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Ok, wow, just wow, this one left me speechless.

The puzzle aspect may not be for everyone, and I almost gave up on solving the first one, but I powered through and after that, this ended up to be the best TWO WHOLE HOURS (gamejam game!) of my week.

This is an experience you should have for yourself, so it's a little hard to write a review. I will be trying to keep things spoiler-free.

What I will say though, the way everything blends together is gorgeous. You always get a double reward for solving a puzzle, both the gratification from solving the puzzle itself, as well as the newly acquired ability/change in the environment that completely changes either the way you play or the world around you. The only exception to this is the last puzzle, since you can't play the game any more after solving the last puzzle. :(

While the graphics may be a little lacking, they are not the main focus and even so, the world feels varied, has sub-areas and succeeds to be pleasing to the eye towards the end. And every other aspect of the game is nearly perfected, especially the level design and the puzzle design.

The sound design is very pretty as well. Background music and the SFX fits the game perfectly..

If you're still reading and aren't the developer, GO PLAY THE GAME! And if you are the developer, thank you so much for making this!

Ok, wow, just wow, this one left me speechless.

The puzzle aspect may not be for everyone, and I almost gave up on solving the first one, but I powered through and after that, this ended up to be the best TWO WHOLE HOURS (gamejam game!) of my week.

This is an experience you should have for yourself, so it's a little hard to write a review. I will be trying to keep things spoiler-free.

What I will say though, the way everything blends together is gorgeous. You always get a double reward for solving a puzzle, both the gratification from solving the puzzle itself, as well as the newly acquired ability/change in the environment that completely changes either the way you play or the world around you. The only exception to this is the last puzzle, since you can't play the game any more after solving the last puzzle. :(

While the graphics may be a little lacking, they are not the main focus and even so, the world feels varied, has sub-areas and succeeds to be pleasing to the eye towards the end. And every other aspect of the game is nearly perfected, especially the level design and the puzzle design.

The sound design is very pretty as well. Background music and the SFX fits the game perfectly..

Now, to the downsides (and some minor spoilers):  

There is a spot in the game where you can softlock and have to use console commands to escape, as well as a certain moment which can cause your save file to corrupt. (This is related to the gamejam version of the game specifically and has already been fixed locally according to the developer)

While things like that can happen during short development phases, this breaks immersion quite a bit, and if unaware of the issue, you can just randomly lose all your progress and be forced to either rage quit or replay everything again.

The way you can fall into water from a height and hit the floor spikes, while realistic, doesn't feel very game-like. Usually, in games with water, all vertical momentum gets cancelled when you drop into water to prevent such cases and I died at least a few times because of that assumption. The upside of that is that you don't feel all that floaty while underwater, which actually makes the water section a lot more bearable and pretty fast to navigate.

The graphics. If the game was a tad prettier it would easily be breaking top 10, but people tend to click on pretty thumbnails and see pretty graphics and go "waoh", while hidden gems like these end up being a lot less popular than they deserve. Since it is a development build, it is easy to forgive, but to me, this felt like a completed game, so for the final release, if the graphics get an overhaul the game WILL get big, mark my word.

The only sound effect that was throwing me off is that of a projectile hitting a wall, sounds a bit like a wooden drum, doesn't feel like it fits.

If you're still reading and aren't the developer, GO PLAY THE GAME! And if you are the developer, thank you so much for making this!

In the last hour of development we completely changed the tilemaps and one of them had a slightly lower elevation, causing the bug, we caught one before publishing but overlooked all the other platforms, that will get fixed.

I was thinking about adding a duration bar that decreases as a part of visual UI to know when the shade form expires, but didn't get it done in time, it is a little unclear when you go back to the regular light form. (It's exactly 5 seconds fyi)

Wall-jumps are probably the least polished part of the moveset, there aren't wall cling or wall-jump animations either, there are a lot of values to fiddle with before it plays and looks exactly as we envision it.

Thank you for your kind words!

Very nice game!

I really liked the use of the primary elements for both spell-casting and puzzle-solving, very creative. I especially like the cauldron bringing it all together. Not too short, not too long, the perfect length to showcase all the abilities and mechanics, a lot of potential for future levels!

Loved the artstyle, simple blob doing blob activities! The jump wind-up is a cute touch, though it made the movement a little less sharp, which is okay, blob is clumsy!

I wish there was a way to switch around movement and ability use between WASD and arrow keys, but that's asking too much of a game jam game, my game also has unconventional keybinds and no way to change them for now…

Also, I kept thinking that the thin wooden platforms are one-way and bumping on their ceiling, but that's more of a skill issue :) I know there's a simple way to solve this in Unity with one-way colliders, there's probably something similar in Godot, I don't think there's any downside in making those platforms one-way.

Great job!

Digging everything about this! Took a second to get used to the controls, but after that I was locked in and playing a completed game, not a demo or a prototype!

Simple pixel art, does the job, nothing over the top but that is the exact amount of graphics a game like that needs. The UI is very clear, you immediately understand which spots are empty and which are filled, and the bars over the monsters' heads are contrast enough to not blend in with the bar table.

The music really fits the atmosphere, I did not think a game could make me feel like I'm working in service industry again yet here we are. :(

Very interesting mechanic with the cauldron between nights, optimizing your perfect cocktail, trying to find a balance between getting more tips, and therefore upgrades, and getting customers drunk and freeing up the spots before the others start a sober fight with you after a hard day. The shade giving permanent bonuses is a little random, also haven't figured out whether move speed is always a must get to rush to the tables or if I should be picking more combat-oriented upgrades.

The combat feels fair, you're a bartender, not a warrior, so you can't not do your job and just perma fight and kite the enemies, your attacks lock you in place. So better serve your drinks and hope the monsters drink them fast!

My PB so far is night 9 but I will probably be playing more to figure out an optimal strategy to get on the leaderboards.

This doesn't feel like a prototype, this is a fully fleshed out game. Everything blends together so well, the artstyle, the environment, the animations, the music and sfx, the abilities, the level design. The little ingredient at the unreachable spot to hint that there will be a way to get there later, the fact that rooms for backtracking play both ways with the newly acquired ability, everything is SO well done.

The only thing hinting at the fact it's a prototype is the pacing, you get both the upgrades fairly quickly, in a full game that would probably take longer. Other than that? Just wow, I'm out of words, I can't pinpoint to a single thing that I disliked about this.

Ok maybe make the respawn timer a teeny tiny bit shorter..

Lovely stuff. The gameplay loop is fun, crafting and permanently upgrading feels good, music and sfx fit the aesthetic really well.

Now, in the first level after the tutorial, that diagonal corridor with occasional spikes on the top or the bottom half - personally hated how it plays. You either diagonally run through and damage tank a lot, or you slowly stuttep step, neither of which feel good. Every other part of the level felt good, that one corridor stood out to me. 

Another tiny thing is when you die you are still able to move while playing the death decay animation, very simple fix - disable all movement once the character starts playing the death animation.

Other than that - great game! And I really mean it.

Thanks for the feedback! We are already theorycrafting at least one more mechanic to make the light form feel more useful than it is right now, but you're right than we can make a lot with what we have and not get into mechanic hell where we make a lot of mechanics and introduce them all at once and don't know what to do with them.

I see a lot of crutique about the controls, one of the first things I'll be doing after the jam is changing the default controls to something more standardized (zxc like celeste?), as well as adding the ability to rebind controls in the options. My decision for using J and K was that I personally have been using these keys when playing platformers for years now, but it didn't occur to me that it might be uncomfortable to others when uploading.

Reminds me of flash era games, short and charming, simple point and click controls and easy to understand. I only played it once but I assume the grade differs depending on how many potions are yours and how many are the alchemists?

Same issue, I was only able to loot the first chest, not the second or the third, which is why the game stopped for me at the part where you're supposed to cast the spell to proceed. But the fact that there is inventory is cool in itself, even if it doesn't work all the time.

All in all, the game concept is nice, but needs polishing. Your character needs a better idle animation than running in place though, you got jump and fall, but not idle, it looks a little silly.

The resolution is fixed at either 1440p or 4k, and doesn't rescale, so I wasn't able to see the entire game on a 1080p monitor. Due to that I can't really say much about the game itself, when I loaded in the zombie counter went down to 0 very quickly and then I was just aimlessly running around. The artstyle is nice!

Very sweet game, love the idea! The potion variety and how they all interact is really cool! The shade mechanic is also very neat, can be used both as a safety measure to go back to if you fall, as well as to generate momentum. 

When I got to potion of creation I couldn't beat the level, at least for now, on touchpad, right clicking is a lot more difficult. I also feels unfair that the shape is random, I guess that's the perks of being an alchemist/wizard, you don't know what's gonna happen, but sometimes the platforms just weren't the right size to beat the level.

I also got some weird bug when I threw it under myself I got teleported up a lot, beyond the background tilemap, wasn't able to replicate it.

Awesome game, the art and music are top tier, the animations are smooth, the Owlchemist character is very cute and feels amazing to pilot. And the writing is funny. Shadow Wizard Money Gang vs Toyota Corolla 2006!

My only complaint is that on taking damage that brings you back (lava, sawblades, spikes), you immediately have control over your character, which sometimes results in taking unneccesary extra damage. There were a few areas where I lost my entire HP bar by taking double damage which went something like "fall into lava -> respawn -> ram into spikes -> let go of directional keys -> respawn -> go again"

A solution I envision would be to freeze movement for half a second or so, just so that the player has time to process that they fell off and is ready to go again.

Best of luck with your ratings!

Very neat concept, though fighting the boss feels somewhat tedious. I lost almost half of my HP due to swords spawning on top of my face (instead of only spawning them inside the arena add another constraint where it's some not too significant range around the player, so that you can't ever be sniped, that feels unfair), and there also waves of only white swords, i.e. waiting out (maybe a little minRange variable so that it always spawns at least one colored projectile).

Otherwise, super dope stuff!

Ooh, good catch, I didn't notice that it doesn't show the entire play area in windowed, I think it used to do that, but I was fiddling with room transitions and cinemachine (which didn't make it into the demo), which is why it's like that. I believe I am unable to change the description right now as it's locked during the voting period, but I will definitely change it in one way or another to improve the player experience.

Thank you! Hornet was definitely an inspiration, the toothless was more of a coincidence, but it's a compliment that our artist gladly takes!

Thank you! The tutorials were done in the last half an hour, so they're a little clunky, it will definitely be more polished in the future.

Thank you for your nice feedback! The music was actually royalty-free, but I was scrolling for a while to find something fitting for the game. 

Regarding the controls, there definitely will be an option to change key bindings, right now I kept it as I'm used to playing platformers, but honestly, the default should be WASD/arrow keys and zxc, not jkl.

The long-term goal is to make a more clear split between puzzling in light form and platforming in the shade form, and add a lot more story. There probably will be moving boxes, levers, mirrors reflecting rays of light (and preventing the shade from crossing?), there are a bunch of ideas we're eager to put out.

Hi, I have bought the Physical PC edition from Fangamer back in December 2019. I have checked my email and there was no update key. Will the Fangamer buyers be able to update soon or is it maybe possible to directly contact you and manually verify the purchase and get the update key? I already own the latest version of the game on Steam and Epic Games, but I would love to update the physical copy, too. Thanks!