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This game is gorgeous. Special shoutouts to the balcony room, both versions (but especially the dream version) have a wonderfully uncanny feel. Maybe I'm just too attracted to tall buildings and odd empty architecture.

My other favorite area is that lovely meadow with the flowers and puddles of rain.




[Spoilers]

I don't know if I discovered everything, but I wonder if Yamaiko was involved in a car accident of sorts and is now injured or dead... This is based mostly on the crashed car you can find in one area, and the 'Necrotic' effect you can obtain from another. The heart rate monitor is very ominous, as well.

Looks like that was a bug! It should hopefully be fixed now. Thank you for playing.

Thanks! Flash-style point-and-click games were big inspirations for this. Two I personally like are Submachine Universe and Bars of Black and White.

This is a cool twist on the Bluebeard story. I imagine there's a bunch of guys sitting in that room ready to meet a new member of the club lmao. And it is weird that his beard is blue, if you think about it. Blue sus

This is the ultimate novelty and I want it in real life very badly. The writing is glorious. The music is delightfully tactile (I think the ticking sound effect really does the trick). The minute timer ties it all together, you get small doses of weather at a time so you don't go overboard with it. (The weather is too powerful to witness for prolonged periods. You must take breaks!)

Also, that data center article is surprisingly illuminating. I was expecting it to just be about a funny cloud in a data center, but it ended up being way more. Non-places, the fundamental role of the US military in the internet's creation, the ecological impact...

Any concept that has to do with sending anonymous messages and getting them back is an immediate hit for me. Like the internet in a nutshell, but a kinder, more benign version. Reminds me of r/benignexistence, actually!

My favorite message is the placeholder one. It technically contains everything, if you think about it.

The illustrations are very cute! I like the simple two-color lineart style, it looks very pretty against a dark background. The music is minimalist but does the job quite well. Bell instruments always hit

Glass is awesome, so I had to check this out even though I've never tried glassblowing and don't have the first clue how it works. I love the illustrations and the calm repetition of figuring out how to do glassblowing, getting into the rhythm of it, learning when to hit vs. tap with your different tools and so on. It captures the arc of learning to do something, struggling with your failures but moving on anyway. Even after I figured out how to do things I still got a spike of worry whenever I clicked the link to proceed on the off chance that it wouldn't work anyway, and then it would go through alright, and I would breathe a little sigh of relief.

Overall, the game reminds me of a pottery-making app I was briefly obsessed with as a kid, where they simulated a potter's wheel and you could use your fingers to shape the digital clay pot and afterwards glaze and color it and everything. I spent hours on that app making all kinds of nonexistent clay pots. I would play this if it was a 15 hour game where you just make different kinds of glassware over and over again

TLDR: Glass is awesome. It's shiny and smooth and so cool to touch and when the light goes through it gets EVEN SHINIER. Once I visited a glass museum and they did a glassblowing demonstration and it was epic.

Knowing this was a Bluebeard Jam entry, I saw the twist coming the moment he mentioned the door haha, but the reveal was still creepy in the best of ways. There are some cool text effects here and I really like the look of the game overall. The interaction style where words/phrases appear one at a time is novel, a bit tedious, but it fits the idea of being a robot that can only scan a few things at a time. As if your internal cameras or sensors are limited...

[Spoilers]

I picked the stab ending, because obviously, but I do wonder what happens to the protagonist after this. Will she be able to eke it out in the lab on her own? Will she be able to pass as human? I imagine at least some of the knowledge about designing and maintaining her body died with the guy, so that might be an issue. But if she's smart, she can probably figure it out. Maybe?

Disco Elysium fans UNITE

This is sweet! The music is great and the art is really charming. A chill way to spend a few minutes.

Haven't had this happen to me before in exactly this way, but I've had friendships with people I really liked that just fizzled off and died once we stopped seeing each other regularly, so this still hurts. RIP.

This game does a lot with its small wordcount. Love the minigame/interactive aspects and how they're used, especially the part where you clean yourself before the funeral. The art is gorgeous, too. Though the conversation at the end, with the estranged sister (?), is what really gets me. The complexities of family captured in a short back-and-forth. I'm not familiar with the protagonist's culture, but death and family, and the unresolved questions that come with them, are universal. A very intricately made game.

Aw hell no, not the vampire apocalypse... Good to see a Disco Elysium inspired game out there! Peak game. The music is very Disco Elysium too and really sells the struggling musician feeling.

I'm fond of dream exploration games and this one hits the right notes. Surreal and pleasantly melancholic.

Creepy little game. I liked it.

I can never survive for very long, but it's a cute little game!

Fun concept, but I got stuck on this level for a really long time and couldn't get past it. The timing to bounce off the wall right is really tight, and it's not easy on a touchpad. I like the art, though!

I softlocked myself before the third rune by pushing a block into the wrong place lmao. Protip gamers do not do this [FIGURE 1 ATTACHED]. Besides that and the slow speed of the gravity beams (why are they so slow?!) it's a cool game, love the theming and landscape design and the little dolls. Do wish there was a way to move the camera around so dolls don't have to be on your screen to switch to them, but eh. The little details like the scraping sound stones make when you push them around and the particle effect when switching dolls are a nice touch!

Figure 1:

You're the first person to comment on that! You get a virtual award.

Kendrick Lamar really is a top tier hater. But this letter has a fair amount of SPICY HATE in it as well. I like how the brother admits that yeah, he fucked off to Silicon Valley, and he's sorry enough about it to write the letter, but not sorry enough to not fuck off to Silicon Valley lmao. Fun story.

Also Meet The Grahams hell yeah

I just watched the entire video and really appreciate it. Thank you so much for playing and everything you said about the game, and for hosting the jam as well. You didn't really miss anything besides the other ending, though I'm not sure if it'd be worth replaying for it. I made some very minor text adjustments after seeing the whole playthrough. I'm glad you liked it.

Love classical music remixes. This one is good, thanks for making it!

Moody. Short game, but cool setting and ambience.

It reminds me of Summit, a little, with the whole "semi-randomized wandering in a surreal world" thing. Alternatively, Dark Souls. I've never actually played Dark Souls or any FromSoft game, but the walking corpse plus decaying fantasy landscape bit makes me think about it. The cyclical nature of the story, too. Space phoenix, reincarnation cycle, food for thought...

 Some quotes:

"The sediment you walk on is impressed with the footfalls of others. High overhead, lights of lamp and hearth glow in the canyon walls. These places are not for you.

The night air is thick and motionless. It carries the smell of spiced roast meat."

and

"The sunrise blazes in that slit of sky ahead, monstrously vivid and vast. "

"Didn't expect handling a machine that could explode and kill me any second to be so mind numbing."

Interesting game, looks awesome though I did have the bug with the text boxes. (Might be browser thing? Was using Firefox.) Fish factory is an unusual setting, but I like it. Reminds me of the fish market episode of I Am In Eskew.

Factory aesthetic is lit, also love the dithering and image edits in general:

Part of me wants a longer story or more choice points so we got a better sense of the characters (and what is up with the mutant fish thing?), but as it is it's an interesting glimpse of a larger world.

Really curious game. I like the strange format and animations, though I think the overall story went over my head due to all the different paths. Not even sure if the ending I reached was an ending. Embezzlement sucks, though.

This game is stunning. Every single image oozes style. Also I got so sad over this whale man, it had whale depression, and whale trauma, and whale found family, and whale peer group bonding, it's the whole whale package in one game. 5/5 emotionally wrecked by a story about fictional alien whales. Also [spoilers]

YOU PULLED A BAMBI ON THE MOTHER HOW DARE YOU

Made me cry though so legit

I can definitely see where the inspiration from "If We Were Allowed To Visit" comes from. This is cool on its own, though, I like how it adds in additional colors and shapes for more variety, and obviously there's the whole part where you can add in your own objects. Distinct aesthetic for sure. I personally would've liked it if there were more objects floating around in whatever world gets generated, so there's more room to discover things, but the game as it exists now is still neat.(Also, thanks for introducing me to "If We Were Allowed To Visit", because that was really worth checking out.)

This is a really cool idea. I'm not sure exactly how large the environment is that we can explore - poked around a bit and found the house with the front yard and the back yard with trees and a fence, is there anything else? Anyway, love how it looks like nonsense at first glance, then resolves into a clear image as you start moving around. Super neat.

This is a cool game! I like the rhythm elements esp. on the first date, syncs up to the music really well and the red heart is a nice touch especially. Had trouble dodging some of the projectiles, the red and blue circles in the first level when they intersect were impossible for me and also the sun in the second level (skill issues lol). I can pass the first level still, since the other parts are alright, but on the second level I keep running out of lives to the sun. The raindrops tend to shave off a few lives too since the player speed is a bit fast and they're really bunched up together. Dating sim part isn't really my speed (and I'm really glad the skip feature exists so you don't have to do it every time!), but the joke about speaking Cat wrong is funny. I'm assuming there are no dates after the second since I can't skip to any other levels...? Did he get the girl or not....? Hope it didn't end too disastrously lmao.

Fun little game. Haven't finished it yet, but worth taking it for a spin to explore a bit. The text issue is annoying since I can't read a third of the text, but the map is giant and I love industrial settings in general. Big factory type place...

The game is made with Phaser, so it's meant to be a browser game and the issue is definitely my fault! I'll fix it after the jam ends.

Edit: Hopefully fixed now.

A strange and charming game. I like it!

I stole the wavy and blocky lines idea from Undertale, so Toby Fox deserves the credit for that one haha. (They're just wavy and blocky instead of orange and blue since I figured the hue-shifting effects would make it hard to tell exactly what color something is.) Thank you for playing!

Thank you so much for playing, and for the detailed comment! I'll note all that down for fixing after the jam is over. The limited time did not help me here, lmao. Will check your entry out too!

Your suggestions are super helpful. I'll do that stuff if I ever make a postjam version (which I hopefully will...) Thank you for playing!

I'll definitely be tweaking the difficulty later! And I did actually notice the issue with the walls, just didn't have time to fix it... If it's that apparent I'll have to push it up on the todo list, lol. Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! The 'points by shooting into the void' is almost certainly from hitting enemies that haven't shown up on screen yet. I guess that's another thing I'll need to change later, haha. And 514 is about twice as high as my best score, so you did pretty well. (Virtual trophy!)

Thank you! I put a lot of myself into it, I guess.

Really cool. Reminds me of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke for some reason. And Manifold Garden? Exploring a strange and beautiful place you can't leave.