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Oh wow, I was just thinking about The Spirit Engine the other day! Great to see there's still a community for this series.

Did you plan to do any re-balancing? From what I remember TSE-1 had a bit of a problem with some skills being very bad (due to how damage resistance works)

Hey friends! I saw this one on Itch's page for upcoming jams and thought it was really interesting, I like weird games.

I wanted to ask for clarification on one point, though. The way the jam page is phrased, it seems to imply that this is a jam for physical games (that is, TTRPGs) and written works. Am I interpreting this correctly? Or would more traditional videogame submissions also work? Can't exactly put those in a zine. (Well, you can, but it would eat up many pages.)

Thank you! I'm glad you had a good time with it.

It's not quite a traditional visual novel, but it doesn't really have the puzzles you'd expect from a point-and-click adventure game. It's something in between.

Hey, thank you for the kind words! The game walks sort of a weird line when it comes to tone, since it's the seemingly "good" path that's unnerving, and the seemingly "bad" one (with the body horror) that ends on an ambiguously hopeful note. I'm glad if the experiment worked out, haha.

Aw, that's really cool! Thank you

Thank you kindly! I always try to put in little convenience features like this, I really dislike pixel hunting in adventure games.

Thanks for the feedback about the data analysis part, too. It's meant to be a bit confusing (i. e. you're meant to sort of guess at the mechanic as you're doing the "analysis") but you're right in that it's probably a little bit much. I'll see if I can make the Help section a little more helpful.

Really interesting experience. The visual distortions make the text somewhat hard to read, but I think that was intentional, wasn't it? Sort of reminds me of trying to read a text when you're in the early stages of a migraine attack, or just recovering from one. Definitely unsettling and unpleasant, in the way you'd expect from a horror game.

Also, thanks for including a Linux build! That's always lovely to see.

This visual short story is gross and frightening in all the right ways. The sudden visual change with the ending really hits home. Nice job.

(As an aside, you can actually mark this as having a Linux build too, since you're using Ren'Py. It'll run just fine.)

Took me a while to figure out what pressing buttons on the screwdriver interface did, and how it related to killing the enemies, but once I got it I had fun with the game. It's a pretty neat concept and the game has an old-school charm to it. Nice work.

(Your cousin Wyatt did a good job on the music too!)

I could not get this to run no matter what, even in a Windows 11 VM. Which is a shame, because the video you posted looks really cool - this is an incredible concept, and I think you could do a lot with this. Going by the video, this would probably be my favourite concept in the jam, and I'd very much like to see it developed further.

IIRC there's not an absolute number of votes you need. Itch.io does "rebalance" scores for games that get fewer ratings than the median, but you'll get a result even with a single rating.

I love retro-computing, and this is actually a very realistic representation of how DOS games from a certain era felt. Okay, the resolution is too high, but the way the transitions are set up, the harsh black-and-white, the music, the GUI and all? Oh yeah, that's my jam.

Quite a medically horrifying situation, too. Now, I'm not a medical doctor, but I don't think this sort of thing should be happening inside of a patient.

Some wonderfully gruesome art in this one, really loved the theme and the grisly nature of the work you're doing. The feedback about the impact if your actions could be a little bit clearer (like being rewarded with a spray of blood in addition to the sawing sounds), but I think this is a really cool project.

Very cool. This becomes an interesting logic puzzle on later waves, and I found myself planning ahead, making sure I was spending all of my sacrifice "budget" for future waves. You've noted that some features are missing (animations for fighting, visual representations of the monsters you're making, etc.) - I'd love to see this developed further after the jam, because a fully complete version of this would probably be something really special.

Quite a fun little game. It's got a spooky ghoul and an impact font meme - what else could I possibly want? I could imagine a lot of ways this could be developed further. There's a battle going on in the background, maybe some of the soldiers who show up aren't quite dead, or maybe there's stray projectiles for you to worry about. But still, what you have here was fun.

Interestingly, I didn't get the bug the other commenters mentioned, running the game in Firefox on Linux. Might be platform-specific or have something else weird going on.

Quite a solid effort for your first game! The environment is creepy, and just confusing enough to be challenging. I like the idea of an invisible monster. The echolocation is a cool way to work with that, since it gives you just barely enough information, while still being disorienting.

I wasn't really sure if I was supposed to be able to fight the monster - left-clicking seemed to trigger an attack? animation, but I don't think that did anything. Running worked fine, though.

(I'd also love to see a Linux build included in the future, Godot actually does all the work for you, you just have to set up an export.)

This one's got a fun Halloween vibe to it. I love the contrast between the design of the environment (realistic low-poly) and the characters (cartoon monsters), really makes it stands out. I though thte puzzles were fair as well, seemed logical to me.

Spooky! I love retrocomputing, and this one's got multiple layers of it. The text adventure portion was implemented well, the audio-visual effects really add some texture. The room with the extras made me smile.

Hey, thanks for the comment! Two of these are known issues, yeah. The boss has an incorrectly set trigger, so an interaction doesn't fire. And warping to a certain position doesn't properly block movement, which can lead to the moonwalking glitch. I'll push a fixed version once the jam voting periods are over.

The cutesy background persisting is actually deliberate, but I can see how it could be misleading. I'll think about making a small visual change to it. Thanks for checking out the game!

Thank you kindly! I figured I'd try to ground the setting in a fairly mundane dystopia, to contrast with the more fantastical elements, yeah.

The moonwalking is a bug, the game can lose track of where you're moving under some circumstances. Quitting to menu and loading the autosave clears it, just changing rooms unfortunately doesn't. Didn't end up having time to fix it before the end of the jam.

Hey thanks! I was indeed going for more unsettling than outright scary, so I'm glad that translated, yeah.

"Collect work files to appear useful" me every day.

This was exciting. The concept's fun and the office is designed well, and I really liked how it starts to distort on higher levels. The difficulty seems a little much (tripping over a wire should perhaps not be an instant death sentence?), but it contributes to the scary setting, and I think it was a cool idea.

Spooky! I like a good maze of corridors, and the atmosphere in this one is especially heavy and oppressive. Enough hints at a larger plot to be intriguing. I did find the jumpscares to be a little too frequent, but I think they still work in context. You know that reading a document is going to get you punished, but you're still going to do it anyway, aren't you?

Thanks for including a Linux build, that's always nice to see.

If I was visiting a haunted carnival, I think I'd avoid the house of mirrors. Bad choice, René.

Fun premise for a game, though! The unusual perspective actually works well here, I think, because it makes the maze just a little bit more disorienting. The short delay on the attack makes things a lot more tense, because you really have to pay attention to see if the reflection is doing something unusual.

Short but spooky. There's a real sense of tension building throughout as the apartment seems to decay. It really feels like something bad is coming, and when it actually does come, it feels earned. I like the art too, the black-and-white style is a good fit.

Interesting game! I definitely have questions about the world presented here, the way one of the enemies seems to be imprisoned at the start and all. The creature design is quite interesting, and I like the use of sound and music.

The platforming does seem a little unforgiving, but I think you've got a cool project here that could be developed further.

Spooky! I think everyone's already commented about the AI and the difficulty figuring out interactable items, so I'll just say that I had a good time getting Murdered in this Mansion, and that I appreciated the low-poly style. Quite neat, especially as a sort of practice project.

It took some doing, but I got to what I think is the end (big red text that tells you to get out.)

I think this is a neat foundation, actually. I like the style of gameplay, but it's a little difficult to get the game to register the action you want to take. (For example, where exactly you have to drag the wrench to repair the generator.) I think the puzzles generally work, but with bigger hotspots or some indicators of where they are, it would be more approachable.

The story's fun though, I like the worrisome implications it makes.

Match 3 gameplay is always a good time, and this one comes with a fun Halloween theme and some (eye) candy.

This is probably my favourite for the aesthetics category, out of all the games I've played so far. The muzak, the mix of sprites and low-fi 3d, the nonsense signs, the sheer grossness of the place. You've done an excellent job here. I liked the writing as well, it implies some supernatural aspects to the mall, but... even a regular decaying mall is pretty creepy. It's an interesting mix.

(Where I live, some train stations have shopping passages in the underground parts. Playing this, I was thinking - yeah, pretty much.)

Short but sweet. Good use of "negative space" mechanic, and the spoopy ghost theme fits well with that.

This is an incredibly ambitious project, especially for a game jam as short as this one, so I'm super impressed with how far you got with the project. This must've been a lot of work, even for a small team.

The aesthetics are especially cool. I've seen the "haunted PSX" thing before, but this is rather fresh take on it, with the deliberately low-poly models and all. I quite like it, this could become something very cool if you want to keep working on it.

Thanks for including a Linux build too, that's always nice to see.

Well, I'm not gonna stop playing Tetris just because there's something in my room.

This is a cool idea, and I think you've executed it well here. I could imagine building on this further, adding some more events around the room, having to switch lights back on etc., but it's pretty cool regardless.

Spooky! Impossible indoor spaces like this are inherently kind of scary, and that's a good opportunity to deploy random(ish?) level generation. The gradual addition of other dangers and monsters works well too. And I like the art style, it's got just the right level of detail. Well done!

As others have noted, Godot lets you export to a lot of different platforms, so I'd have loved to see a Linux build too. But the Windows one runs fine, so no big thing.

Aw, cats! I was worried something would happen to them, but I got a rather heart-warming ending, so that was nice.

This is a pretty cool game. The chase mechanic creates just enough tension. The story is fun too, I like the way it misleads you not once but twice about which cat you're playing as.

Good old RPGmaker horror. Not literally, of course (different engine), but that's very much how it looks and feels. It tells you at the beginning how it's going to end, so you're bracing for that, but then the style of horror ends up being something very different. Intriguing!