itch.io

Thank you! And thank you for helping me identify this funnel point :) 

Out of interest, how far did you get/how long did you play for?

Highest consistent rating and my first five star review.

Just fantastic.

Roses are red

Cooldowns are bad

This game is good

It convinced me they've got their place in an ecosystem designed around them

Holy shit, the "Now Loading" jape got me IMMEDIATELY and the transition to the dark lord's volcano lair was genius. It carries on in this vain throughout. The gimmick does begin to wear thin after a while, and some jokes land harder than others, but in general this is a marvellous piece of work presentationally, very well done.

Also, the combination of animations + event work? Genius, and well-timed.

I will say, the bits where I had to play the game - if you can call it that given the lack of actual explicit gameplay - fell short of the cutscenes. Like, the trial-and-error nature of the waterslide puzzle felt quite cheap,, but the presentation once you finished it was clever and fun. Some of the puzzles are better, but the mapping combined with the constant "haha gotcha"s started grating a bit after a while.

I feel like the game coulda been 1/3 as long and I'd have had just as good of a time, if not better.

I think I see how it all worked, and I'm keen to try something similar myself, but in general the actual "game" part of the game didn't work as well as the terrific cutscenes. "Take the stairs" REALLY got me. I wish it'd been more of that and less "chasing the game's maps around" haha.

Just generally a great experience. Feels like a flash cartoon from 20 years ago with how pacy it is and with the style of humour. Didn't always land, but when it did it LANDED. Really solid work.

Hey man, thanks for playing - totally appreciate your feedback here. If I were able to patch my entry before rating ends I would 100% act on this as I acknowledge the flaws listed!

Thank you for your kind words, and for your feedback. Feels like I could totally fix this in like an afternoon, and am very glad you enjoyed the vibe, music, art, and writing <3

Thanks for playing man, was fun to watch - and yeah, totally appreciate that blocking is fucky atm. Unable to patch anything until the jam's voting period is done, but there is slight cheese if you wanna see the ending. You can hold more than one direction to give yourself a wider window in which to attack, or block.

Either way, this was a joy to behold and I apprecaite your time! Thank you very much for your kind words, and for your feedback.

If you're struggling to finish the game, two directions can be held at once which gives you a massive 60% advantage on the minigame!

Speaking as a bloke, and quite a blokey bloke at that, I don't particularly think Pride Month being a thing denigrates the awareness of men's meantal health - but to each their own :) 

You are more than welcome. Can you elucidate on your issues on "what June has turned into"?

By golf scoring, this game is beating everything else in the jam by miles.

Mostly, I'm disappointed that in a fantasy post-apocalypse feat. Drag Race you didn't call it the world of Ru-in.

I actually enjoyed this game more than I thought I would from the other reviews.

I want to preface the rest of the review with that because I'm gonna now talk in quite a lot of depth about what I did and didn't like, and while there's a lot here that I did like I think there's a couple things in this game which are borderline inexcusable.

So, I enjoyed the combat - even if the way TP worked meant that it was very prescriptive and essentially implemented cooldowns. There is never a need to use "slash" because by the time you're on the wolfman floor you are only fighting single targets for the rest of the game.

I also enjoyed the repetitious nature of the dungeon and thought it was clever that you changed up the visuals to indicate process - even if I'd have apprecaited a single on-map mechanic to differentiate the two loops. I thought that had conceptual legs, even if you didn't go all-in on it to make this concept work, it has a neat little 60 Second Hero vibe to it that could be clever if expanded out to a full game.

I also enjoyed how unpretentious it was. You fought bats, goblins, wolfmen, then a knight, then the game ends. Cool. Done.

What I didn't like though I think is what's going to be useful to you in terms of feedback:

• The game has no narrative, as such I am forced to give the game one star in that area. I don't even mean "the narrative is explained in the manual" - you're just in a dungeon and you go do stuff. This'd be fine, if there were something revealed to you about what was happening, but the game ends as abruptly as it starts and with no characterisation whatsoever.
• The Jam Requisites are all shoehorned in at the last second. You open an island map, include Harold and say the line (Bart). Davina is just there. It doesn't feel like a particularly creative use of the source material, or of the Jam's constraints.
• Two loops was just long enough for me to not get sick of how repetitious it is, but your encounter rate is really high - I only enjoyed it because I'm an old man who was raised on that kind of design, but for broader audiences this will be very offputting. Especially as the dungeon loops.
• Your level design is kind of outdated - it reminded me a lot of Wizardry 1, a game whose plot is "a man has built a deliberately annoying labyrinth below the town!" I liked that it harkened back to that, but the environment was so stark, and the levels so linear that there's nothing to do in the game. Also, the fact that it reminded me of something which was narratively contrived to justify being annoying and archaic probably isn't a great sign.
• You kind of don't appeal to anyone - people who like exploring have nothing to explore, and the game is so easy that people who like the achievement of compelling combat also have nothing to enjoy. At one point I had to use a potion to outheal the Knight, but that's the only non-prescribed action I took in the whole game. "Get TP, use move". That's the whole game.

I guess if I had to sum it up I'd say: Look at who you want your audience to be and design something for them. Right now you have the building blocks of a very basic, inside-the-lines, normal RPG. For those of us who like that, fine - but I'd have been just as entertained by someone combining the default RPG maker maps into a game and saying "here you go, content you enjoy" and just playing that instead.

The game needed a hook, or a reason to want to continue playing - and if the game had not finished where it did I may well have put it down never to pick it back up.

2/5 - I like this kind of thing, but I don't know many other people who would. Kinda carried from being 1/5 by the standard RPG-maker combat, which I am known to enjoy.

"Play ethical dilemma" had me laughing before the game even started, so well done there.

And now it's come full circle to "rate this ethical dilemma", hah.

The text crawl opening was difficult to read. Theme6 blew my ears out. Then Harold started pontificating about the ethics of making money and my eyes glazed over a bit.

Then David arrived and I was instantly sold. I understood the premise inherently and the block caps delivery of the story was really funny. Also DON'T LOOK AT THE MENU INVESTMENT BANKER triggered in me a deep and apparently latent fear that I think will haunt me until the day I die. Especially as you can literally disable menu access without a single plugin.

The fact that I was forced to rewatch the whole text scrawl after getting the "lame and extremely boring ending" was kind of a pain. Feels like that could have been handled better. I opened the menu and laughed at the gags, but the inability to save to avoid the hefty punishment for failure was a little frustrating.

And then it ended. The game is a single choice. It's a funny choice and it's a neat little concept, but I fail to see how it particularly hit the criteria for the jam given that you don't see the island?

Either way, I laughed. For what it was it did it well, and that's kind of the thing I'm trying to grade these more esoteric games on. The art is just stock, the music is just stock, and I don't think I can give gameplay more than a one without abjectly lying, but overall this entry kind of nailed it?

3/5. A shitpost, but not a shit post.

This game is - to me - the definition of a 3/5 entry. Each individual piece is fine, but together it has some issues holding it back from greatness that I think it's worth talking about here in a review.

First off, I appreciate the amount of effort that's gone into the game. There's a script, the scope is clearly defined, and it accomplishes what it sets out to do. I really respect that about this entry, and I think that should receive some kind of special Production Prize for "well-managed scope".

The presentation is good - especially the music, which has great Flamenco vibes. I really appreciated the basically-gerudo-valley track especially. I liked how consistent it was within its own rules, and the use of RTP backdrops to tell the VN-style story I thought was especially well-considered.

I do wish that the backgrounds and battle sprites had been custom - there's a distinct artstyle on display here and while I appreciate that bust art (haha, geddit) is one of the more appealing things for an artist to work on, there's a bevy of other assets here which would have really benefited from a similar treatment.

As a broader critique, some of the art here made me frankly a little uncomfortable; I'd recommend that the artist do some anatomy practice and studies - there are a bevy of references which will help improve this skill in a matter of days-weeks. I personally am a huge fan of http://reference.sketchdaily.net/ - which has the added benefit of being customisable so you can spend as much or as little time learning as you like.

Not to "go in", but some of the art here ranges from 'that man's obliques are multiple seperate muscles and his spine is too long' to 'this feels weirdly oversexed for a jam entry, her back must hurt a lot'. The art is charming, in its way, but I think that some time spent practicing anatomy will go a long way!

Now, as far as the gameplay goes - the game has a charming structure which straddles the line between RPG and Visual Novel really well. I appreciated getting and spending currency in the form of shrooms, and the stock of items/use of accessory slots is really cleverly implemented.

On top of that, the battle system was really creative! It did seem like another RPG-Maker-Game-That-Could-Use-A-Balancing-Pass, as it was so easy that it became quite easy to disengage. Not to say that games which are easy are necessarily bad, but here the challenge ranged from "do what I say or you die immediately" to "this is so trivial you can win by holding space", so it felt like the delta was too wide to be meaningfully satisfying.

I did enjoy my time with the battle system, please don't mistake this critique for dislike, but I was left feeling somewhat disatsified. Especially given that the enemy variety and customisation/skill point system were so strong.

Finally I'd like to address the story and writing. The story is fine - it's standard fare, but also shamelessly basically lifted directly from the Besaid portion of FFX. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it served as a fine framing for "do some fights, get a lamp". The issue I took with the story was that tonally it is all over the place.

The game struggles from having jokes and not really following through with them. You go to a weird sexpervert forest but it ends in a catfight between an ogre and a dominatrix - and the sexual content isn't presented in a particularly funny way. It sort of detracts from the game, rather than enhancing it, because I don't know what the vibe is. One of the characters is like "I don't fight people because I crippled my brother" and it's like "wait what, wasn't this game about titty jokes 3 minutes ago" - then the whole game ends with Harold demanding that no-one think he's gay for watching Ru Paul's Drag Race.

In the post apocalypse. Because it's all a dream. Out of nowhere :P 

I dunno, none of it comes together to create a cohesive whole and instead you're left with a game that does several things fine, but nothing well enough that you can point to it and say "that makes this a stand-out entry".

Certainly not a bad game, and a game with a bunch of cute ideas, but a game with flawed execution marred by tonal issues and content issues. The epitome of a 3/5.

Edit: Mostly, I'm disappointed that in a fantasy post-apocalypse feat. Drag Race you didn't call it the world of Ru-in.

I really appreciate what this game was going for; I blasted through it on-stream and recognise I probably didn't get the best impression because of that, so I'll avoid commenting on the story and instead focus on what I played.

So, this game is Pac-Man, but the dots move, and occasionally go into the walls of the maze. Its stated purpose is to be an excuse for the player to relax, but between shonky collision on the collectables and repeatedly falling into water under bridges which change on a timer (not connected to the music so there's no sense of rhythm) I fels like this experience was more frustrating than it was relaxing.

Maybe I'm not the intended audience for this, but this style of game never really appeals to me. I'm a gameplay-is-king person, and the gameplay here was mazes-with-extra-steps. The dialogue seemed charming, and I appreciate the message of taking time to slow down, but this can be perceived as busy-work or time-wasting, so if there are to be follow-ups in this I'd recommend really clearly labeling them as slow-paced experiences so that you don't accidentally foster resentment in your playerbase. Especially if they're not particularly engaged in the story and don't want to talk to multiple characters as a mandatory exercise in exposition between mazes.

I found the concept novel, but as I said - the dots floating out of reach was more frustrating than it was relaxing, and given that I was able to sprint I think that made me more impatient. If the game had forced me to go slow and take my time maybe this wouldn't have been an issue? Or maybe custom art in a less vibrant, noisy style would have helped - the RTP really isn't "cosy art to chill out to pastels", so I think the game's movement and presentation was at odds with the chilled-out experience the author was going for.

I appreciated that it was using the engine to make something non-standard though, so for that I give the creator full kudos!

Now, onto the game's strongest aspect: The music.

This game's music is absolutely incredible. I also loved that when you talked to David the music stopped because he stopped playing it. The game is an auditory FEAST, and as a way to get people to listen to game music as a way to relax I think the game is actually a really interesting exercise. I appreciated that it was basically an album where you had to earn the next track, which is kind of a cool ludic statent in and of itself.

Overall, a good effort, but due to the issues I experienced while I did have a good time I'd have a hard time justifying a rating over 2/5. Maybe if I'd been more into the story it'd have elevated it, but I just didn't vibe with the narrative and as such am engaging with this on gameplay alone.

Good job, hope this review helps!

Neat! I'm a big fan of Shmups and Bullet Hells and this certainly is one! I'm also personally a massive fan of ThunderBirds, so this hit me right in the nostalgia!

"Insert Coin" is a cute way of saying new game, this was very sweet.

The gameplay itself is OK. It's novel, but it's one of those cases of "an rpg maker game doing something another engine could do better, easier". I really respect and appreciate the ingenuity on display, but the game suffers with the issues you'd expect it to. Movement feels quite sluggish and inexact (which as a fan of the genre was somewhat frustrating), and enemy patterns aren't super interesting - there's not a ton in the way of challenge or finesse here, and while the ability to switch bullet types by switching ships is cool they lack the feedback to feel meaningfully different (except for firing pattern).

Hit detection both on friendlies and enemies seemed to be quite buggy - which I'm sure is an artefact of this being an RM project. It didn't lessen my enjoyment, nor did it lead to the game being any less endearing, but it was notable. Health also bugged out for me a couple of times, leading me to not take damage where I really ought to, and the lack of a limit to credits meant that any semblance of challenge was immediately offset by basically being infinitely shepherded through the experience. 

Structurally, the game is exactly as you'd expect. Do stage. Do boss. Repeat. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it innovate particularly - the novelty here is in seeing our favourite characters doing stuff outside the norm. The stages progressed quite nicely - I especially liked Stage 2, whose ground-based enemies reminded me a bit of side scrolling Shmups like R-Type.

This brings us to story: It's not particularly story-intense. Cutscenes play out as expected. Super competently made, and I enjoyed the Tracey Island sequence (although I felt it was a missed opportunity not to use show picture to animate the default title screen island to show where the machines were hidden). I really enjoyed the ending - going from ThunderBirds to Voltron with some wicked sick hero theme happening was a great way to capture "Heroic Return", so big kudos!

(Also, Spark Cannon made me smile, well done)

Not gonna lie, I very much did not expect the CG to show up postgame  - but I do think that this CG made me realise that I wished we'd gotten a Voltron/Megazord combination set of CGs/animations, so in its greatness it kind of made the rest of the game's art feel underwhelming.

Music was fine to good. Don't think anything really stood out there. Sound was fine. All felt fairly stock. Same with the art, and for that I feel like I can't really give more than a couple stars in each area. I really love that CG, but overall I feel like the rest of the project could have benefited from some of the author's incredible artistic talent!

In general, a fun time - 3 short stages and a High Score tracker to encourage you to play again. Classic stuff, but with enough niggles that it holds it back from true greatness.

3/5 - absolutely would recommend to anyone with 15 minutes to spare!

Overall, this entry was fine.

I don't think I could really rate it as good. The story is just the Saiyan Saga, but without that context it kind of dalls down - and the writing was in the author's trademark style, which is to say that it was somewhat odd. I laughed once, I think - and that was upon realising that it was just the Saiyan Saga, but the author kind of failed to capitalise on this other than "there's three guys you fight".

Also, not sure why Vegeta was purple. This could have benefited from custom art.

I'm somewhat confused by the mention of a combo system in the other review haha.

I didn't see a single timed input here, but what I did see was a battle system I didn't really have any chance to lose in. Healing was too cheap for the action economy to ever actually be losable, which meant that what it boiled down to was a series of premade assets, used to tell a story that was lifted from somewhere else, in battles it is impossible to lose. Music wasn't particularly special, art was just Low's, presentation was weird, and I'm just left baffled.

So yeah, a valliant attempt, but given that it was delivered 2w early there was plenty of time to identify and address the above issues. The author's keeping it short was very much appreciated, because that final battle with Not Vegeta really drags, no matter what you do, because of action and battle economy.

Thanks Sigma, I hope it's useful feedback :) 

Review:

The concept of addressing one's critics through media is not new, nor is it inherently problematic, however I cannot recall a piece of media as incredulous or bizarre as this one. 

As with all of SigmaSuccor's works, it is a game which stretches RPG Maker to breaking point, filled with squashing and stretching sprites, and more plugins than one really requires to tell the "story" the game is attempting to tell. Once you're in past the opening dialogue (told through a VN style interface) you reach the meat of the 'gameplay'.

This is where things get weird.

This game is insane. I don't use that as hyperbole, or as some way of trying to praise the psychological depth of the piece: It is actively disturbing that a human being put this together.

The title is incredibly fitting: The game perpetuates a false narrative, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the defensive party chatter, where the author has invented two NPCs who agree with him and his defensive responses to what one can only assume are the criticisms leveled at him by other developers. The format is novel, but the use of multiple characters there to provide the author with a sounding board read more as aspects of a single personality than an actual trio of people with their own thoughts and feelings. At one point Succor (a sort of bizarre Tulpa seen throughout the False X series) comments that 'women don't compare, they accept' - and this stood out to me as especially bizarre.

This tends to be the bulk of what constitutes the (False) narrative - the gang walks through a train and interacts with groups of people, all discussing the actions and behaviour of the author, as well as giving their thoughts on him as a person and his work. These interactions are then commented upon by the party, occasionally interspersed with humour, but more often than not devolving into rants and commentary on community criticism of SigmaSuccor and his work.

One highlight of these conversations was a rant about AI generated images, which frames people having an issue with that technology as a personal attack against the author. Another concerned perceptions of the author's work as pretentious, and his claims of depth (along with another rebuttal against those claims). Then there's the bizarre joy at being compared to more popular (and successful) titles, claiming that the author's work is simply incomparable to other video games.

There are also allusions to suicide; and a heavy implication that any criticism of the author's work could be inferred as mental illness on the part of the critic. Indeed, there is one scene where the party discuss that attempting to take action perceived as critical of the author could lead to suicide. This is obviously unfathomably cruel, given that all of the people in the piece are at least analogous to real people. This is not the first of Sigma's games to use these analogs of real people, or visualisation of the Internet as a "real" place (or even the use of unauthorised snippets of Discord/Forum text concerning the author).

All of these conversations between party members come across as incredibly defensive - and borderline delusional - but it's not the crux of why this piece is disturbing. Among the delusion and self-aggrandising comments about "service" to the community, or how criticism of the author could be a ploy to keep the author creating is something far darker and more sinister:

After reaching the front of the "Hate Train", insulting the person "driving" and demanding that they stop criticising you, and telling them that their issues with you will explicitly lead to their suicide, you start to commit acts of violence towards your critics.

In a moment not unlike a pre-teen making their teachers as wrestlers in some WWE game to beat down for perceived injustice, SigmaSuccor - a grown man - flips the narrative, claims victimhood, and decides that the best way to deal with people being critical of him is to murder them with a sword. This is shown as "cancelling the noise" - wielding his "power and influence" to silence critics.

Combat is simple, and killing an enemy plasters the word "Ban" on the screen where their body fell, so the theme of Internet-As-Reality continues. It's a simple affair and nothing poses anything approaching a threat (after all, why would it). You fight your way to the back of the train and the game ends with a monologue from a man in a tophat insulting someone - either the author or his critics (calling them a piece of garbage, repeatedly saying they'll get what's coming to them, calling them cancerous et cetera). 

The subject of this monologue is left deliberately blank, whether for plausible deniability or as a rare moment of self awareness. Given the remainder of the game it's more likely that this is directed towards the "driver" of the "hate train", the person whom Salik has - whether it intentional or not - decided that Internet Drama is worth them taking their own life over.

All in all, the game is short - taking roughly 30 minutes to complete if you read everything, and accomplishes very little in that time. Technically the game is (as always) a marvel, pretzeling the engine into shapes it was never intended to take, but the cloying, self-congratulatory, defensive writing coupled with the disturbing bloody violence towards the author's critics comes across as the ramblings of a man on the absolute edge of sanity. It is a disturbing artefact of RPG Maker Culture, very much of-its-time, and concerning a reality which - for some - is clearly beginning to take its toll.

There is a great irony in that this game was made as a way to address people being critical of SigmaSuccor's games being self inserts, and a greater irony still in the demands that this stop so that all parties can focus on game development. There is a level of hypocrisy here which is either post-modern brilliance, or the kind of thing usually scrawled on an asylum wall in faeces.

Why not give it a half hour and decide for yourself. 2/5

I could port it I SUPPOSE. There's always Lutris, til I do?

I really love this idea in concept - the presentation is pretty nice, but mechanically there were a couple of things which were unclear/immediately caused me issues:

• I wasn't sure why the enemy and I were going at the same time/in the same playfield. It made it very difficult to strategise and it took me a moment to realise the game wasn't turn based and that the CPU doing moves wasn't a hint system but actively detrimental and something I should avoid. Not gonna lie, I got bodied by the enemy and I wasn't entirely clear on why, or what was going on for a lot of the game.
• There were a number of times where new gems would not drop down, or a void would be left - a couple of times I'm pretty sure I saw gems going up? Because of this, it was very difficult to look ahead as I didn't know when these bugs would occur, or if they were behaving as intended?

I played the game for ~30 minutes and I'm not certain as to whether or not I should assume bad faith of another dev, but this game is borderline unplayable. The fight with Superman in which he repeatedly wastes your time by forcing you to miss, the regenerate MP move which only regenerates a single MP, the fact that everything is designed to waste as much of the player's time as possible, the headache-inducing music, inane toilet-humour, terrible writing (chock full of spelling and grammar errors), Japanese menus, unintelligible plot and terrible combat...

I don't know. The way you're vehemently defending the game and acting like it's in some way not a troll/deliberate waste of your audience's time makes me think that you're either:

• really committed to wasting everyone's time or (much less likely)
• legitimately unaware of the relative quality of your game

Given that the content of the game is 100% the kind of meme content you expect to see I think you're trolling, and I'm not putting another second into it.

Good luck, I hope you submit a game which isn't designed to waste your audience's time

I really, really like this so far. Killing the hard enemy felt great, and you've really nailed that feeling of soulsy combat in a way I don't think a 2d game really has before - I've played a shitload of soulslikes, and I honestly think this is the highest praise I can give.

The weapon trails really make it feel obvious when things are dangerous, which is fantastic. I kind of wish there'd been music/atmos but totally get that combat has been the priority so don't begrudge there being none yet.

I love the style of the little fella - I hope he looks like that right up to release.

The game has great conveyance - when I entered this room I immediately was like "what is the best way to deal with this threat", which I think means you've done a great job of conveying exactly what's required of the player and what the nature of the threat is as well as the toolset available.

I finished the demo and gotta say that I think all of my feedback at this point would be in the areas of presentation and inventory management. Once I got how it worked it was fine, but I was playing with kb+m and it felt a bit counterintuitive to figure out at first.

Presentation feels like it hasn't been a top priority - in terms of function over aesthetics it's instantly groccable and fulfils its function perfectly, so maybe giving feedback in that area is unwarranted right now.

Gonna be watching this project with EXTREME INTEREST. Keep it up, man. Stonking game!

This is fun! Feels like a real game already, kind of got a ludum dare vibe. It emulates that late-90s feel so well; maybe some music would go a long way to really finalising that vibe?

Combat right now feels VERY spammy. I don't know if I could lock on? Feels like dark souls, but kinda more light hearted? I like the broom, but I wish I'd had more options available.

Felt kind of bad not being able to climb up here:

 I got pretty lost after finding the ruins crystal and thought I had to backtrack, the rubble next to this looks like a ramp so I thought I was being taught that I could climb by the environment. That said, you never imply that the player can climb, so maybe no action needed?

Please never change this graphic:

That said, falling through the white down there was an unexpected death.

I say this without a shred of hyperbole - if someone told me this had been a secret early era from game trying the souls formula on the n64 I'd have believed it. Not tryna overcomplement, but this is strong! Gotta leave unexpetedly so will probably do more feedback v soon! Nice work

Aw man, I thought this was finally up :(

Ahhh, I was wondering how close I was to finishing! Seems like: Very