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Interesting concept, but I found it a quite incomprehensible if I'm honest. I suspect there's a good game in there, but it has gotten a bit lost somewhere along the way. I could appreciate the hand-painted art, but that was let down by the standard Unity UI controls that also had a few bugs (I think - I'm not really sure I was able to see what everything should be doing).

Good effort still. Turning out any working project in 4 days is a huge challenge! Ask me how I know... My own entry was very incomplete.

Well, that makes a lot more sense now! I really enjoyed my second playthrough of that! Inventive level design. I think I've seen a similar mechanic to that somewhere before, but I can't remember where.

I found the speedy controls a little too fast for my aging reflexes, but I can't argue that it was fun and a full complete polished game. Congratulations!

Ahh, I didn't realise the tops of those things were walkable! I'll try it again...

Love the concept! Love the checkpoints. Love the way the scaling works. Fits the theme perfectly.

It's a little dizzying when the scale suddenly jumps up faster than normal, but I got used to it fairly easily. Could use a tiny bit of Coyote Time when falling off ledges, as it's not super clear where the hitbox for the bunny's sprite is. Also the music gets a bit repetetive, although it's totally appropriate for the cutsy style. But other than those minor niggles, it's great!

It's tricky to control, but I suspect it's one of the ones that technically could get to the top... In theory... With a lot of patience!

Glad you enjoyed the game, that's more than I was expecting from anyone when I submitted it. Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the kind words! I'd like to see those things too, but, you know, time and reality had other ideas.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm surprised but really pleased you got your own things working. Did you manage to get a controllable rocket?

Agreed, there could be a mini-map, that would be a great improvement. But it's not even on the list of improvements ranked by importance to the game! In an ideal world, with unlimited time, maybe, just maybe that might be possible. But in the real world, in a tight 96 hours, that sort of luxury just wasn't doable. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.

That's fantastic! It's by far the easiest contraption to get to the top with, but by no means "easy"! Glad I put something up there now, even if it's a little sparse and not very rewarding...

I totally understand that building your own contraption would be very intimidating. I didn't get time to make instructions, and it's kinda the opposite of intuitive!

I love the presentation, music, graphics, sound, character movement. But I can't seem to get the gun to fire! I tried for about 5 minutes before giving up. If you can help, I'll take another look and give you some better feedback. As it stands, it's hard to rate (except for style, which is an easy 5 stars from me).

Thanks for playing! I know it's a little bit rough around the edges. Ok, quite a lot rough around the edges. Maybe 80 grit sandpaper.

You seem to understand what I was going for, which is a big credit to you. I wish I had time to add the sharing features, and lots of built in contraptions, and sounds and music and better, well, everything. But you know games jams...

Interesting game! Nice take on the theme, good mechanics. Music gets repetitive pretty fast as the loop is quite short. An option to turn that off would have been welcome!

The axe mechanic is also fairly novel, I haven't seen anything quite like it before. I like how you can only double jump when not carrying the axe, and that you can retrieve it from wherever it ends up quickly. I also like how flexible it is - you can throw it downwards from a jump to make a springboard. You can throw it diagonally up to kill enemies above you etc.

I didn't like going all the way back to the start when I died however, and I gave up after falling to the start area from a tricky tall platform above it. I was wondering if checkpoints would have helped, but I can tell you're trying to ape Getting Over It with it's non-failure failure modes! You just lose a load of progress. It mostly works in that game, but I'm not so sure about a games jam where nobody is as invested in getting to the top.

I'm probably too old to be able to play this well. I couldn't get used to the controls enough to react to the twitchy movement, although it is very well done. It's just not for me, but that doesn't harm my rating of it. Overall, great effort!

Glad you liked it. Wish I had more time to finish it to a higher standard, but that's games jams for you

Nice! Interesting puzzles. I played to level 8 before running out of time, but the puzzles were pretty decent.

Main comments are that it's hard to tell what the blocks will do in your inventory before placing them. Also, once placed you can't move them other than to hit the undo button at the top. That's kinda the same thing, so why not just allow more flexible drags to edit blocks. You could click one of the expanded tiles to undo the grow and return the multiplier to your inventory.

Most annoying thing is failing near the end of a lengthy puzzle because of a misplaced block, then retry removes all your work. Now I've finished playing I wonder if I should have been pressing UNDO rather than RETRY, but it didn't occur to me while I was actually in the game.

Anyhow, very solid game. Well done!

Thanks for your honest and kind words. I'm very aware how hard the game is to get into, and I'd have loved to make that a bit easier. But you know games jams, you never get the time! The only nod to onboarding is that I insert a few example builds into your saves to start off, and I only added that in the final hour before I hit submit.

You might see that I submitted it several hours before the deadline, but in reality I was so exhausted I absolutely had to sleep. Anyway, I can make excuses all day, in the end it's the initial decision to go with this crazy big idea that's really to blame. That's entirely on me too, of course.

Can't quite get the hang of the controls. Love the concept though, and I chuckled every time I died! Good work!

Love it, although the travel time of your shot makes it a lot harder to dip into the healing static near spikes. Might have been more fun if it instantly attached and dragged you towards the walls, the visual effects wouldn't really need to change at all.

Thanks for your kind, thoughtful and insightful words!

Did you actually try to build anything for yourself? I wish I was able to get the sharing stuff working, as that would have been a good reason for players to actually engage with the concept. Everyone loves to show off their inventiveness, right? While that would have been a fairly easy thing to add, there simply wasn't enough time.

About three-quarters of the way through, I realised I had actually built a fairly similar game years ago in Flash, for Aardman Animations (the people behind Wallace and Gromit). That project took me about 6 months, with a team of professionals helping. At that point I realised just how much time I'd need to get the entry to a polished completed state: Another 6 months!

Mistakes were made. By me. A lot.

I like it a lot! I made something pretty similar a couple of years ago:

https://deeperbeige.itch.io/alien-nursery-evacuation-plan-gmtk-2021

Love the polish you've achieved in the limited time of the jam. I know the glow does a lot of the work, but it's super consistent and looks lovely. Plays well too! I finished the final level and got the WIN screen, most people don't really bother with them in a games jam.

I was about to say it's a shame there aren't more levels, but actually I think you've got just the right amount, given they're all pretty tricky. Remember, you work on your game for a long time. You're likely the best at it in the world when you release it. With more time you could work on the initial difficulty curve to help players get onboard.

Missing features you could add in any update:

1. Zoom out when the level gets bigger. Probably automatically when you get to a certain size, but there should be a control so the player can manually see an overview. I found myself having to remember the sequence that worked when I made a mistake...
2. ...An undo would be lovely! Especially if it rewound time in a beautiful way. You could have the reversed sounds while it's rewinding time, reverse the music etc.

Overall, well done!

Thanks fella, although I'm skeptical that you've actually played it. It's the least polished game I've submitted in 5 years! Was far too ambitious with my idea from the start, and clearly ran out of time. I reckon at the end it would take another 6 months of development to get it up to where it was in my mind at the start!

Just worked out what it was...

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2023/rate/2158486

Interesting concept, but such twitchy movement makes it hard to play. I got frustrated failing the jump just after you get the gun. Up until that point I found it easiest to just avoid the 'enemies' and play as a pacafist. I would have expected dashing into enemies to kill them or at least dodge through them, rather than taking damage.

Love the presentation, sound and concept, even though I didn't get far enough to see the role reversal. Good job making a finished game, especially one as complete and complicated as this!

Thanks for you kind comments!

Likes:

• Concept
• Art
• Juice
• Sound

Dislikes:

• Controls. Why can't I drive diagonally? Why can't I drive in any direction with a game controller? Why does the cursor get lost in all the visual noise?
• Fire hurts me! But I'm supposed to be setting the fires. It's far to easy to paint yourself into a corner. I didn't even realise that was why I was failing at first. Then I did a specific test and discovered that yes, indeed sitting in a fire hurts. I think it'd be instantly improved with that removed.
• Police occasionally spawn right next to you, and hit you before you've had time to react.
• It's really hard. I tried the tutorial about 10 times, and never passed it! I did pass the first level, but nothing other than that.

Well done still. You've created a working game that looks incredible in just 48 hours. No easy task, I know.

That was really good! I enjoyed my time with that a whole lot. I got to the end too, and felt it had about the right number of levels, and they were about the right difficulty. Even the onboarding puzzles were well paced - very hard to do in a games jam setting where you don't get to see much feedback from playtests etc.

Before it introduced the B key to return to the bot, I struggled to move the box in level 2. I was starting to think it would continue to be a frustrating experience, but on the very next level it showed me that was a deliberate trap, and how to solve it. I'm guessing if I went back to that level B would have still worked, and made it a whole lot less trouble. That was a wonderful lesson!

I think I solved a lot of them in unintended ways, but I liked having the freedom to solve things the way that worked in my head. Stacks of buttons holding each other down were a particular favourite technique for me. Sometimes there were boxes that I never touched at the end of levels, but that's a joy in a world where most puzzle designers would block off unintended solutions.

I thought the music was OK, but a little bit short to loop continuously like it does. Not a lot of variation too, so it kinda grates a little bit. I'd have appreciated an option to turn it off, but I totally understand games jams force you to prioritise things that really matter, and appreciate just how many other features were competing for your limited resources.

The controls weren't exactly to my taste. I found it hard using A/D to move, but not W to jump. Then there's E to swap (that's fine) and B to return? That's a bit of a stretch, and occasionally I found myself automatically pressing R and resetting the level, when I meant to press E or Space or B. I wonder if keeping to one button to swap souls would have helped - you could maybe hold it for a half second or so to return to the robot.

Anyway, great concept, great fit to the theme (I was genuinely surprised when I discovered I could move buttons and lifters), great presentation. Great!

Glad you liked it, thanks for playing.

Thanks for the kind words!

Took me a while to get the main mechanic, and it's a bit frustrating until you do. Even when you 'get' it, you have to look the exact opposite way to where you're aiming. Not sure how to judge my aim when I'm not looking at it. Third person might have worked better for this, perhaps?

I eventually got to the "slide" bit, and fell on my first attempt. I couldn't be bothered to find the ball, make the first tricky jump at the top of the stairs and try again, so my play ended there.

I'd have played for longer if there were an invert-mouse option. I'm really old, and the first FPS games I played had 'inverted' controls and that's just what I'm used to. In games like this, I typically end up looking at the sky/ground, rather than where I'm going. For me, not having the option to change this makes the game practically unplayable.

Still, you've done really well to get a working game concept finished in 48 hours. You should be proud of that, it's not easy!

Thanks for playing!

I enjoyed that quite a lot! At first I was a bit like "isn't this just Commandos but with a monster". Then it dawned on me that while in Commandos getting seen is probably a game over, this game differs in that you're not actively hunting the NPCs, you're hearding them to safety. That's a proper mechanical difference.

I was never quite sure how the lights worked. I think they behave like this: If an NPC steps into the light's illuminated area, it attracts them to huddle by it. Thing is, I'd have expected them to trigger if any illuminated area is within the vision cone of an NPC.

The random motion of the NPC makes it hard to dodge past them in level 5. If they were a little more predictable it might be a little better. The levels are very short though, so failure isn't as painful as it could be. I didn't figure that one out. I think you're meant to scare the two NPCs into the hall and steal the box, but on the occasions I managed to do that and get back to safety with it I ended up getting caught trying to figure out how it was useful. I noticed that it blocks the light, but didn't see how that was helpful.

Beautiful presentation. My only real nit to pick is that the fullscreen button doesn't actually make the game bigger. It sits in the same sized window, just at the top of a black screen. It's more like a "remove distractions" button. On my main 32 inch monitor, it's a bit too small for my old-man eyes to see clearly.

Well done, incredible to get this done in just 48 hours!

Conceptually, I've seen very similar games before. Mechanically, it's a bit unforgiving for me. I stopped playing after level three when it introduced both mechanics at once. I gave it my best, but after failing 4 or 5 times in a row, I lost interest.

I was immediately put off by getting quite a long way into the first level, then failing and it sending me right back to the start. I know none of the levels are especially long, but when you have over 6000 other games competing for your players' attention, you have to be very careful with people's time.

I would have been more encouraged to battle on if I had some kind of indication of how much further I had to survive to finish the level. Level one felt really long. Level 2 seemed about half the size, which was a bit weird. I personally like to leave the early levels until later in the development when I know much more about what the game will actually be. Once I know that, I can carefully tune the onboarding levels more appropriately. I fully acknowledge that's not easy to apply in a games jam's tightly limited resources environment.

Getting the difficulty right is always going to be a knife-edge challenge in games like this. My old-man reflexes can't cope, but other people might find it trivial. There's never going to be a way to keep everyone playing without some new features like (say) dynamically adjusting the difficulty. I'm not really sure how that would work here anyway!

It's beautifully presented, both graphically and the audio. And it fits the theme pretty well too. Congrats on getting a finished game out in 48 hours!

Thanks for playing and rating, much appreciated.

Thanks for the kind review.

That's what the reset button was added for, when it's obvious to you that you've spent all your resources, but not to the game itself. Glad you spotted it, one friend I sent it to said "It would be good to be able to reset when I've got it all wrong"...

Lots of fun, very complete, very polished! Congratulations on a fantastic entry.

Thanks for playing!

Maybe the ships collided then? I'm not sure now. It's always worth communicating to the player why they failed, though.

Interesting puzzle game, but it's quite hard to read what things actually do. The good hole and the bad hole look very similar. Sometimes the ball travells over the hole as if it's flying, but there's no indication of it's height. It looks like the game is on a fixed grid, but not much seems to line up.

The presentation is functional, but the stripes hurt to look at after a while!

I didn't like the way it resets everything you've placed each time you reset the level. It even resets the zoom!

Quite a few flaws, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed playing it. Well done!

Interesting puzzle game, but it's quite hard to read what things actually do. The good hole and the bad hole look very similar. Sometimes the ball travells over the hole as if it's flying, but there's no indication of it's height. It looks like the game is on a fixed grid, but not much seems to line up.

The presentation is functional, but the stripes hurt to look at after a while!

I didn't like the way it resets everything you've placed each time you reset the level. It even resets the zoom!

Quite a few flaws, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed playing it. Well done!

Interesting idea, but I'm really bad at it! I played about 4-5 times, and the ship is just so good at escaping. I never got close to it at all. So I tried pumping out more asteroids, hoping to make a collision with the ship before another asteroid, but the odds of that are not in the player's favour.  I also tried firing them directly at the front of the ship, but it was always able to shoot the asteroids before they got close. I tried firing lots of them in the same direction too, to minimise the chances of them colliding with each other.

I might have missed an essential feature, but I couldn't see any way to make the asteroids faster, and couldn't see what affected their size. If these are related to the length of the line or the amount of time you wind up for, that wasn't communicated to me. Without feeling like I had agency I lost interest pretty quickly.

The presentation is lovely. The sounds are functional. The story is pretty fun too. But for me, the gameplay wasn't quite up to scratch I'm afraid.

Still, great job for 48 hours!

Interesting idea, but I can't see how it affects the gameplay much. It'd still be the same game with the roles as they normally are, wouldn't it?

Love the squat when an egg lays a chicken!

Thanks!