itch.io

Beautiful concept

Kosuzu too precious

Now this is a really inventive game. I'm absolutely awful at it and honestly didn't make it very far, but the idea is super good. The only thing I didn't really like was that once you're out of bodies there's nothing you can do and it feels super bad, but I suppose failing when there's nothing left to possess is kinda the point.

While the idea of your dead spirits helping you on future attempts is really interesting, I didn't think it was executed that well as they often get in the way, and if you do want to take advantage of them there's a lot of waiting involved. I have bigger gripe with the controls however, since Miko moves instantaneously instead of accelerating/decelerating and at such high speed at that, precise movement feels very difficult, and since she wall-sticks even if you're grounded I also often wall jump when I don't mean to. The combination of using the spacebar and shift key also wasn't comfortable for my hands so although I like challenge I eventually stopped persisting. 

I hope this doesn't come across as overly negative, I get it's meant to be a parody of an "unfair" game - honestly the level design was actually pretty neat and didn't feel like it was trolling me that hard - but more underlying issues related to controlling movement made the experience worse for me.

This was a really well written interpretation of Sakuya! I would've liked a bit more interactivity from a visual novel and character portraits would've been nice too, but I really liked the concept since Sakuya and Sanae are not the first two characters I would've thought of for "Immortality".

Thank you for your kind feedback! I can understand your opinion about wanting an original story, and I'm glad you liked the opening scene, since I honestly wasn't sure what people were going to think of it. Admittedly I am a huge folklore geek (as well as Touhou of course) so I love opportunities to retell my favourite tales, but I'd like to tell original stories too in the future. Since this was my first game where I actually had time to implement story elements I wanted, I'm happy that I got anything out at all!

Just like in your last game, the writing really got me. Things started out funny and got really crazy this time around, it was really a fever dream experience. Can't believe I got to learn about the water cycle again

Bullet hell shmups with weird minimalistic control schemes are kind of your thing, huh? I was reminded of Heavy Machine Bun a lot playing this and totally not because of similar looking bullets and sounds. I'll be honest, I'm not very good at this game (the cirno fish are the bane of my existence), but racking up combos is super satisfying, and the game feel is just so good when things are going well! Unfortunately once I get hit things tend to go downhill very quickly, but that might just be me being bad at recovering. Certainly a creative idea with good execution!

A nice storytelling experience. I liked the freedom to simply look around the environments while reading the narrative.

The visuals and music are sooooo nice, particularly the character portraits (and Wakasagi's theme!) - also worth noting I liked how you did the character designs themselves. The dialogue was great too, this was a fun little game to explore in, and the aesthetics really lent themselves well to the tone and setting of the game. Crafting system is also cool!

I did wander around for a long time before realising that sweeping the floor was the final boss, though.

Thank you very much for your review! Creating an updated, post-jam version of this is absolutely something I'm interested in doing, I have a lot of plans for additions and changes but I don't yet know when (or how) I'm going to do that (right now I'm tied up trying to review other games from the jam before the deadline...)

I wouldn't worry much about not completing it, there isn't an epic ending you're missing out on just a very brutal final level.

However, no checkpoints is very much an intentional choice, as checkpoints would not be compatible with the gameplay formula - the whole thing revolves around getting random new cards to add to your deck at the end of each stage, and making the most out of what you have on a given run - with checkpoints, this wouldn't matter much anymore so you can always keep trying a stage until you get the right draws anyway. Going back to the start is kind of the point of a roguelike.

I'm not sure what you mean about dream cards giving you even more movement? Aya's should be the only one that does that.

But I am well aware that the game needs more balancing in areas - something that I have several plans to address. I also appreciate your point about having more defensive cards - unfortunately card design is limited quite a bit by the shoddy way I programmed this game, but I'm sure there are still possibilities I can come up with - for example, one card idea that was cut due to time restraints is a card that creates a decoy Maribel that enemies pursue instead.

The UI for this is adorable, also very cute how you get random 2hu sheep every time! This game really test hand-eye coordination with trying to micromanage all the sheep. I especially liked the last level with the lifts you can move by yourself. There was one level which I thought was a bit annoying, which was the one with two moving platforms going side to side - jumping off of the first moving platform to the ground on the right doesn't feel very natural since the sheep will break unless you land on the little railing bit of the moving platform first.

I really love the artsytle in this, the backgrounds felt very Earthbound-esque and the caricatures of all the characters were really funny. It was very enjoyable to go through and read all the dialogue!

A very short game, and the story wasn't really there even though I felt like it was meant to be, but I have to commend your pattern design, I really like some of the spellscards and non-spells! The music and sound effects are also both really great!

A lot fun to move around and evade things, especially when you get the part where you can move on 2 axis, I found positioning myself between bullets worked very well and had a lot of fun doing it. However aiming bullets felt very awkward, especially at the start. As someone else said though, it's much better once you get closer to Doremy.

I like the unique camera perspective, it's very interesting and works really well the art. However, did I find a pretty key problem with the Cirno section - the bullets go behind Koishi's sprite instead of in front of it, so you can't tell how close the bullets actually are to your true hurtbox.

Controls work really well for this. The idea is hilarious and the regularity with which Maribel wakes up when you're close to the end is incredibly tense and frustrating, but that just makes it funnier.

It took me a good while to get used to spotting the rabbits and sheep in Merry's dream bubble that were about to wake her up, but eventually I got the hang of avoiding being spotted!

I also love the artstyle. I found mashing the keys a bit awkward, though - might just be me.

Good game but the rock projectiles are super annoying, often I get hit by them from one flying in from offscreen and I have no way to see it coming, also the frogs sometimes jump in very weird arcs that makes it hard to tell where they're going to land. I have been slapped around numerous times by these two things.

Running around and punching stuff feels great and presentation is top notch, but I guess I suck at beating up 100 frogs. I did get to the boss once and thought it was very cool, but I don't have the patience to do the first section all over again to have another attempt.

The first time I played I found it very hard to shoot anything, I was expecting hitscan bullets but when I realised they were actual objects in the world, and with considerable drop at that, I found things very frustrating because it was basically impossible to hit any fairies with all of their bullets swarming me. That being said, I really liked the idea, and the movement felt good, weaving around bullets actually works surprisingly well, so I gave it another shot...

On my second playthough, I was able to appreciate the game a lot more. I took a methodical approach to attack the castle, making sure to clear all the enemies in each room before progressing so that their bullets did not become overwhelming. I got used to how to aim my bullets, and I also got to explore the castle much more, discovering alternate routes and even some secret passages (and a secret fumo) which is pretty neat! Taking a methodical approach was much more satisfying, especially when I managed to hit fairies with little effort.

I had fun, however, there are still plenty of areas I think could be better:

-Firstly, I was never able to get used to shooting the first time because there is little time/space to figure things out and fairies kind of just come and start attacking you. If you get overwhelmed at the start and fail to hit things, the whole game basically becomes unplayable. The beginning area should definitely be changed so that players aren't under pressure and can practice just moving around and shooting things.

-Although I did get used to the projectile bullets, and you could keep them like that if you're going for a certain game feel, I also think hitscan would feel nice and make it easier to hit things by quick reaction.

-I found certain cases where enemy bullets were passing through walls.

-Also, do the enemy bullets ever despawn over time? I do feel like the bullet number can just get ridiculous sometimes, especially if you fail to take out all enemies.

-As for the Doremy boss fight, the first phase was actually great! Second phase was worse though, and last phase is horrible. The thing that made the first phase so good was that dodging her bullets was feasable, but you can't really do that for the others, and for the last phase in particular, if you try running anywhere you get hit by loads of bullets and your HP is just melted super fast, so the best thing to do is just stand still next to a wall and try to shoot her down before you die.

I hope you found this feedback helpful, I really like the idea and what's there has elements that feel very good!

So, I may have played through up to the last boss in a frustrated manner completely forgetting there was a dodge roll...

While my first experience was unfortunately soured by that, once I remembered dodging was a thing I was able to beat Yuyuko and had a lot of fun with it, and went back to play the rest of the game again in the intended manner. I like the cutout style for the characters and how they're animated (probably saved a of time on your end too, heh), and I was also honestly quite impressed you went out of your way to make cutscenes.

The memes were... OK, I guess... but the combat was actually pretty fun to figure out, and rolling past things feels very smooth and satisfying! 

One problem I have with the game though is that attack patterns don't always seem to end properly when you drain out a lifebar, which is pretty annoying.

This is pretty much just a finished game.

I love how you structured the game out of a series of simple mini-games, it felt very dream-like and they were a lot of fun too! Art, writing,  music and even sound effects were all gorgeous (I particularly like how well the "jump" sound goes with the music for that jumping minigame), the whole thing just has a very professional, polished sheen to it. It's the little details that count, like Marisa blinking on the title screen.

With the inclusion of optional side-modes too, this game is a marvellous example of something that makes a lot out of a little. I'm thoroughly impressed!

I opened the game. Bam, just dropped straight into things. So I just started flying around and picking things up. The UI communicated the rest. The way new mechanics are introduced in this just works so seamlessly, having the purple items circled around the lanterns so you learn how to active them later is fantastic, and having more enemies spawn later in the game also made me accidentally learn how to defeat them. I never knew what I was meant to be doing from the start, so I just did the things that could be done, and by the end I had a goal set for myself and a sense of direction.

On the flying physics themselves, they didn't immediately click with me but this also isn't really a problem, it didn't take long to feel like I'd mastered them after a while of picking up purple triangles. Maybe only bad thing about them is that sometimes I found it difficult to avoid crashing into an enemy, even when I could see it coming.

Speaking of which, the one thing I didn't like was that you dropped all of your collected "stuff" when colliding with an enemy, although that didn't stop me completing the game. I would have liked being able to pick a portion of the dropped items back up in a sonic-esque manner.

Still, really fantastic game overall, I mean it! Very enjoyable!

I found the beginning area easy to get lost in, with the terrain not having any distinctive shape and having no real sense of direction on where to go it was a bit confusing, but once I eventually got past that into the main bit of the game, what I got was a solid "puzzle" platformer (idk if puzzle is really the right word here but you should understand what I mean). Rather simple, but enjoyable.

The transition effect for moving between the two worlds is really slick, both visually and with the music crossfade, good job on that!

I really love the whole direction this game took, it had a very "warm" feeling to it, and the Touhou 17 cast and setting is very underused, loved that the story explored the lore from that game. I also love how different it is to all the other entries in terms of how the theme was interpreted! The art and music were both great and the whole thing has a very professional finish to it - also, the "Mima is dead" gag in one of the backgrounds got a laugh out of me!

If there's one thing I'd criticise, knowing which afterlife to put the bear in during the quiz section felt like a toss up - what qualifies as "good karma" for animals?

I still need to play a lot of games from the jam but this has been a highlight for me!

Hello, and thank you for your very detailed response! Since you wrote out so much for me, I feel it's only fair I send you a response back!

First of all, I'm happy you at least partially enjoyed our game! This is the first time I've made a card game, so there was a lot of learning going on in this jam, and not as much time for testing, haha. Understandably, there's a lot of things in this game that are rough around the edges (both from the viewpoint of you, the end user, and me, the programmer). Having the deck more skewed towards movement than attacking is definitely something I was aware could be a problem, but I couldn't fully tell how serious it was without more testing from other people (like you!). I appreciate you have the same mindset I had, that having too many attack cards would make defeating enemies too easy, and I also wanted to include multiple copies of the move cards to ensure the player could actually have decent manoeuvrability around the board and not feel "stuck", but in retrospect, there are not that many attack cards starting in the deck, which makes them show up infrequently. The initial justification for this was that you'd add more attack cards to your deck throughout the game to even out the balance, but of course this devalues the cards which don't either attack things or draw deeper into your deck.

Balancing all the cards was also not exactly something I had a lot of time to consider, particularly for the character cards... (see: Marisa. She originally didn't even discard anything LOL. The discard thing was sort of just thrown on last minute when I noticed that she objectively did the job of nearly every card but better.) The character cards are all meant to have really crazy effects so they can't truly be balanced against each other or the overall game, but there are certainly some outliers in terms of especially strong and especially weak.

Did you get to the last level (7)? Because that one had almost no time for testing and is honestly brutal. Our composer managed to beat the whole game though, so it must be possible...

The pencil line art was indeed a stylistic choice on the part of our artist, meant to evoke the ending panels from mainline Touhou games.

Thank you very much for your kind comment!

(Also I don't play roguelikes either, I just like card games lol)

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I've now added a new version which fixes a bug that could randomly crash the game. Please use the new fixed version to avoid game crash.

Our team: Myself (buskerdog), NeedleMouse and Cassare.

This is the puzzle I mean, the one near the beginning after you move a bunch of rocks out the way.
-When I attach her to the beetle and have it push her off the edge then carry her back left, she gets caught on this bit of the terrain.

-When I attach her to a rock, then have the beetle push her off the edge and then push the rock left, she can go further under that section and I am able to retrieve her from the other side to progress.

I really liked Alum's Strata Gems so I went in with high expectations, but I won't lie, this game frustrated me a lot. The concept of the mechanics is brilliant, but their behaviour can be pretty janky, which made it harder to understand the solutions, especially when the solutions involved said jank (why does dangling Kisume from a rock place her lower down than dangling her from a beetle??). Combined with having to constantly reset to checkpoints, it made it quite a slog to get through, I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to solve the first puzzle and got really mad every time I had to reset and move all of those rocks out the way. I don't want to be all negative, there were several good puzzles as well, but in the end I had to watch a stream of someone who played the game to figure out the last 2 puzzles.

I feel the more obscure ways to use the string (like how it can pull things off the floor by attaching to something higher up) could have been first used in a basic context before asking the player to apply them in more complicated puzzles. And less jank please, idk why you have to dangle Kisume from a rock in that first puzzle when attaching her to the beetle looks the same but gets you a different result.

Anyway, I hope you found my feedback constructive and not too negative.

I see someone else gave you the solution in the discord server, so I won't say again here because you already know and that would be solution spoilers. Still, thank you for playing!

Played a match against a lvl 2 CPU. Got a massive lead. Thought to myself "I can't possibly lose this".

Proceeded to knock myself out.

10/10 would drink again. Looks really fun to play with a friend.

As someone not really experienced with rythm games, I didn't find anything wrong with the gameplay. I thought it was pretty good overall! My main criticism would be that it's hard to read the story and understand it properly because it all appears on loading screens so it's easy to miss or even know if you're reading it in the right order. Also it would be nice if there was some point to selling/making potions but I get there wasn't time to implement that.

The animation for the potion coming out of the cauldron tho, idk what it is but I love it so much.

Awesome artstyle, and I love how in character everyone is. Difficulty felt just right for what I thought would be a simple memory game, the timer really adds a lot. The stress of realising I'd forgotten the directions while low on time is real.

Never has Mamizou made me so mad before.

Cute artstyle and dialogue, however you should have made more efforts to stop the player going where they're not supposed to. After the start of the game conditioned me to think that falling out of the level was fine, I assumed doing that would always transport me somewhere and tried it when I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do next. This led to me softlocking myself.

The first area at the base of Youkai Mountain had invisible walls to stop this happening so idk why the other places didn't.

Use of theme was fantastic, exactly the sort of idea I was hoping to see more of from this jam. Really good music too, very nice how it tied into the gameplay. This game is def one of my favourites from this jam.

For me, the best design element was that meteorite chunk (at least I assume that's what it is?) that's worth loads of points but slows you down, makes running back to the cauldron very tense!

Very nice one-screen platformer design, I like the use of wrapping around the vertical ends of the screen. Sound effects were very pleasant. The main thing I dislike is the umbrella attack, I understand it only has a hitbox when it opens but the timing feels extremely tight and it strikes at an awkward angle; I feel the hitbox should linger for a bit. Also the bullets shot by the boss are extremely unthreatening since they fizzle out before they can reach you, and there's a lot of doing nothing while you just wait for the boss to come close enough to be hit.

This was a pretty neat danmaku game, I liked how it was basically a montage of final attacks, and the part where the restrictions on the sides broke away was really cool. Looks good too, and the title screen music is great! However I didn't think the jam theme was incorporated well...

BTW what's the music playing during the last phase? I can't tell if it's based on a Touhou song or if it's original.

Thanks for playing my game! I'll use a better font for long text next time!