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quick rules question: if one were to cast this to invalidate the part of your backstory to which this spell is relevant, does that lift the restriction on others using it?

Wow!! There were so many strong submissions to this year's jam, so that is really high praise. Thanks so much for your kind words and for playing, it means a ton!!

love you love you love you!

Thanks so much for playing!! I think our sound designer @7axel7 did a bang-up job with the music and voices, too. So glad to hear you had a good time!! <3

Hehe, we LOVE a spreadsheet!! We've realized since uploading our latest post-jam patch that we still managed to overlook some combinations that you just have to gamble on re: smells and glows, so I anticipate there'll be some of those in our own future soon as we try to refine the design and make sure everything is actually solvable. Thank you so much for playing our silly game and leaving a comment -- so so glad you enjoyed!!

Loved the vibe of this one. The telegraphing of your progress was super clear (I was taking notes on how you did it to inform my own future puzzle design hehe), and I loved the sound design -- night ambience with crickets chirping, bells ringing, and the sound effects that faded in whenever you found a constellation. I'm curious, was there ever a plan to outline the constellations in the sky on completion? Or to put in a soundtrack in the same key/scale as the bells? Definitely not a "this feels missing", I really like it as is, but moreso asking out of curiosity because it seemed almost like the constellation types and bell sounds were too carefully chosen for it not to be the foundation for something like that.

Totally get it! I thought it might have been something like that, the rest of the game was extremely thoughtful when it comes to accessibility. All in all still a fantastic submission and easily a top contender for me! I’m thinking I’ll have to check out some of your past games soon, if they’re all as weird and wonderful as this was… Head Honcho looks very interesting :)). Keep up the great work, I look forward to seeing what else you make in future jams!!

Ohhh gotcha, that makes total sense then. Had a good chuckle reading the reviews at the end of each day, that’s a super creative and fitting touch. Loved it!

This was great fun. Fantastic idea, had me bobbing my head to the music on every level, and the rainbow VFX on the jump trail really elevated the otherwise simple B&W visuals to make a visual style that was so much more than the sum of its parts -- I was really hoping that that would be where the Memory Lane part came in! I'd agree that the jump window could benefit from being just a touch more forgiving, but on the other hand that made it feel all the more rewarding when those nice streaks stacked up. One additional thing I wouldn't have minded is some way to see the "borders" of where the little void bubbles reach when they're expanded, as there were more than a few occasions where I lost a level because I was standing just a bit too close to the bubbles, but again that could be less a game design thing and more a me-being-terrible-at-platformers thing. All in all though, this was probably one of the entries I've had the most fun playing in this jam so far. Really awesome execution on a great idea!

Whoops, so I wrote this review before getting to the final level, reached the final level, and realized I immediately had to come scurrying back here to praise it in particular. I mean this with full sincerity, that's brilliant level design. Especially liked the space it gave to turn over and over that last line of "dialogue" in my head, really powerful writing.

[Spoilers for the ending:]

One thing I will say in the interest of being thorough, just because I commented on the content warning in my original post: If you decide to upload a post-jam patch, would you consider adding a jumpscare warning to the list of content warnings, and/or to the game page somewhere? I realize that that may take away from the surprise at the end a bit too much, but the rest of the game's content is definitely enough to make the player believe that the subject matter and mild flashing/loud sounds on "explosion" are all that they're about, and unfortunately in the inclusion of a content warning the implication is sort of given that the content warning covers all that could be potentially distressing for a player.

Wow -- this was so well-polished, and the concept so creative! Just the core gameplay loop on its own would have made for an impressive jam game, but then the progressive story and increase in difficulty that took place over the course of seven (!!!) levels took it that much further. Sound design is awesome -- as someone else already commented, the transition from cutesy music to people screaming for their lives is... well, it's really effective, especially as the enemies fade out and you just have to sit there and think about what you’re doing lol. And I'm sure I don't even need to point out how nice the style is: the smooth animations, the pictures at the end of each level, and especially the [spoiler] that talks to you in between with that ~smooth and sonorous voice~ and forces you to actively keep choosing to continue. This could've easily been a game I bought on Steam; that it's a 9-day jam game instead is really remarkable. Amazing work all!

PS: Very appreciative of the content warning provided at the beginning -- that was a really nice accessibility feature and let me adjust my audio settings going into it accordingly.

Coming in here to gush only to see that, of course, I'm just adding my voice to the chorus of "wow"s. I can hardly believe that this was a jam game, y'all did seriously such an outstanding job with it -- art and animation style are so clean, consistent, and polished; music is a jam; and the core mechanic of having to balance the hops and the void is brilliant and goes perfectly hand-in-hand with the level design. Like some other folks in the comments, I've never been much for platformers on account of being Very Bad At Them, but this silly little bunny has well and truly stolen my heart. Doing it for you, little guy.

I love the visual style in this one! It looks super clean and the enemy designs are awesome. The one accent colour on black and white is very classy, very void-y. Big ups also for the tutorial, it gets through everything the player needs to know efficiently and effectively. Mining looks great, ending was charming, and I'd be interested in seeing what could be done with the shop if you ever decide to revisit after the jam!

Well, this was an absolutely fantastic brain-boozler of a game. First level was enough to get me hooked -- I really like the visual style of the game, the level transitions were super smooth and your conversations with the Wanderer surreal and wonderful -- but as soon as I figured out what was going on in the second level I was 100% in. What a fantastic take on a familiar type of puzzle; moving through endless impossible corridors as the "solving mechanic" just made for such a cool vibe. Seeing as you talk in the description about how this is just a demo, I can only say how much I would love to see (and play) it if you continue developing this concept out!

Gosh, this was incredible -- I think very possibly my favourite entry I've played so far? Wonderful incorporation of theme with a super original idea executed brilliantly, and everything from graphics style to sound design and music (which built so nicely, huge ups to your composer) to the intro and conclusion (what a fabulous ending!!) to the itch page just came together to create such a cohesive and strong vibe. Intro sequence is cinematic, surreal, and instantly oppressive in the best way. I also appreciated that you could watch the black hole growing closer and closer at a good rate as you played to keep the gameplay feeling rewarding. What a weird, wonderful, artistic dream of a game.

I was super charmed by this game! I was hoping to see someone do a Papers, Please take on the theme with all the contract/legal discussion going on and this so much did not disappoint -- the art was charming, humour was fantastic, and it all was super polished. 

Some tiny things I did notice/wish for: 

• Even after I think I'd unlocked all the office decor I was still getting the "Office feels bland" ratings? So I'm not sure what I was doing wrong there / if there was anything I could do to set it right.
• Just a really small QOL thing, it would have been nice if clicking the contract again made it so you could lift it "over" the book, since the table didn't have enough space to fit both the contract and the book without one covering the other -- which I realize might have been the design! But it would have been nice if you could click between them to decide which is covering which.  Again, though -- tiny tiny.

Generally, a super fun and well-polished game with a lot of heart and a lot of funnies packed into it. Well done, I had a great time playing!

Took lots of notes for myself recording my thoughts as I played through this little game. Here they are:

• Hell yes, custom noun. It’s such a small thing but every time I see a game use one cleverly it ticks a tiny check box for me. “Run Nothing” is an excellent one.
• Main menu:
  • Cool to see the game comes with controller support! Yours is actually the first entry I’ve played so far that does.
  • Also, nice.
• Dang, that music is a really good vibe. Really fond of the choice to use gentle piano music instead of the more uptempo spacey synths I'd sort of expect from this kind of game; putting that at odds with the flying spikes and swarms of enemies coming at you gives a really cool feeling the whole time you’re playing of this being just one little piece of a larger universe that doesn’t care about you; you’re nothing, and that’s kind of nice. Same goes for the jellyfish which as far as I can tell you can’t do anything about but avoid. Dudes are in their lane, unbothered, thriving.
• Similar thing goes for the background changing every time; it’s a little thing, but it does so much for the vibe.
• Having to catch your projectile is a really neat mechanic, and I enjoy that it can also keep damaging enemies as it flies — it feels pretty great to just toss it it once and then keep running around dodging and kiting enemies into it. I didn’t realize at first though that once you’ve thrown it you can’t stab anymore, either. Which makes for some fun incentive to try to face enemies head-on with the stabbing as much as you can so as not to leave yourself defenselessly running around trying to grab your projectile without getting Killed Dead
• To that end, I did wish for a bit more range with the stabby spike sometimes as it felt like I always had to wait for enemies to get just a little too close for comfort and by the time they reached me within such close range they were joined by their other pals attacking from other angles that I couldn’t turn to stab fast enough, but that could very well just be me needing to git gud.
• The asteroids breaking apart when you hit them looks really neat, but it took me a couple runs to figure out  what’s going on with the asteroids when it breaks apart; when I first hit it and saw it break into a bunch of smaller asteroids I assumed that they would still damage me, and that therefore I should avoid trying to hit them because it would make things harder — or, alternately, that I could try strategically to hit them to kill a bunch of enemies at once.  
• I really enjoy the little touch with the enemies bouncing off/pathfinding around? the asteroids.
• Looping across space took a sec to get used to; the fact that it mirrors both horizontally and vertically, as far as i can tell, really messed with me for some reason and I kept showing up where I didn’t expect to. But that’s not exactly a bad thing -- it adds to the experience, I think, to have that brief feeling of disorientation that as you keep playing you eventually learn to work with and anticipate.
• Final note: I think I found a super minor bug where, if you die right on the border of the void, the enemies freak out trying to figure out where you are and end up having a fun little flip-along-the-y-axis dance party. Which, tbf, was kind of hilarious honestly.

Final, final note: This game was supposed to be a love story?? Say more! Is there another spike-shooting octopus-lookin' little dude out there in the void somewhere?

Okay, wow, this is super! Thank you so much, definitely using your skill for good here. 

This is definitely something we'll have to stick a pin in -- getting feedback at only the correct number of words is something that never even occurred to me, but it makes so much sense now that you've pointed it out. I wonder what else could be done to discourage that sort of systematic brute forcing you describe, as this system does make it significantly easier to reward brute forcing and remove the joy of reading and solving for yourself; maybe the answer does lie in still applying that multi-word-bucket design philosophy, where the sprite lights up only at half, or 2+, or all but one -- which will definitely be handiest for solutions of 3-4 words, which seems to be the sweet spot for puzzles that are tricky but still doable with that sort of hint system -- or maybe there's a greater need to rethink how the puzzles/solving mechanics are designed altogether before we can get into that. 

In any case, this is all really promising already! Sending so many thanks, good internet vibes, and invisible baked goods your way. :)

All noted!! This is super helpful, you rock.

Actually, it's nice to see that (as you can probably guess, which is presumably why they were left out of your original comment to begin with!) almost all of these were points we'd considered but ran out of time to properly implement/fix -- that tells me at least our instincts had us on the right track, which is always a boon. 

Unrelated... I keep psyching myself up to play I, The Void next and then you go and leave such thoughtful comments that I'm like, how can any feedback I offer on yours live up?! Lmao. Don't worry, I won't let that totally scare me off from playing: It'll definitely happen (promise)... and I'll try to keep it from being novel-length when it does (buuuut no promises there)!

Of course! We'll have to make that instruction clearer in the post-jam patch, I think. You're actually looking to black out every word EXCEPT for the ones with stars. So only leave the stars showing!

Thank you so much!! Definitely, we had a wonderful time working on this and are just as hopeful there'll be plenty more coming from this team in the future <3

BREAD!!! everyone else in the comments can go home this ratings page is a bread fanpage now :'00

OH FRIEND HI!! i was looking for you after the stream omg :'))!!! thanks so much for stopping by, it was so nice to hang out with you and im so so glad to get to put a name to a face (er, username to a username)!!

Hey -- wow, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment!

I know my reply here turned out to be suuuper wordy, but even if it feels like nbd to you this legitimately marks twice now you've saved us on this game and I just want to express my gratitude:

Throughout the course of the jam so far we've gotten a lot of feedback reaffirming what we suspected on submission -- that the puzzles are, sadly, kind of unsolvable at the moment without a better/more responsive way to guide the player to the goal. But at least for me, reading you talk about how you had the most fun when you could just relax and create something your own rather than trying to find a pie-in-the-sky solution suddenly made a major light go off.

I've been trying to figure out how to fit a subjective peg into an objective hole, but the joy of this game concept and about blackout poetry in general was never about finding a set solution, but about turning something set and static into something unique and unexpected. I got so much more excited seeing you post your own creative take than I have at any point watching someone stumble blindly into the arbitrary correct solution after trying a bunch of other beautiful combinations that totally should have worked. This is how the game was meant to be played, and this is what was exciting about it before it was distilled with the perceived need to make it "gamier". We don't need to set up guardrails shepherding the player along an arbitrary path; we need to move the goalposts entirely. What exactly that'll entail, I'm still not sure, but it's a really important distinction that I really hope we can find a way to follow through on now that it's been clarified.

Anyway, suffice it to say: love your poem so much. If you're willing to share, I'd also be very interested in hearing your mechanical nitpicks, just in case we do find it in us to keep polishing this game until we can get it to that full-potential dreamstate. ███ ███!

Aww, thank you so much! (And I'm sorry - totally unrelated - but who's the cute kitty in the profile pic?!)

Thanks so much!! We had a blast watching your team member stream their playthrough, it gave us a lot of great ideas on what parts of the tutorial and gameplay needed clarity and how to possibly go about improving that -- not to mention just generally being a ton of fun, hehe.

Thank you!! And hey, no shame in using the walkthroughs -- they're there for a reason, we totally agree that the game in its current state is still very much lacking a good feedback loop so otherwise it ends up being a bit of an obtuse guessing game for sure. Good eye re: first stanza of second screen! That'll be the first thing we fix in the post-jam patch.

Thank you so much!! Hope you got some good rest, hehe. I still mean to give it a proper rating later today once I get a chance to play for myself, but I watched Littlest Wanderer played on stream last night and was legitimately blown away by your game's sound design and general atmosphere, so this is high praise!

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! Yeah, to be frank, "walkthrough-heavy" is, well -- it's a very kind way to put it. Though it's wonderful to hear you describe the poetry as a joy (couldn't agree more tbh, I think our writers did a fabulous job), it's just as you say: turns out it's tough to design intuitive, objective solutions for something so inherently subjective!

Per-word feedback was something that got batted around, but the initial sticking point for us was that in a puzzle where all the pieces start off "active" already and you just have to pick the right ones to "deactivate", how do you really offer positive feedback for lack of interaction -- or for that matter, negative feedback on interaction without it being a dead giveaway and taking away the feeling of actually solving something? (As I'm thinking about it again now after the haze of jam time though, I wonder if it couldn't be worth revisiting if we just took things in multi-word buckets instead of per-word, to give you *some* progressive feedback without going word-specific right away? Say, for every X words you correctly black out, you get some positive progressive feedback like the image brightening or otherwise slightly changing, but if any of those X words you blacked out were intended to be part of the solution then you don't get the progression, etc? Which tells you something's wrong, but doesn't tell you right away which ones you went wrong on. Hmm.. definitely worth exploring.)

Anyway, on another note, I think your point about labelling the target image with a Help button/calling it a "hint" system being a misnomer is right on the money -- it's more a necessary question, than an answer. Really good insight there.

Many thanks again for all the excellent suggestions raised here. You rock!!

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback! Honestly, we're right there with you about the difficulty -- we spent a while trying to figure out a good balance between too-sparse hints and just outright giving the solution, and even on submission were thinking it was probably still not super solvable (hence the walkthrough inclusion lol). 

Beyond appreciate the alternative ideas you've pitched here, both would make for a much more forgiveable solving curve. Done right, multiple solutions would probably lean far more into that aspect of player-driven creativity, actually. Just updated the jam page to actively invite other suggestions on improving the hint system; turns out fresh playtester perspectives like yours are exactly what the jam doctor ordered :)

Thanks again!

I really enjoyed this game! Playing as a little creature consuming the canvas piece by piece is an awesome idea and felt great, honestly -- and the writing in the cutscenes hit on a really good vibe. And of course, that painterly background art is sooo nice!! I did just find myself wishing for a bit more in the sky to be nice and methodical with the overtaking, as it felt like a big jump to cover so much canvas in one click, but in general superb idea :)

Loved this idea! The aesthetic was super, and the modelling for the planets and ship looks awesome. I did run into some bugs where, for the first leg of my journey, the 3x speed fast forward didn't work, and also on the uninhabited planets there seemed to be no limit to the number of minerals I could mine, so... free get-rich-quick scheme, all it takes is some natural resource exploitation :P If you ever plan on revisiting this game, I think I'd also have benefitted from a bit to do aboard the ship between planets; as it stands right now, it seems that there's no real reason to pick a further planet over a closer one if they have the same resource.

But in general, I *really* enjoyed the concept of having to manage your ship and choose your planets wisely. Got genuinely nervous watching the unrest counter tick up, haha. Congrats on a finished game!!

Goodness... I came to check out your game after seeing your message in Discord talking about how glad you were to hear people talking about how moved they were by your game, and this did not disappoint. Having to choose which memories to save/mark as standout and which ones to let fade (or be forced to watch fade as you sit there frantically clicking and waiting for the arrow to turn orange again) is such an incredible idea, and at the end of the game when the game text said "four minutes" I could hardly believe how invested I'd gotten in such a short time -- genuinely let out a little noo! when my pen pal faded while I wasn't paying attention. And then the blurbs for each photo at the end with the memory lane inclusion really got me good all over again. Deceptively simple concept and execution, phenomenally married.

Eek!! That's a good catch, appreciate the heads up. And thanks again for playing & the feedback!

That intro was too cute, oh my gosh!! This was a super charming game, and I felt so happy for my clever little void ant every time it found a new passageway into a new level in that wide-open world. The underground levels in particular looked awesome. A couple of the jumps were really tricky but I get that that might have been the point. Fabulous job!

Holy smokes, this game sounds AMAZING -- huge props to passivistefforts, those efforts were NOT in vain! Combat mechanic was super fun too, though I have to echo the sentiment that the way the void crawlers fade in and out was a tad confusing -- it's a little hard to tell when they start and stop existing. I also found myself somewhat wishing for an option to change the text speed, but that's such a tiny nitpick -- cool text engine, by the way, and an awesome tutorial! Keep up the great work.

Aaand we're up and running! Thanks again for taking the time to share your interest with us while we waited. Hope you enjoy!

Weather update: We're up and running! Thanks again for your patience, hope you enjoy!

Hey!! Thanks so much for taking interest in our game. I just posted a quick comment and devlog explaining the situation -- basically, we're a bunch of newbies and didn't realize the game wouldn't ship with the txt files, which ended up breaking everything haha -- but we've got the fixed builds ready to go as soon as we get approval from the jam hosts to update our files, at which point we'll post another devlog to say it's ready to go. Super appreciate you taking the time to check it out, though; hopefully it lives up to the wait!

Quick comment for anyone coming from the GWJ submissions page: We're aware that the build currently on itch is, unfortunately, non-functional, and are waiting right now to upload our fixed builds pending approval from the jam organizers! Turns out we missed the .txt files needed for the game to run while exporting... whoops.

Thanks for checking the game page out; we'll post a devlog when the builds are fixed!