itch.io

This is tagged as phone browser compatible (it's a checkbox that can be toggled by the poster if they enter the Edit Game page), but it isn't. About a quarter of the screen shows. 

Well paced. The mechanics evolve in a logical way. Avoids cluttering the screen. 

I haven't beat it yet, but at Wednesday Night Master level it's been fun so far!

Nice. I cured world hunger, solved the energy crisis with half a tenth of a degree shift in global temp, and uplifted a whole new sentient species without ever exerting any overt martial or political force. Retired with over twenty billion in the bank, too. The trick is to move really fast and break things, wringing everything you can from individual investments and then abandoning them as soon as anyone complains.

Specifically, launching a larger grid (say as a challenge) blots out the whole screen and soft locks the game since that grid doesn't scroll and can't be disabled.

Same just happened to me. After a longer than usual boot up/ load time, my prestige just gave a Feed button that clicks but doesn't fill or produce marks. Reloading the game gave a binary choice pop up and the storage room for the scavengers showed up, but play is still broken (can't gain marks or trigger the basic mechanics to show up)

As of 06Jan25, scrolling doesn't work on Android/Chromium. So while it shows up as a phone browser viable game in itch's filters, it's unplayable in it's current status 

Ironically, the notification that launches when the player selects Impossible difficulty on a phone (chromium based browser) cannot be dismissed because it's below the accessible screen area, making it impossible to play.

There's enough text visible to imply the schtick, but either having a conditional vertical scroll if screen.height isn't large enough or moving the confirmation button to the top of the notification would make it playable on this platform without a download. (I haven't tested the apk, the download version might have the same issue).

Edit: It's particularly strange because the previous screens do have vertical scrolling of the press and drag variety.

Fun little game!

- Having the overlay remind the player to press the Next Level button over and over during the last minute is pretty distracting/annoying if the player doesn't have the points to actually press it. Maybe add "and (currentPoints >= newLevelCost) to the overlay's trigger?

- (Sometimes) If the player replaces a bumper with a new one before the first bumper of the level has been 'organically' removed via the dropped balls, the old bumper is not added to the player's inventory.

I'm looking forward to it. I've got the auto run to the point where it can defeat Legion without my input (outside of opening the last door) and am stacking up points for the next layer in anticipation.

This mission introduces a great take on operational planning, one that I predict flows better than my own efforts in that direction (Operation Copper Glow). There's enough here to improvise successfully, which is important since the scenario gives so much initiative to the players.

It looks like it's built for ensuring player buy in, and tying a strategic and tactical version of play together in a way that promises to reward or punish PCs for their planning/failures to plan, without dragging out the pre-op phase forever. Well done!

I think special applause is needed for the geographical attention paid. Konduz is mostly beautiful, and frequently lush, but if you pay close attention to the specific place wherein the operation takes place and compare it to the real world location, both the description of it as an intel dead zone and a wasteland make sense. I hear a lot of people treat Afghanistan like the whole thing is a desert - Dice Goblin Games actually worked out the where and the why of how a mission like this would take place in the real world. Kudos for that.

Have you tried again recently?  I suspect some of the dependencies were down for a while - I tried to install a local version via their github and had some issues too around the same time you posted this.  

The online version is working for me today, though.  Try it again?

These REALLY helped me in the late game. Thank you.

This is neat! I did something adjacent with a bookmark that generates 1d6 or 2d6 results based on English letter frequency a while back. It's interesting for me to see someone else using the same data with the same intent produce such a different end product.

Their other paid release, Sea Salt, appears to be redacted too.  Both are actively for sale on other sites (both are on Goodolegames, at least) which implies they're still functional programs.  Strange stuff. 

Bad Ghost's reviews are solid, this one included!  I was going to try it based on his video - a shame the game got mysteriously redacted.  (I got it in a bundle a while back, so it's not a big deal for me, but I pity anyone who paid full price and then had it yoinked away from them.) 

Fantastic! Strong theming, a nice transition from 'narrative RPG' to 'Prestige loop maximizing' play, well paced while being surprisingly long. I like how you can earn an ending from the word go, and the prestige loops are for earning a better ending. I dig how the RPG exploration becomes a puzzle of maximization on consecutive playthroughs - it felt a little like the old 'Lock and Key' interactive fiction game in that regard. 

Scratches the incremental game itch beautifully. Numbers get larger, and progression gets faster, while having enough long and short term decisions for the player to keep it engaging. It never goes from Game to Spreadsheet territory, like most incrementals do. 

Nearly perfect. I feel like the purchases that can be toggled on and off before a run could be marked as such before purchase, so the player knows they are not committing to always doing X on all subsequent playthroughs. And if I were in the author's shoes I would replace the promised meta-prestige layer with a firm ending, but I'm looking forward to them proving me wrong in future updates with whatever they still have up their sleeves.

Slayer Shock does an incredible amount of things correctly. The moment to moment pacing is top notch. The interweaving of the planning 'Strategic' loop with the action/stealth 'Tactical' loop is both simple enough to comprehend at a glance and middling complex in the way the two interact, making decisions feel weighty. Each has good Push Your Luck mechanics - enemies you can avoid confronting at the loss of the extra currency they'd drop, harder than average missions that will temporarily bring the average mission difficulty down if completed, etc.  Losing on an operation has costs, but doesn't end the run right there, so the game feels oppressive but never outright cruel.

The only real problem I've had is with the difficulty curve, which starts fairly high but then drops off a cliff. Skills remain unlocked and weapons remain available once acquired, so things get progressively easier, and additional 'seasons' either don't get harder or get harder at such a slow rate that it's not noticable. This caps the game at maybe ten hours of enjoyable play (for me), after which it becomes too easy to relish. But those are a highly enjoyable tenish hours. 

Recommended!

Solid prologue, leaves me wanting more! I don't know what the plans are for the later chapters, but I hope they address in fiction the meta-game of juggling the different consumables in order to avoid death by quantity caps. (I, playing the game, know not to do a certain thing early on for arbitrary game mechanic reasons that I, if really in the scenario, would ignore/bypass. That could be strong tutorializing if it ties to the reality bending narrative, but would be weird and gamey if not.)

Anyway, I dug it! Took a little over an hour, and that was because I was super thorough about having redundancies even where it ended up not mattering and cost me an extra cycle. 

A beautiful concept. Relying aggressively on players bringing solid story game chops to the table, Cabbages explores something like Stoic Philosophy through playful reminiscences of MUDs and other era appropriate collective online experiences, closer to BBSs than to today.

If a thing matters, it can be struggled against, at the risk of breaking yourself, a risk that increases with each thing struggled with. If it doesn't matter, it advances and evolves like cancer, but maybe by not caring enough you can cut out the part of yourself where it metastasizes. If it only kind of matters, play the victim, griping and moaning and internalizing and stabilizing the trouble.

So, is this twenty year younger you that you play, who faces trials of life similar to those you did but contextualized through the lens of your friend's memories, is this young you a stoic? A victim? Sisyphus, bound to be crushed over and over in the struggle? Or someone a bit less of an Ideal but more of a Human? 

I'm honestly a bit scared to ever play this. It's self evidently an emotional meat grinder, and looks designed to maximize bleed. I think it might secretly be a masterwork of horror game design. 

It's in a solid, playable (and enjoyable) state. Heads up though - as of 27Nov2024 there remains a scrolling issue on phone browsers (or at least the DuckDuckGo one) where the final screen with the end game statistics doesn't scroll, locking the player out of reset (prestige?) options.

As a big fan of both FIST and Cultist Simulator/ Book of Hours, this impressed me. I like how it treats knowledge of the Hours/Longs in a winking fashion, rather than a prerequisite to comprehension. 

The PDF has a bit of wonkiness that might not show up depending on the viewer used, but I'm getting unsupported bit warnings on most of the pages. It seems to be tied to a page wide image, probably a background? The whole Aspects chapter also fails to load anything. Again, might not be an issue on PDF viewers with more aggressive automatic compensation/correction protocols.

Thanks for hosting this Jam! I have an 'allowability question'-

In Markdown you can make text link to another chunk of the Markdown doc - "To begin play, create a character, then etc etc" with 'create a character' linking directly to the applicable chunk of the document. 

This feels like an edge case - allowing H1/H2/H3 suggests partitioning text for easy navigation, but the use of links reek of formating. 

Yay? Nay?

I don't know if there's a "Right" answer, but I would load the page in Incognito Mode, export the new game right away, and import that into your normal browser's version.

You might want to check out the annual Dungeon Crawler Jam here on Itch.  It's been going for a few years, there's a lot of fun short games in this ouvre.  (Very, very few anywhere close to as well polished or balanced, though!)

Simply wonderful. This may be the most concise, hackable OSR/D&D house rule I've seen. Brings Dungeon World esque bonds into play, with a really clever and simple cost/benefit game. I imagine that the social pressure to reciprocate is thematically spot on. 

I've read dozens of pages of 'how to make mealtime in the dungeon mechanically interesting' hacks, but this is the only one likely to actually make it to my table. Seriously, check this out - all the bits and pieces scream to be reutilized in other aspects, so even if the tea time theme does nothing for you there's probably something here inspirationally for you.

(Lots of respect for figuring out that "inverted Depletion Die" makes a leveling mechanic. Of COURSE it does!)

https://e5burrito.itch.io/the-thing-about-is
My counterargument to your "Science trumps high quality conjecture as a mechanism for determining Truth" implication is complete.  Thank you again for the inspiration!

"Sears the potato"? So, the made up cult of which I'm the high priest and only member, "Spudology", explores the secret knowledge that can be derived from observing potatoes and potato related phenomena. Basically, we (I) contextualize life lessons and insights within the ouvre of potatoes. "A potato left in a dark place within a paper sack will eat itself, converting all its energy into questing roots that fill every inch of space. The wise potato teaches us, thereby, to prioritize removing ourselves from the situation when people are actively trying to keep us in the dark." That kind of thing. Less 'potatoes are divine', more 'anything is sufficiently complicated that you can contextualize knowledge about it into a metaphor or insight for something else..and if you're digging into one random thing deep enough to perform that analysis, why *not* a potato?' It's a quasijoke about making explicit what I think most people do implicitly, contextualizing new data or experiences in terms of the things they know particularly well already regardless of applicability.

Anyway.. Your slight against the wise tuber, and advocation of objective metrics over inspired truth claims reliant on viewing reality as metaphorical fractals, has been noted! In indy tabletop tradition, expect the inevitable refutation to be in the form of a TTRPG. 

(I once ran a one shot about spelunkers trapped in a haunted cave, and the survival of half the group ended up riding on whether a PLAYER could tie a knot in real life that he insisted his character could in the game. BS Internet posturing about potatoes aside, I've accidentally used 'RL experiment as in game success criteria' before and it rocks. "Let Us Relitigate etc" highly recommended, tuber heresy aside.)

As a player, if I manage to steel the man from the GM do I win or lose?

Nice! Maybe throw this their way (I'm not on Txitter), it's a replacement for dice I came up with a while back. I know some detainment facilities are anal about dice...

https://e5burrito.itch.io/pbtlota

You're a lot farther along than I am (I left my 'time machine' back in Trimps) , but at the 'just recently unlocked towers' point I wouldn't advocate waiting that long. 

Even a few of a new type of heirloom make a massive difference, and there are some to be found in the towers. Add in the mild bonus of the low hanging attack/health crown-bought boosts, and I think it makes sense to burn a few keys pretty quickly.

Thank you!

I had picked up on the shards sticking around after equipment changes - it's the reason I have the first ten pieces of equipment at/ approaching level six, even though I don't typically use half of them once I'm anywhere near my zone cap/ in the struggle.

I'm getting them faster than that, although I'm not sure what is boosting the speed. I guess it doesn't really matter since whatever it is I'm unlikely to be able to micro manage it.

Code Delvers, can I get an assist?
What determines the likelyhood / trigger for a Mystic Shard?  I'm not seeing anything in the notes or tooltips, and it may affect how I run my Horde delves in the early phase.  (Is it a per-mob chance?  Should I stay in a one-hit-kill zone, with taunt mode on, to max out the shard income rate? Or does the current or max zone affect the income rate?)

You're right- one of the Baker kids (ie child of the Powered By The Apocalypse creator) made a card driven TTRPG  about aquatic salvage that has really strong, dark Helcomb County Lake Dredge Appraisal vibes.

This is beautiful. Thank you. I was unwilling to run RR&F for my group because I didn't think I'd get the buy in on the hefty manual for what might end up being a one shot, but you've solved that issue for me.

For newcomers, I'd still advise that the GM get the full version from Kumada1's page, but this wonderful write up is almost certainly sufficient for the other players to fully engage.

I'm not familiar with the creepypasta, but the USSR sure tried to kill off the idea of God. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Unio... )

Glad you enjoyed the read! If you try it out at the table, let me know how it goes.

Thank you for your review, and especially for pointing out what stood out as tension points! 

I need to rework the presentation of OOC at a minimum, for sure. It's ambiguous right now if 'pushing through' just makes you vulnerable for the rest of the scene or for the rest of the session.  (Edit : My post jam version now reduces the recovery time from a few hours to a few minutes of secure, peaceful recouperation.)

Re : The Director, that's a specific NPC rather than another title for The Referee...which I should probably look for a way to emphasize early on. Given that they're forced-retirement age in 1991 (heavily implied in the cover letter's background text), and three-letter-agency recruitment typically cuts off in one's early 30s, they've been in the field since the late 50s or so. Anyone but a male would have almost certainly hit the glass ceiling before being put in charge of the Agency.  Pushing the game even a decade into the future would have allowed me to use gender neutral terms, but then I'd miss the sweet spot between the Cold War and the (openly acknowledged) War on Terror.

This game has about four months of playtesting behind it, but I've had to reassemble it mostly from memory.  I'm interested in your opinion, but ESPECIALLY about things that don't make sense or seem incomplete.  I've tried to err on the side of brevity and leaving some fruitful voids, but suspect that'll come with being overly ambiguous in places.

Corrupted Flesh feeds the Cleaning Ritual, which lowers Corruption.  Corruption goes up each Horde level, and if it's in the positive (IE you haven't been able to keep up with it via the Cleaning Ritual or other Corruption lowering perks) the enemies gain a bonus to their attack and defense.  If it gets high enough they start getting bonus special abilities.

So, Corruption is a pacing mechanic to keep rapid-repeat prestiging from being super-viable.

Still a quite lovely game.  My favorite non-ending idle / incremental on the site thus far.

Equipment mastery gain, as displayed in the tool-tip, is wrong.  I'm seeing things like 681 pts for a boss a level, and 3.55 pts (5%) for a miniboss.  5 percent of 681 is 34.15, significantly higher than advertised. Minibosses are either giving approximately (but not exactly) tenth of the intended mastery points or the tooltip is misdisplaying the income rate.

I'm pushing through this right now.  Given that you posted about two months ago, you've hopefully blown through the blockade.

Good cards help A LOT.  There's a +3 equipment card that's perfect for leveling up gear in the Tainted World pack.  The extra pieces of gear outclass the x1.25-type bonuses most other cards provide and ought to buy you an extra level or two.

There are a few pieces of gear worth getting to LVL 2 as a priority - Star Shield, Longsword, and Fire Orb spring to mind.  The lvl2 boost lets you gain a 50% bonus to the passive, which buys you a lot of division shields and critical hit power.  I'd advocate having those active on the "way up" to the levels where you're struggling, since the boss fights grant the most XP fastest.  In fact, I'd consider a handful of taunt-heavy no-card runs since the point where these early equipment items start gaining XP is so low.  Those extra rounds without damage from the division shields and pushing Crits above 100% chance has a HUGE advantage - you'll soon find one in six hits or so doing over quadruple damage, which beats any of the active equipment attacks.

I burn most of my school bonuses on Horde.  It helps - a bunch of extra levels to things you only need to buy once and you've got another x2 or so to damage and health.  Gems spent on tripling the efficacy of heirlooms are generally well spent, too.

You should be able to get the Corrupted Soul Capacity up to seven to ten days worth with a bit of patience.  Then, with MORE patience, cap it once at that ridiculous value.  Now your Cryo will be vastly more productive than being active, at least for a while (this is what I'm working on at the moment).  While you're waiting for the CS to hit cap, remember : Minibosses at any level have the same CS drop, based on your highest Horde level hit (since prestige, I think).  So if you can barely squeeze through to a high-nineties value level, then back off to a lower level where you can comfortably get 1-hit-kills.  That way you can use all your equipment that boosts Miniboss spawning and drops and still wipe them out reliably.  Every day or two, check to see if you've got enough bones to squeeze out another level, each of which should cut a day or so off the time-til-max-CS.