from some resize-to-window issues (UI and graphics), however, so I have to play it in fullscreen and the edges still cut off slightly. Most of the large-scale assets are impressive. I failed the first attempt at the typing minigame because I wasn’t allowed to backspace and didn’t know what to do at that point. I haven’t had this happen in any of the other missons. played until roughly I unlocked Detection Upgrade. It is a bit annoying how all enemies seem to turtle with firewall + healing potion once they’re below about 20% health, making them impossible to kill with Overload.

The CRT-overlay effect is rather fine. I can see what you’re doing with it, though an option to be able to turn it off (to increase readability and such) would be great. You could also experiment with making the lines further apart.

Nice title splash. Volume controls got some use, also. Mechanics all seem to work fine generally speaking and there’s certainly a build up of tension once the light starts going down. It took me a while to realise that ‘throwing’ threw towards the cursor, since the throw button isn’t a mouse-click. Played about one run.

It is possible to bind multiple keys at once accidentally in the keybind menu, since you can click multiple buttons at once. I didn’t like the button press noise bursts, but that might be personal taste. It might be worth either having mouseclick as an optional throw button, or to always throw items towards the cauldron by default.

The game is okay. Played a couple times. Managed to find a town area which I purified on the second just by running out into the purple to see how far I could go before dying. There doesn’t seem to be any issue with how the mechanics are implemented. I don’t know if I ever picked a health potion up, though. With a few quality of life adjustments and polishing you could have something interesting.

The game doesn’t resize very well. When I first opened it up, it was too large even for fullscreen. When the game is started, it is goes to a full screen size rather than a window size. There are also instances where the resizing isn’t centered on the middle of the main menu. The range on attacking seems too narrow for me to be able to get more use out of it than simply outrunning stuff.

I liked the music. I did have some issues with identifying what parts on the table were - fortunately, I was able to empty the cauldron before I lost anything useful. I did experience the very Hyrule-Castle esque maze minigame, though there were times where I moved to the next camera view and immediately got caught.

The trial and error is interesting, but I mostly managed to get “no effect” or “Property not revealed”. It’s unclear if incompatible ingredients cause properties not to be revealed or if I need two matching ingredients or such - at least early game.

Played ’til about Night 3.

It would be useful to keep terms consistent - for example, the tutorial uses ‘grind’, but the mortar dialogue uses ‘crush’. Adjusting the text prompt window to be narrower, moveable, resizeable, or scrollable might alleviate some of the constant opening and closing I had to deal with so I could see what i was doing under it. The other useful thing would be to remove or highlight completed ‘quests’ - since I was trying to complete them multiple times.

The art style between the world and the bag/recipe book is definitely distinctly different, but I suspect this is more resolved with experience with the medium and producing handmade assets than any particular design decision.

If you’ve experienced the Wordle, clicking, and at least one adventure, you should have at least encountered most if not all of the mechanics.

Volume slider was put to good use. The mechanics are relatively easy to get a hold of, but admittedly it seems to just work fine if you delete all the ‘bad’ items and just pump out potions every time you get three items. I never really looked in the grimoire since I was busy doing other things. Overall a decent game.

Sometimes I had difficulties with clicking on an item to remove it while falling. I can’t tell if this is due to harsh boundaries for the object, if there are parts of the object that aren’t clickable, or if the clickable zone of an object is calculated after it’s been rendered then subsequently moved - in which case, the hitbox would be lower than the drawn sprite. You might also just get a better play feel if you expand the hitbox slightly beyond the bounds of the sprite.

I enjoyed the fact that you found something other than “Another wizard/potion game” to fit with the jam themes. The shadow is also particularly useful when jumping around, even if you’re not in the air that long. Interactibles are well signposted.

A hang can be replicated in the second room by taking a photo of a Large object, then trying to get a photo of the other one. There’s no grace period for jumping when falling off edges, but the jumps aren’t so serious that it’s especially needed. Sound sliders could also be useful, though the game is short anyway.

Sprite design is excellent. Coyote timer (jump grace period when leaving ground) is appreciated. Volume controls were put to good use. Mechanics are well integrated and introduced. Respawn mechanic is quick and easy and solid enough to be used to reset position when you need to - small exception for entering rooms from the opposite side.

Encountered an issue when walking back out of the entrance of the multiple trap bullet launchers room with the wood. Character appears stuck in the environemt and not visible. Found all potions, did not complete game because of this.

Potion particle effects are plentiful, though I find they sometimes cover up the thing you’re trying to throw them at (IE enemies). I also only found out you could throw upwards by accident. Throwing potions also locks you out of jumping. Firebombs are a touch hard to work with and I thought they were an environmental hazard when I first encountered them and turned back to try find some sort of powerup to get past it.

I found two endings, I don’t think I discovered any indication of there being a third one.

It looks like a load() object got misplaced into the Greenhouse in the latest patch before the submission deadline, so it keeps loading default values for upgrades and resources.

The art style in this is striking and reminds me a bit of Omensight. The timer-based tile movement is unique at first, but it makes getting a handle on the interaction part (inputs/action modes) more difficult.

Overall I think it’s okay. I didn’t have a desire to progress much after I filled corruption to 50 and went though the portal.

You can put symbols in your name. I tried putting quotation marks in and it would just load in forever without end. It’s hard to tell if there’s a specific method to get skills other than three-of-a-kind type powers. There’s a lot to click around with, but having to click for movement and for actions and within specific time ticks was a bit too much micromanagement for me. Absorbing all spirits omnidirectionally was a good design decision, though. It would be a little more interesting if some buttons were click-to-fire rather than click-to-change-mode, like stealth.

The 3d physics aren’t bad considering the main way to get rid of an item is squeezing another prop onto it to push it through the floor. It took me several attempts to realise that the rope was, in fact, not a French Horn or something. I did notice the password was randomised though.

Overall decent, but the background music does get repetitive by the time you start reattempting. I still don’t know what triggered the clover to be interactible with the bucket. I managed to trigger it by accident while I spent time figuring out how to light the unlightable firepit. Managed to finish the game in the end.

The clock sound is quite fierce. Good thing there’s a volume slider. I was expecting to be able to rebind controls in the controls menu, based on its name. I also had some issues with the lack of feedback on successfully grabbing or releasing an item. That’s probably the biggest caveat here. There’s no sound or visual clue or animal to suggest you should start dragging the item, or that you’re close enough to use it but it that interaction doesn’t work.

No issues with the actual physics and respawning timers. That’s pretty good, considering the amount of weight those two mechanics are pulling. The additional mechanics caught me by surprise. Managed to finish the game in the end after failing to be the worm in the apple.

Music is alright. I didn’t even consider trying to change the sound volume by the time I was done. Someone’s spent a lot of time looking at penumbra lighting! It does however lend a 3d aspect to the environment which otherwise has 2d sprites. This isn’t really an issue - more a stylistic decision.

With irregularly shaped platforms, something like a Coyote timer could be useful (grace period for jumping after leaving the ground)- sometimes you slide off when running down slanted slopes instead of jumping.

I headbutted the ball by accident when it respawned on the first level because I was playing with the one on the ground. I don’t know whether this was intentional. Being able to click away at terrain is a nice mechanic and seems handled well, but there is a brief moment where I expected a sword animation or something to appear rather than the terrain I clicked being deleted based on expectations and the text prompt I was given. I also tried to click and drag my mouse cursor for the sword, but the event happens only on click - which is understandable given later levels… however, being unable to cut free-falling terrain does have it’s own issues! I keep getting stuck between two cut pieces and unable to jump out.