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It clicked for me after I erased the "winding" part of the sentence and the river changed. It reminded me of Baba is You with words affecting reality. It is a bit buggy but that's understandable.

I quite like the level design. It was fun to smash through the traps. I also saw some platforms on the side of the jump maze area before entering and that gave me the feeling of "Ok this game is bigger than it seems"

I think the biggest factor in it feeling like a proper game vs a jam game with janky mechanics is the lack pf polish and focus on the core/most interesting mechanics in the game.  In jams, you don't have a lot of time. So in order to make the best game you can under those circumstances, you focus on the unique aspects of the game and explore what's interesting about them succinctly.

In this case, that'd be the word manipulation mechanic. I think, rather than implementing a lot of different powerups, It might be better to focus on making lots of unlockable words and give them a lot of interesting/unique/useful effects. 

UX wise there was also some room to polish the mechanic. Ex: I feel that erasing/restoring UX was a bit unclear. It took me a while to realize that the words were getting lighter colored after dragging. It might require some shader/vfx work to convey the erasing. Rather than focusing on making the dragging perfect, it might be better to just erase/restore the words on click. Highlighting the words on hover would also help convey that they are interactable. 

You can also look at other successful jam/short games on itch and analyze what they did to make a polished games. Zacchary Richman gave a talk regarding their team's gam jam strategy which might be of use to you:

His team has consistently performed well in GMTK by making polished, unique and appealing games in GMTK jam. So I think it's worth listening to him.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful to you. Overall, it's a very interesting concept that you can expand with more words, interactions etc. I'm interested in seeing where you go next.

It was a nice surprise to see this game again. The devotion of sonic fans knows no bounds haha.

Movement feels great. Good job with the animations. 

Camera movement has improved greatly from last time. I had to adjust the camera speed a little but it felt good to use afterwards.

The only complaint is that grabbing and carrying keys is a bit cumbersome. I feel like it slows the gameplay down. Maybe you can simplify to just have keys be auto collect and auto use. 

My other suggestion would be to have a tutorial area to show off the moves. Not everyone is a sonic player and it took me a while to remember that knuckles can wall climb and glide.

I also really like the whole playground vibe/open level structure. I like the freedom to choose which platforming challenge your want to tackle.

Overall, great job and want to see where you take this next.

What genre do you think the game is?
Probably a party game. 

How fun is the game on a scale of 1-5?

Quite fun. I spent quite some time just messing around

How balanced is the difficulty on a scale of 1-5?

I think the difficulty is too high. Whenever I got more than 10 secs I feel like it was more due to luck than skill. Thought that's not necessarily a bad thing for party games.

You can only control the board to move the ingredients. But jumping to avoid the hose will require movements that would send the ingredients falling. Perhaps that could use some balancing. You could add some anticipation/predictability by stopping the hose movement to foreshadow that it's gonna shoot.

Is power-up collection clear and enjoyable?

It wasn't clear what the powerups did or how to use them.

Would you replay the level to improve your time score?

Maybe for a bit. But I'm typically the type to never bother with highscores.

What one change would improve the game most?

Maybe adding lives so that you aren't killed immediately after a mistake. Could also be a powerup

 Other notes:

Artstyle is nice and goofy. A good fit for the game.

I guess this is unrelated but I would play a bullet hell/bossrush game with each stage being a cooking step. The hose/ chopping knife combo would make for a fun attack pattern in a game with more precise controls.

Overall, good job. I think it has potential as a party game if you work out the issues.

The art is quite pretty. I especially like the portraits. The artstyle and the cryptic atmosphere reminds me of Nier which is a plus.

Though the sprites are great, I find the attack animation a bit odd. It looks like she flails her arm and the sword moves independently. Maybe you can add a strongly posed  keyframe at the end where she grips the sword after the swipe.

Combat wise, hitting things is fun  but I think the game needs more verbs. I quit at the boss because you have no defensive options like dodging and some of the attacks do not have a long enough animation for the player to see and avoid. Maybe you're supposed to out level the boss or grind for heals. However, I can't recommend making grinding a requirement if you want people  to play for  the story. Additionally, I would like to be able to attack mid-air/directionally like hollow knight.

UI is stylish, However, I found the level up screen confusing. I could select a stat with arrows but couldn't actually level it up. I pressed every key in the keyboard to try and spend the currency but couldn't level up. I had 75 G and the level up screen said 30. So there's no reason to not be able to level up there. If it is a different currency then that should be communicated.

Level design wise, it has the "leap of faith issue" with spikes falling from places you can't see until you jump through. Both the spikes and the spiders blend in with the background. I don't know if that is intentional but combined with the lack of heals with repeated dialogue after death made the level design frustrating. 

I don't have any issue with respawning to a checkpoint after death. But repeating cutscenes after death feels punishing. You can integrate respawning into the narrative, have a skip button for seen dialogue or just put a save point at every cutscene.

The story setup feels interesting with the white room portions. The worldbuilding is good at dropping hints. The only complaint have is that the spider dad doesn't feel like an interesting boss storywise. If you're going with a world that contrasts with ours(it already has goblins), it'd be better to have a boss creatures that wouldn't exist in the normal world.

Overall,  good job. I think the story has potential if you manage to spice up the combat and improve the pacing.

Thanks for playing. 

I agree that it's hard to get a good idea about your and other object position in 3D. I'll try to improve the difficulty pacing for the 3D levels.

Hope to check out your game soon.

Thanks for playing and the suggestions.

Regarding needing more levels to grasp the concepts, there are more difficult/elaborate levels for each mechanic, but I omitted them from this build to get to the 3D levels quicker.

Undo is definitely planned.

I agree that there are too many modes. I'll try to simplify it.

lv16 is the "I" shaped level. lv15 is the level where you have to move around the unfoldable blocks in the 3rd dimension. I feel like that's a simpler level. But maybe it's hard to understand as both sides of lv15 look similar. I'll try to improve it.

Happy to see that you enjoyed the game. Hope to check out your game soon.

Not in the traditional sense I suppose. But I took a lot of inspiration in terms of visuals and atmosphere from ps1 inspired horror games.

Thanks for the suggestion. By "along the glitch" I meant "parallel to the glitch". I agree that the wording can be confusing here. I'll update the text and also add an optional hint in case people need more clarification.

Thanks. I forgot to add it in the controls section in the gamepage. I'll also add a button prompt in the HUD during interactions.

Thanks. The enemies changing allegiance results in a some emergent bullet patterns and it was fun to make it.

Quite fun.  I like how the game makes you utilize the unique properties of different blocks. I overall enjoyed the puzzles. 

Some suggestions:

I recommend making block retrieval a separate button. It's very easy to accidentally delete blocks while trying to place them. Additionally, making it so holding RMB retrieves all blocks would be great. Sometimes the block drops out of range requiring a full restart. Most games bind camera panning to other buttons(MMB or hold some button+ move mouse).

Some levels require you to place blocks after falling for a long time which is quite hard to time. You can try adding slow mo  while aiming. This'd also allow you to preview the whether you can actually place  the block there which would be great. To make the player not abuse the slow mo, you could add a limit to it and restore it when the player reaches ground again. But it is your choice since it might make the game a bit easy(and lower the barrier to infinite static box jumping).

Overall it's great with a lot of room for expanding in the future.

Thanks for playing through so many levels.

Glad to hear that you found 3d folds intuitive. I updated the tutorial for that many times last week since people kept having trouble with it.  Still got a long way to go.

Keeping 2d mode for 3d folds is a good suggestion. Once you're familiar with how the 3d folding works, 2d preview is actually all you need. 

Thanks for the bug report too.  I've never had that bug happen before.

Regarding level progress, the game does save in the pc ver. Saving in WebGL has issues. Also, the pause screen shows the level name.  

This is my first time playtesting the 3d levels so the difficulty curve there is a bit wonky. That level is solvable

Sln spoiler if you need it[decode via rot13]

Lbh arrq gb wbva gur pvephvgf sebz obgu jbeyqyvarf gb cbjre gur tngr.

Thanks for playing. I've seen some players struggle with that level. I'll try to make the level easier to understand. Thanks for reporting the bug as well.

Thanks for playing. Several people have brought up the MMB issue. I've updated it with a keyboard binding.

The game has a lower amount of early puzzles currently since I want people to get to the 3d parts quickly. I will make the initial level flow smoother in the future.

I'm still working on the visuals and plan on changing the fold blocker visuals in the future. 

That puzzle is also one of my favorite. Glad to know you enjoyed it.

Thanks for playing. Lack of full screen was an oversight. I've added a fullscreen button now.  I will improve the sound design  and game feel in the future.

That's a good point. I'll update the box tutorial level

Thanks for playing. Yeah not sure where to move the 3d fold controls. It needs to not block wasd movement. Shift was already used for the parallel world preview. ctrl activates a lot of browser shortcuts if you press WASD with it(can happen easily while moving). For now I've added an additional binding for 3d folding to shift and the preview to c.

MMB scrolling on webGL is an oversight. I'll see what I can do fix it.

I don't understand  what you mean by where you create the 3d fold not mattering. Maybe since your screen started scrolling on MMB, it only made vertical 3d folds which would look quite similar regardless of where you made the fold. Do you remember if the  x marks after 3d folding were always horizontal?

Thanks for trying out the 3d levels. I've gotten feedback from others that the 3d mechanic is a bit hard to use/understand. I'll improve the tutorialization.

It's a good suggestion to add more early levels. I've removed some early levels to get people to the 3d levels faster. In my experience people don't play  entries to full completion.

Regarding the symbol, it's meant to represent that  you have to get two units of power there.  I agree that it's a bit unclear. Maybe a battery icon would make it clearer.

Regarding the wires being broken: yeah it's a bug. 

Thanks for playing. It's great to hear that you enjoyed the puzzles.

Thanks for playing. I've made the 3d animation speed fast to avoid annoying the player(since they have to do it many times). But that might've made it harder to understand initially. I think this can be solved by using a slower animation speed the first few times the player performs it.

You've raised a good point with mmb being unavailable to laptop users. I'll add alternative control schemes in the future.

Thanks for playing. I forgot that I had disabled cheats in build haha. Thanks for catching that. I've updated the build to allow skipping now. I'd like to make the game accessible to everyone. I'll try to make the early game difficulty ramp smoother.

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you can't leave the rooms after entering them?

"Scale to move" is a novel take on the theme. I like how it makes a movement and navigation a core part of puzzles. It reminds me of snakebird  in that regard.

The puzzles are great and it's impressive that you've managed to make so many puzzles within the jam timeframe.

My only criticism is that it's a bit finicky. Thankfully you restart without losing much progress if you die. Though in the levels where you push boxes, you can sometimes push it into an unwinnable state requiring a full reset. If you expand the game in the future, my suggestion would be to add a separate slow-mo button to make precise mid-air maneuvers easier. Or an undo button.

The lo-fi style is very pretty with post processing. It nails the retro vibe.

Overall it's a great entry!

Fun turn based dungeon crawler. It manages to make engaging puzzles from a simple idea. You have to plan your moves order to pick the portions in the correct order.

The 1nit graphics are great and the sound nails the retro vibe. Reminded me of classic roguelikes dungeon crawlers/

Overall a great entry! Also ultra buff dipper best dog.

I planned a few puzzles that emphasized room arrangements but I had to cut scope due to time constraints. It's definitely something  I want to explore in the future.

Yeah there's no way to know how to exit the house without text sadly. I somehow missed  adding it to the page's controls section. Thanks for pointing it out. 

Really cool take on the theme. An impressive puzzles with a good selection of mechanics.

The water simulation aspect must have been hard to code in the jam. I found the puzzles where you have to redirect the water really fun.

My only criticism is that the orb dropping and getting lost if I make a mistake. Would appreciate an easier way to stop growing the plant. It's too easy to twist the plant unintentionally while trying to tuck the orb away. For example, you could make grabbing the orb permanent but the orbs ability only activates when LMB/RMB is pressed. This'd work for multiple orbs too.

The pixel art is really good. The tree looks really pretty when it gets big.

Overall this is a great entry! 

Wow! You are a champ for soldiering on with the broken text. I got the issue when I made the webGL build only a few hrs before the jam ended. I couldn't fix it in time. After the jam I'll certainly post a web ver without the text issue.

Cool concept. I like combination of cloning and stealth gameplay.

The game tutorializes every enemy which is good. Currently they explain what the enemy does but the player is meant to exit the level after reading the description. You can make the tutorial levels such that they show the mentioned enemy and the player has to understand and deal with the enemy to go to the next level. Doing this can make the tutorial levels more engaging.

The levels can be quite difficult but it was enjoyable to find a path though. Overall a fun entry!

Really cool core mechanic. The matryoshka mechanic goes really well with the theme. My game also is a bit inspired by Matryoshka dolls(esp. the ending) haha. Feel free to check it out.

Puzzles ramp up quickly in difficulty but are managable. I had to really think to solve the later ones.

The graphics are a perfect fir for the game. My only suggestion would be to make switches more visually distinct. I did not notice that the white pedestal looking thing was a switch.  Both the pressable part and the switch base were white and blended together since the model was so small. You could use a different material for the base.

The soundscape is very relaxing. It it the perfect chill vibes for a relaxing puzzle game.

Can't believe this was done in 48h. Excellent job!

Very nice puzzles. I've seen a few  puzzle games based on scaling but this utilizes it in new ways. It utilizes your height as puzzle elements as well as object size. Getting yourself to the right size while still allowing yourself to reach the goal requires planning.

It's a bit janky  but in a good way. I like that you can grow and shrink blocks repeatedly to move them.

If you plan on expanding this in the future, I recommend having some visuals to highlight the current box. Adding and outline to the boxes could work.

Overall a very solid entry especially considering that this is your first jam.

I've seen a few scaling based puzzle games but this is executes it really well. LMB to grow and RMB o shrink via a gun is very intuitive. Reminds me of The Entropy Center(which also had growing cube puzzles) 

I will say that throwing is a bit inconsistent. The object placement rotation was also hard to work around. For the latter, you could allow the player to rotate a grabbed  objected with mouse scroll. 

The graphics are very polished. The VFX is pretty cool as well.  As a suggestion, I think you can make the rescale power slider diegetic UI on the gun like dead space. It would increase immersion.

Overall a great entry.

I like it. I've seen a few games about scaling in the jam but this is the first one that combines stealth with it,

The scaling and vision ray obstruction thing  is a bit janky but that's to be expected in a jam.

The pixel art is great and gives RPG vibe. The BGM sets the mood pretty well.

Overall a solid entry.

Amazing take on the theme. It starts of as a normal brick breaker but continuously subverts your expectations.

The horror part at the later is a surprise. I feel that it'd work better if the ultra big mode was after it. It would be cathartic to smash through the toasters after playing hiding from them for so long. But the current way it works gives the feeling of "There are always bigger fish in the sea" which is also fine.

The sound and sfx were really satisfying. The graphics gave reminded me of the old brick breakers I sued to play. 

Overall it's a great entry.

Yeah inscryption was a pretty huge inspiration for the game. This is my first time making an escape room type game so I apologize for any unintuitiveness. We didn't have enough time to properly playtest.

For the part you're stuck on, a hint: try right clicking stuff.

Perhaps you can try giving the player partial info about the events instead of telling them outright. You could base this on alien races. The event icons could show the race but not the what the event is. There could be a run metagame of picking choices of the same race. Maybe you could build rapport with a particular race and get items that boost favourable outcomes from that race's events.

Interesting take on the theme. Building a scalable space station was fun. I also like how it constantly make you take choices with different tradeoffs.

The graphics are very nice. It's impressive that you've managed to make such a detailed 3d game for a jam.

The balancing was good though it was quite hard to  get people. All other resources were managable to get.  I also think that instead of having a single random event button, it'd be better to offer the player a choice between multiple events. The events can be very feast or famine so having some level of control would go a long way..

The BGM and SFX are very sci-fi and gave me the vibe of being on a spaceship.

Overall a very solid entry. 

Yes! Inscryption was definitely a huge inspiration for this(esp. the escape room parts). 

Really impressive. I've seen games that play with the viewport but anchoring one side of it and using it as a platform is quite new.

The soundscape is amazing. It gave me Fez vibes when I started the game. If you've doe the soundtrack for the game yourself, that's very impressive.

It's  a bit hard to predict where the  anchored side of the viewport will end up after shooting. Some sort of preview for  the anchored side will be would be good. 

The controls are tight but the wall jump timing is quite strict. There was  a portion where you had to jump, lock the left side without moving too much and then do a long stretch of wall jumps. Some input buffer time on the wall jump would help here.

The visuals are very nice.  Also Fez vibes here.

Overall ,  a great entry that deserves more ratings. Hope this  gets more love!

Simple but enjoyable turn based roguelike. It was fun to create my carrot of doom. As others have said,  some more varied enemies or units would be great.

My only gripe is hat the game fully covers the screen on the default view. This made it hard to play since the itch.io buttons overlapped the start combat button. I had to zoom out. It's probably best to make the game window size such that there is sufficient game for the website buttons,

Fun take on a tetris. 

It was a bit buggy especially the resize mechanic. I think it prevented me from scaling something if it would cause collisions but it was hard to tell how much free area I had to make since the camera is so zoomed out. If the resize fails, maybe you can flash the color of the tiles that would need to be free in order to allow resizing a city. 

A lower zoom in limit would be nice too.

Visuals and SFX is very polished. Overall it's a solid entry,