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This was really good! Tough, but quite fun, and replaying earlier phases rarely felt like a chore, since it's fun to find opportunities to deal lots of damage with the parry during those phases.

If I had one criticism it would be that it was really hard to gauge where exactly the player's hitbox is on their sprite, which is fairly important for dodging some of the harder patterns.

As in, a game where the movement itself may be 2-dimensional, but the background contains 3D objects and some player/enemy models may be 3D, despite being constrained to a 2D plane. Is that ok?

The story and characters are very interesting.
The art and general aesthetic is  incredibly charming.

The gameplay is good, learning to read enemy patterns is fun and all, but movement (in battle) can feel a little unresponsive, especially since you can't move for quite a bit after attacking and there's no real way to tell when pressing left/right will have any effect, so I end up mashing a button to move (though I've realized now holding it is an option as well, but still not very elegant). This is by no means professional advice, but I feel like the 3 boxes below the player could make for an easy communication shorthand. Making them a little darker when you can't move and highlighting the one you're currently bound to may make it a lot easier to read and could probably be understood with zero explanation.

Good luck going forward!

After playing all of the submissions for this jam, this is by far my favourite.

Somehow, I got softlocked twice. Both times right after going back to a checkpoint after running out of lives. Pressing R did nothing and somehow I became invulnerable to all damage, and stuck in a wall the other. Otherwise the game is really nice! I only got to the end because you lose no hp when restarting by pressing 'R'.

Only got to level 13, however, the fact I physically had to resist the urge to try to get higher score means you've done a very good job.

There's a few patterns that are REALLY fun but the dice are so abstract it's hard to put what they are into words, but I'm talking about the ones that seem to "flow" into each other.

I love everything about this game except that one virus that spawned right where my file was. The rest have very good tells, but I couldn't figure out what theirs was.

The fact the GUI had the dice shown be the opposite of how they would be physically arranged was a little misleading at times, but otherwise this was quite nice. The puzzles showed you knew what a dice could do.

Well I didn't read the description and got stuck on the last level for an embarrassing amount of time...

I will now do what any math nerd would do when they cannot solve a puzzle: show proof that it is impossible.

First off we can notice a parity property of the vertices as it relates to the spaces they can occupy. Let us define a coordinate system X,Y,Z such that Y is vertical and a unit is equal to the side of the cube. We will color the cube's points in two distinct colors such that two points that share an edge do not share the same color. Then by moving the cube in all possible directions, we notice that any point that a vertex of a certain color occupies cannot be occupied by one of the same color. A little more detail on that one: after any move, a vertex either does not change position at all, or changes whether it is on the ground or not (+or-1 Y-axis position) and moves one space in the  +or-1 X/Z direction. Therefore, the parity of X+Y+Z will always remain the same for said vertex, after any move. A common occurrence was for the dice to be in the position it would need to be, but translated 1 tile without rotation. This, of course, would mean the target position's vertices would  be in unreachable positions. To deduce this, we need only look at one edge that is parallel to the translation. after the translation, the colors on the edges would occupy unreachable positions.

Therefore, assuming there's only one target position (4 on top, 5 to the right when standing above the gate) (proof left as an exercise to the reader) it is impossible to bring the die in a position where the stage could be beaten.

You may think this is a waste of time, but such insight can help you develop better mechanics (say, you could make an apparently useless tile that rotates your cube in place to make a similar later puzzle harder). Nice game btw :)

319 rolls. Are those all fair dice though? I'm sure the RNG was as fair as it could be, but some of the die ones looked like they had some sides that were much smaller than others...

Really cute! Got 260 on my first attempt. The difficulty ramps up far too slow though, so it'd be nice if it ramped up faster or at least had special sections to break up the monotony a little.

Ady you're in the credits this isn't how this works.

"a lot of"