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Hi! I'd be interested in joining if you're still looking for a composer? I've written a couple of jazz/big band type pieces before: I haven't written any full-length tracks in that style recently, but it's absolutely something I can do. The idea of mixing that style with more gothic music sounds really fun!

Two pieces I've written that have a bit of a jazz feel to them: unlimited shrimp (the harmonies more than the arrangement) and Headless Chicken (an oldoldold track, so it's not super polished). You can hear some of my newer work on Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

Let me know if you're interested! I can't really start work on writing any music until after the weekend, but I can chat ideas through. You can reach me here or on Discord (I'm @sshhaappeess).

Hello! There's always lots of composers in jams like this, but as a queer vampire myself I thought I'd try my luck!

I'm Lying Pink (she/they). I work across lots of different styles of music but I tend to gravitate towards 16-32-bit era JRPG soundtracks, ambient and contemporary classical. I'd love to work on a game with some wlw content (you might see me later in the year at the yuri game jam lol), but I'm open to other projects too. I've done a few game jams before, plus a couple of other bits of soundtrack work.

You can listen to my most recent soundtrack work on Bandcamp, and I've put together a demo reel of other tracks on Soundcloud (there's a few tracks in that playlist, and more if you click through to my profile).

If you're interested, feel free to comment here or message me on Discord (@sshhaappeess). There were a few people asking around for composers a couple of weeks ago, but I know developers in jams can get inundated by composers, so I didn't want to spam. If you're still looking for someone and think I'd be a good fit, pls feel free to comment!

Loved it! I felt like I knew where this was going, comfortably, until the narrative lurched unpleasantly off the expected path.

The details were beautiful, and really pulled me inside the player character's head (the "we want the redhead" section in particular made me feel so uncomfortable - in a good way). The final twist initially felt jarring - I needed to go back reconsider everything we'd learned about the player character and her world - once the twist slotted back into place, it felt all the more sad, and satisfying.

The metafictional touches to the final twist resonated - rather than feeling like cleverness for its own sake they really helped to add an extra perspective on the themes of the story, and raise some questions about the way our experiences chime with the narratives we pass through.

Really well written!

Surreal, minimal and numbly sad. This feels as much like a ritual or a meditation as it does like a game - it leans into the ritualistic aspects of the mechanics and the premise - the counting of the tokens, the separating out of the cards - which feels effective.

Some aspects of the rules could perhaps be described more clearly. For example, I wasn't 100% sure what the aces are for: it says in the example round that pulled court cards are added to the aces, but this isn't mentioned elsewhere in rules. I might have just missed this, though.

The consistency in tone works really well, and makes even just reading the rules feel like part of the experience – almost like an actor staying in character when talking to the audience after the play. “Never spare a knight” - great!

Really nice! I think it's hard to make properly scary top-down 2D games, but this one was. The quirky humour really draws you in (and gets you caring about the characters!) before the gut punch. The phone conversation before the first chase was fantastic. The music was great, especially the variations on the house theme. Well-paced and nicely polished.

Fun variation on a classic concept. Well done!

I really liked this! I felt like I knew what to expect after the first 10 minutes of gameplay, but I was wrong! I'm really glad about that - making a pattern then subverting it once the player catches on really added to the sense of tension. I love that you gave the AI more character than just "something that wants to kill the player". There was enough worldbuilding to give an idea of what was going on, but still enough "unknowns" to give the player room for their own interpretations and questions.

In Dreams builds itself out of the parts of old games that we read as unintentional, unhelpful, oversights, limits of a medium, poor design choices, and subsequently (half-)forget. Your game puts these parts front and centre, and uses them to great effect to create horror.

There's a particular kind of loss of control you feel from playing old PC games, particularly old shareware games of dubious provenance. Most are janky and unplayable, unpredictable. Some are less wholesome than they first appear. The audio and visual aspects of old DOS games are inherently uncanny and offputting, especially when done “badly”. In Dreams uses this feeling of wrongness to unsettle. It uses mechanics that take control away from the player and uses them to increase the feeling of horror. Frantically pixel searching is like being lost in a forest. Checking and re-checking the same clickboxes in the hope that they will reveal a way to safety does evoke the feeling of panic we would feel when almost alone in a remote place. Even the options on the right-click menu unsettle a little in their lack of function/context, and unsettle even more when they are taken away. Agree that the click-mashing can make you miss certain bits, but it's a game that still plays well second time round and BLEEDS atmosphere.

A surreal, frightening experience. I enjoyed playing this immensely!

This has a really cool premise! Taking a conveyor belt and expanding it out into its own world with its own religions, cults, rumours and factions was inspired. Erring on side of player/GM discretion and creativity rather than overrelying on intricate mechanics was a great idea, and using the number of words to convey a character's strength was a brilliant shorthand to convey information to the player and GM, and very cleverly bridged the gap between game mechanics and game world. Got a feeling this would be a great one to play with people.

This was great! The first half alone was really effective as a character study: you described the player character's interior world really relatably and evocatively. The change of feel with the arrival of the train worked really well too.

Overall, this was really well-paced, surreal and imaginative. Nicely done!

This was really immersive, with a good story, told with just the right level of detail. The interactivity felt like it added interest for repeat playing – one or two properly branching paths would've been good, but probably would've taken too long given the time limit. Some of the “bad ends” were funny. The illustrations and formatting added to experience without being obtrusive.

A unique, well-paced take on body horror. Well done!

There were some really cool things here! I liked the monster designs - they felt really uncanny and creepy - plus the bear trap was cool. I liked the time skip at the start, plus the way that the game 'loops' at the end. I like that you weren't afraid to make the player wait. I thought that the walk to the building near the start and the elevator rides gave the game more of a sense of atmosphere, for example.

Agree with the others about the graphics. I like that you couldn't tell exactly what things were some of the time, but it would look great with a little more polish. Some of the boundaries of objects were off - for example, you can 'climb' the wall of the building with the ladder near the start/end, then keep going up into the sky! I couldn't work out what the screwdriver was for either, and the character's stamina seemed to drain very quickly.

Still, overall this was really cool. Well done!

I loved the sense of atmosphere here! There's something really cool about games that explore a really short timespan or sequence of events. The fairly light ruleset and limited turns both work in the game's favour, with the former directing the player's focus naturally to the secret-sharing mechanic and the latter providing ever-increasing tension and a "deadline" to play in the face of. The fact that the players cannot “win”, but that this is not explicitly stated anywhere but deducible from the mechanics in play, works well too.

The (kind-of) unwinnability and the way tension naturally increases both reminded me of Ten Candles, but this definitely feels like its own game. In particular, the secret-sharing mechanic makes the game feel less like a puzzle to be solved and more like a brief moment of intimacy between the characters and a meditation on death for the players. The mechanics that are there prevent the game from feeling too freeform, and give an extra layer of tension in holding off the threat long enough to explore the characters' secrets fully. I think this would be a really enjoyable (if sad!) game to play with the right people. Thanks for submitting!

This was fun! The player character was really limited in what she could do - always good for a horror game imo - which made the exploration feel a bit richer. I couldn't jump on anything to get a vantage point, for example, which meant that I needed to properly search around every corner to progress. With the robots prowling around, this felt pretty tense!

Agree with Scream Catalogue about worldbuilding and story. Investigating the corpses could've been a lot scarier with more hints of story and threat around them: the one corpse that was surrounded by dead robots was intriguing for example, and got me asking questions about what happened.

The building with the organs on the side was well done! We'd already seen the organs on the robots, which tips us off to what the building is for. Seeing it from a distance a little while before we can physically reach it was a nice touch too - it gave a sense of achievement to getting to the final area.

Overall this was a fun, short game. Nicely done!

Kudos for tackling some heavy stuff and doing it well. That was a bleak one, in a different way to some of the others in the jam. I felt like there was a good degree of depth to the main 3 characters and their relationships; I definitely got the feeling that there's more to them than we've seen from this version of the game.

I think the uncertainty the main 3 characters feel around each other worked really well - there was a bit of tension in feeling empathy for the three of them, and seeing them pulling in different directions. I think you chose the right moments to show the player things outright, and the right moments to pull away and leave things to the imagination. The feeling of unreality in some sections worked well, and added to the feeling of foreboding.

From your response to Scream Catalogue below it sounds like you were unsure where you wanted the story to go - I hope you (or your characters!) figure that out. It'd be great to see a longer version if you decide to keep working on it. Well done!

Nice job! I agree with the others about the visuals - they definitely add to the atmosphere of the game, plus the slightly janky low-poly style definitely makes the game feel more uncanny and spooky.

The second half of the game felt really interesting, aesthetically - it felt like the player character had stumbled into a different world, which felt unnerving.

It'd be great to see this expanded - I want to know more about the world! It was slightly frustrating having to restart from the beginning each time, but you let the player skip through quickly, so it wasn't a huge problem. The ending where you stay in the lighthouse was a cool idea, and I think it would've been great with a slightly slower pace. 

Overall this was really cool - I think there's something inherently creepy about CYOA games, and you definitely ramped the creepiness factor up to 11. Well done!

(the captcha told me to select all images with bridges when I was submitting this... too soon 😨)

This feels like the makings of something interesting! As the others have said, the combat feels a bit unbalanced. The enemy that you only encounter on the second screen feels very difficult.

The aesthetics - the colour choices, the environmental art, the enemy art and so on - give the game a definite sense of place. I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, but I definitely left this game wanting to find out more about its world! The crafting idea was interesting - if the game was longer I'd be interested to know how the crafting mechanic fits into the world more widely, whether it's something that lots of people do to survive, or if it's something the player character has as a unique skill, or something else.

Congrats on submitting a game, and for trying out some new stuff in RPG Maker. Hope you enjoyed making this and carry on working on the project!

Who nose what I expected from this entry, but it snot this!

The weird choice of subject matter works surprisingly well for horror. The initial ridiculousness kind of bypasses the reader's defenses. Although the body horror feels quite mild, there's something unsettling about the way that the character portrait and text change once the nosebleeds start to happen. The character's anxieties feel very real and relatable - the nose picking feels like it could be any poorly-chosen coping strategy, which makes the game feel like it speaks to something bigger. This works particularly well in relation to the "verbs" the player is given - if you only have one coping strategy to get you through the day, every situation you encounter will be viewed in relation to it! Simply commuting, doing your work, interacting with colleagues feels almost secondary in comparison.

In a slightly Stanley Parable-esque fashion, the game's 'good' ending feels like the least satisfying somehow: why be good when it's so easy? This lets the player really get stuck in to making terrible choices with their character's personal hygiene and seeing the results.

The minimal graphical elements work well, and the music fits the tone perfectly.

Never been scared of my nose before, but your game has taught me how close my insides are to my outsides, and how easily that barrier can be broken. Well done!

This was a fun idea! I quite like TTRPG concepts that are specific and closed, rather than really open-ended. The overall plot, pacing and ending are already mapped out, so there's a lot of fun to be had with this game through the GM and player's descriptions and imaginations alone.

It feels like one risk playing this game would be that the player has quite a lot of power, in that they can make very drastic changes to the rooms! I feel like if I was playing this game I would be tempted to come up with really straightforward solutions to the traps (for example, getting rid of the water in the piranha room), which would make the game pretty short! It feels like some of the traps avoid this problem by being less easy to understand right away - I thought the dark room full of razor webs was a great idea, for example.

Overall I thought there were some good ideas in this, and with the right combination of player and GM this game could turn into a real battle of wits. Well done!

There was some lovely stuff here! There's a high level of polish in this game, and it felt like polish with a purpose. The game felt like a unified experience with a definite sense of atmosphere: I had a clear idea of when, where, and possibly who I was. The environmental storytelling, the puzzles, and the hints of the events that led to the game's story gave the game a surprising amount of tension for its length.

I agree with what some of the others have said, in that it would be great to see more! It feels like you could get a lot of story, a lot of atmosphere and a lot of HORROR out of a longer version, if you keep working on this after the jam. Well done!

This was a really interesting entry! The textual imagery was evocative, even poetic at times. I felt deeply uncomfortable reading this (in a good way!): throughout the game I felt like an intruder, witnessing things they shouldn't be seeing. The ambiguity in following the narrative definitely helped with this. All the information was incomplete, and the imagery was so surreal that I questioned the reliability of the viewpoints I had access to.

I agree with some of the others that some of the text effects were overwhelming. They worked well, but maybe would have been better used for emphasis, rather than all the time. Some of the other effects worked well (the "I'm here mom", for example: I like how much it interrupted the flow of reading. Seeing that window come back again later in the game felt really satisfying, and gave those particular 'interruptions' their own character). The overall aesthetic was brilliant - the graphics you used really added to the atmosphere, as did the audio. Allowing the player to replay from the branching decision point rather than forcing them to restart the whole game was a good choice.

Often horror tries to overexplain, but I think you struck a great balance here. There's probably a lot to discover about what actually 'happened' in the text, but the ambiguity allows the reader to keep guessing. It feels like there are lots of dark themes on the periphery, and letting the reader draw some of their own conclusions really let these themes breathe. Nice job!

This was a great read, and I reckon I'd love playing this. The premise was interesting and would lend itself to some cool gameplay. In particular, the enemy and boss ideas were fantastic: the sometimes more humanoid enemies compared with the more machine/object-like bosses really gave the game a sense of inhuman, industrial scale. As the others have mentioned, some of the mechanics also added a real interest and flavour to the game.

The typesetting and design choices really aided the game's atmosphere. The textured heading text and angled subtitles, for example, gave an extra feeling of polish to the whole thing.

It felt like some of the wording was perhaps a bit vague, e.g. the final sentence of the "yes doctor" description, but that might have just been me. With more time, it feels like the game could definitely benefit from some more worldbuilding, to give a sense of what the place is and the feelings it should evoke in the player. Perhaps some example characters (plus short backstories?) could help with this too, or some example rounds of gameplay, as the others have mentioned.

Overall though, this was a great entry. Very original, well thought-out premise, bolstered by some interesting mechanics that were original, but not too complex to pick up. Well done!