itch.io

not bad for what you managed to get done. the game functions on a basic level, and i can see the hints of what it wants to be. on that level, you did a good job of getting it up and running and published. i liked the 2d limited field of view mechanic. it added something very interesting that isn't often seen in this sort of 2d action game, so there's potential for adding a lot of suspense due to not knowing what's around the corner.

the weakness, here, and it is -the- weakness, is in the controls. having everything be keybound the way you have it is a bit much. mouseaim at the minimum would improve playability a ton, but as it is it's very QWOP-ish to play.

back in the days before mice were common, the usual setup for something like this would be to have the arrow keys or numpad as your directional control and ctrl, alt and shift as action buttons. it gets very cramped having so many action controls clustered in a tight space assigned to one hand otherwise.

great effort, and good for getting something working and submitted!

i dug the basic idea and whole future dystopic setting. the graphics and shaders you used looked very nice, however they were very distracting, not just when looking around, but particularly regarding the game's one and only real mechanic.

morse code puzzle is a fun idea, but with the way it's staged it's impossible to see the puzzle and the morse code guide, and the keyboard at the same time. in fact, the shader actively made it unreadable if i tried to have both in view. it was only by typing into a web tool that i could solve it reasonably. a more fleshed out version might have progressive bits that teach you morse code in small bits until you get to a puzzle like the one you have. check out 'the witness' for a game that does this sort of thing very well.

would've been nice to see a little more twist in the revelation. in this case it was exactly as expected, and didn't really payoff the difficulty. i know it's not quite fair, but this sort of thing has been mined to death so much in every media that you see it a mile away.

so  find a way to have the whole puzzle in view: keyboard, clue, and solution because asking to recognize, type, and decode all at once is literally a skill that takes weeks of training.

great effort!

it’s basically just a very surreal, distorted media based aesthetic. your game is very much at home there. https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Weirdcore

very scummy! ;)

top notch production level across the board. art, voice acting, progression, story, all excellent. perfectly nailed the classic point and click experience. in that vein, there was a tiny amount of pixel hunting like figuring out the set of drawers were all individual, and not just one item, and the hot zone for the battery box in aux is a little unintuitive hitting somewhere in the empty space -above- the box. otherwise everything made sense and the pieces came together very naturally.

sound and ambience were perfect. i'm a sucker for that classic sarcastic dry humor. both the writing and the delivery were perfect. 

the only real scuff is that the inventory was a little too subtly hidden. the little red tab was barely noticeable at first.

wonderful game all around!

very cool game! very much dug the setting, the art style, and the overall tone. very good job of conveying another world and all the mechanisms and factions.

the writing was absolutely top notch. i was very convinced by the world building, and you dug deep into fleshing out the world. there was quite a depth of content. music and sound were spot on as well.

as for the gameplay itself, very strong at the start, but diminished quickly around halfway through. the initial mechanic of scouting locations and waiting for reports back was so great, that it was a shame that once everything was discovered there was nothing further to do with that. would have enjoyed a further level where maybe re-scouting might reveal something new about whatever location.

the decision making mechanic was very captivating, and i like that very old school mechanic of choices and consequences.  though i'd say the choices were almost too easily telegraphed as to any sort of motive, and they mostly seemed to have effects right then and there. usually that sort of mechanic is most fun when the best course is more ambiguous, or when what seems like the obvious best choice ends up having repercussions several turns later.

i suspect the 'what kind of day is it?' question played something to that, but if there were any late term consequences they were either very subtle or i managed to avoid them.

towards the end i was starting to seem the same choices multiple times and by that point i had figured out which ones had the effect of increasing or decreasing the population and that's when the magic started to break a little. again, this is where some complexity might make that tail end more interesting. maybe the 'correct choice' 10 turns ago is a very disastrous choice on turn 20.

very much enjoyed this one!

very cool implementation of the prisoner's dilemma. it was fun trying to figure out the emergent metagame of what to prioritize on each turn, and there were genuine moments of suspense waiting to see whether i would go first on a given turn.

the theming was excellent, and all of the ux fit very well. my main request from a ux perspective would be maybe a visual bar of the turn order, and also a way to visualize the coin flip of who goes first each round.

other things to play with would be just the overall balance. the 1,2,4 system is a bit too blunt. the treadmill of having to always eat 1 for 1 goes from suspenseful to tedious quick. so maybe some mixed stats like the ice cream giving +.5 hunger, or something.

also, in the tutorial you had two bits of nice diegetic ux in the ✓ and X of the tinder app. just use those. ;)

great job! wonderfully dark concept!

wickedly dark and disturbing. there's a subreddit called 'weirdcore', and the vibe of this game fits right in there. i guess a further exploration might change the variety of types of notes and passages and other little mindscrews.

quick, fun and effective!

i loved the idea of being able to play an rpg from the monster's perspective. however, despite being tipped off in the initial instructions, this part of the game seemed the least properly filled out.

the human party had far more to properly do, despite being less interesting and could level up while the slimes couldn't even earn gp to heal from the encounters that were available. 

i also encountered the bug in the silver sanctuary regardless of which path i took, so i can only evaluate the game before that point.

some ux notes: dark text on dark backgrounds is basically unreadable, but it's used for two pieces of 'key text' in the game. also the boss guardian creature forgets that he was defeated if you leave and come back.

i would have liked to see a far reduced scope, and rather than having so much stock map to explore, would prefer more interesting character interactions, and something that really sells the hook of the solid, liquid, gas, plasma system.

great effort, hope to be able to see an update!

wonderful, well-crafted and succinct.

this is a perfect little slice of a game. the theming is spot on, the visuals are perfectly appropriate without being distracting. i really enjoyed using 'hot spots' as the interaction method, though some were not so clear. and of course the overall meaning was well conveyed an poignant.

subtitles aren't even negotiable any more. they're pretty much as standard as visuals and audio, and assuming you wrote a script for your lines, that work should already be done anyway.

because everything is conveyed through audio, it can be tough to know when segments are done. in the very first room i thought the character was done speaking and walked away, before realizing i had to go back and listen again and let him finish to progress. easiest way to accommodate this is with maybe a little 'speaking' orb above the character's head as an indicator.

it might also be too subtle in some respects. maybe one or two more steps before the 'meaning' of each room is revealed with a little more buildup. but otherwise, all the necessary elements are there and it works well. amazing experience!

cute graphics and a very good first effort. it definitely felt more like a traditional mario-style 'platform' game than an 'adventure' game, which means the most important thing of all is getting your movement and controls exactly right. the bunny seemed to drift a bit which made the platforming with the big boulder screen extra difficult.

another thing to learn is how to communicate where players can and can't go. a big opening on the right side of the screen communicates that i should be able to go to the next screen, but it was blocked off. large open space above a closed off space, makes me want to find a way to go there, but there was only one path. communicating the difference between falling in a hole you're supposed to fall in (at the beginning), and ones you're not (the scenes with the rocks) helps give players confidence in that they know what the next goal is. in game design these are called 'affordances', and it's something you learn with practice and paying attention to what other games do in these scenarios. many games do it so well and invisibly you have to pay extra close attention to notice the subtle ways they do this.

the story at the end of 'becoming' and 'you can't go back' is a very strong theme. your next step would be to see how you can express that more strongly in gameplay itself. a subtle way to do this would have the somewhat comforting light piano music to either go away or change as the rabbit went deeper into the cave.

congratulations on pulling something together and submitting it. best wishes on your journey into game-making.

very clever in presentation, progression and aesthetic. i really enjoyed the vibe and oddness of the characters, and the idea of having multiple characters to control for an adventure game is very interesting, though here it's only used to limited effect.

i really loved the idea of finding pages to the games 'instruction manual' within the game itself, and that also has strong potential as a mechanic in a very metroidvania way of discovering things you could probably have done all along.

my main nitpick with the game is the 'strong gating' you have in place, being unable to control interact with any of the characters before the game decides to give me permission. i teased out a sort of golden path, but it was really hard to figure out where the gates were -especially- as i tried to replay and get around the game's main bug. the main three characters at very least should be controllable from the word 'go'.

concerning the game's main bug: it is a shame, but having the characters disappear after what looks to be getting the note off the arcade without going through the dialogue, makes all the minor nitpicks that much worse. i tried 4 or 5 times to find a route that had the characters do what they needed to before triggering the bug, but it became too much. and then also the backpack seemed to be single use? i was hoping to carry all the characters around for their unique abilities, but could only use it on the one character, and then never again.

i also didn't understand the 'kissing' mechanic described in the manual. there certainly wasn't any ux feedback as to whether right clicking on any character did anything. they just seemed to wake up for dialog when the game let me.

again, these issues only really became issues because of that major bug and somehow understanding what to do put me in a worse spot as i now had to tease out that golden path again.

other ux nitpick is the dialog choices at the bottom of the screen were very hard to notice the first time, especially in the web browser. it does fit with the chosen aesthetic, but anything you can do to help draw attention to that area would be helpful.

once again, great concept, great aesthetic, loved the weirdness, and would love to see the mechanics of the characters more fully explored. great job!

you have a very strong initial concept that could be made more understandable through some writing and ux adjustments.

i enjoyed the art and overall theme, and like the concept of a before/after story, finding things in the aftermath. also the 'look around' effect while mousing around is very pleasant. most of the sound and ambience were well-fitting, and from a theming perspective everything was nice and consistent.

the weakest areas are in ux and the 'meat' of the story. the key theme of any adventure game is 'curiosity' and exploring or clicking something, especially when you specifically ask for it to be clicked should always yield something: wit, exposition, characterization. true you did a lot of basic scene setting, but it was mostly very dry. best example of violating this is clicking on the one tent 'you shouldn't'. then don't ask me to, or be more creative in how you admonish a player. 'someone pushes you out, how dare you!' same effect, but now you're giving story and consequence.

you were going for a suspense story, and that makes characterization even more important. the changes of the 'before and after' should have weight and consequence and give understanding into how characters would react to a monster suddenly appearing. how are they now behaving differently in response to something like this?

on the ux side, i'll echo the other comments about the dialog sound. however, the interaction and progression needed more baking. most interactions didn't need two actions, especially since it was very linear and there really wasn't much dependency on which order you interacted with anything. having to left click and right click was confusing, especially when there often wasn't even more dialog. there was no key difference between 'talking to people' and 'looking around' so just make it one shared interaction. i can sort of feel you making do with the system you were using, but even within that figuring out how to streamline that is a core element of game design.

also, for the 'keep the fire alive game', i'd say the requirements were too tight. basically burning all but one plank with a sliver to spare. think of ways to make it more engaging and give a little more margin for success. 

a very good effort, and a nice start to a promising concept.

cool concept! i can see the seeds of something amazing. lots of possibility for richness with territory play, or network bonuses, or other strategic play. the overall gamefeel is on point. slightly disappointed there was no initial bonus for connecting the outer trees, but great job overall!