itch.io

I never really comment on itch, nor would I honestly want to leave a public mark on something like smut. But...

This VN. This absolute ridiculously good story. I just can't not. I'd feel forever guilty for not clamouring how amazing this is.
I have quite a few VNs under the belt, from Katawa Shoujo to Steins;Gate to Doki Doki to a ridiculous amount more and genuinely not a single one has ever ever gotten close to having me care about this many characters to this degree.

The absolute breadth and depth of these characters, relational concepts, and philosophy is just mind boggling. I could not praise this writing enough.
The MC that is perfectly introduced as probably one of the worst tropes and having the severe opposite slowly creep up on you. Wonderful. Just wonderful.
The characters around the MC, all unique in their own way. Characters that make sense, with execeptionally varied history and reasoning. There's not a single moment that made me question any of them or their actions. Flawless.
The world that's both nonsensical and yet somehow perfectly defined within its own ruleset, to the point where the exposition is just enough to make me actually understand all that's explained or shown. Complete with colourful graphics that even a chromatically-challenged doofus like myself appreciates. World-class.
I don't know what hole you crept out from, Story Anon. I genuinely hope that you have an insanely good imagination and there isn't some other reason why you're able to write this tumultuously, because hot damn you made me feel way way too many things. You're doing okay, right?

It's taken me little over a week to plough through this since I found it, and I'm genuinely distraught that I not only hadn't found it before, but especially that I've gotten to the last bit of content.
I would say I clearly want more as fast as possible. But genuinely -as someone who's adored everything so far- please do take all the time you need.

Finally, and I'll admit that perhaps the story so far has affected me just a tad too much, perhaps this is just flatout sappy... If you, Story Anon, ever need help -and I know I'm just some dumbass internet stranger who just left a single comment, no connections, no ring, but still- if you ever need help in whatever way, please shoot me a message.
I would absolutely hate for a brilliant mind like yours to not be able to do what you clearly have so much passion for.

P.S. No spoilers, but I have to admit that Cro's story has tugged my heart strings the most, rewatching the prologue after having gotten to the current end felt so different. I do hope her story will continue as it's going so far and end with a bang~
And uh, thanks for reading!

Eesh, this is a spicy hard game. Being as impatient I am with timed platformers like these, I often just try to rush things as best I can, and correct my mistakes with each go. Somehow that seemed to work out for me, as... hoboy, this game requires reflexes I should've had a few years ago.

I liked the graphics, they were fairly timid, yet the lighting definitely broke the monotony in a really well way. The theme was ...well, this is what I expected the most frequent type of game to be, so I guess it's fine.

The gameplay could've been a bit more forgiving, all things considered. As the game was speedy, the platforms were too, which turned this into a very high precision game.

Other than that, I enjoyed pulling out all the stops to get to the end.

Ah, this just oozes with charm. It was a simple yet fun and challenging game (had to restart twice), and I was surprised it even had a second level!
Also, the fact alone that you made this as a GB game is insane, genuine props on that.

P.S: I looked back to when you were streaming our game, I absolutely loved it, and am glad the writing struck such a cord with you, despite dialog heavy games not even being your thing! Thank you for playing and streaming it.
P.P.S: No, get your own sandwich.

A fun, short, and well looking colourful game, and so far as I've seen, a pretty well done take on the theme.

A few points of critique. The middle/"real" screen is near to useless. I think I only used it for a short bit in the beginning, after that I stopped looking at it, which is a big shame as it ends up literally taking a third of the screen. Also I managed to defeat the shadow 3 times in unintended ways. Why unintended? Because I could see where you were supposed to kill it, and I decided to just cheese it. Maybe look into making sure that their environment is properly tested.

Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed the writing, and most of the atmosphere is most definitely thanks to the great audio.

Like many games in the jam, we overscoped like mad and had much more planned for the driving parts (like a car chase), but ended up prioritizing the minimum that still implemented the theme (oh lord there was so much more story).
Might we continue, we'll definitely keep the destructibles in mind. Thanks for playing!

Thank you! It makes us happy that you enjoyed it! I hope the detectiveness lived up to your detective fiction expectations!
Also, yeah. No sammich for you. If we do continue this, there just might be some kind of retribution for that. ;D

Way. Too. Difficult. This is the first game in this game jam I've played I'm not going to finish.

I'm clearly missing some kind of hidden mechanic strategy, but I've tried I think it was day 9 (first non-tutorial for torpedoes) like 4 times, I couldn't get through. It's just too much, and I can't imagine how much harder the levels are after that.

At first I was going to leave a comedic "Please for the love of god get me a new sub.", but genuinely, with the stress the game introduces I got extremely frustrated with the mechanics. Why isn't the button that drops things the exact same as the button that picks things up? You can only carry one thing anyway!
Please keep in mind that the player does not know what you know, the game will always be unfairly easier to the developer. Players don't know the hidden mechanics. They don't know if it's smarter to keep something burning, only to fix it later. Or if they should even bother with the torpedoes. And forcing them to go through it by trial and error (instead of a more direct UI, or not being able to repair anymore when something is at 100) is extremely disheartening to anyone who isn't a tryhard.

All that harsh critique aside. This game is flatout gorgeous, I enjoyed the story, and felt like it could've been taken further, though perhaps it was, I will never know, as I can't finish the game.

I somehow by the grace of god found the portal on the 7th run. And that's after I managed to escape the void by swapping gravity twice.

I'm not sure how to rate this game. It looks pretty damn slick. But the gameplay is pretty stale, and I don't see how this fits the theme at all. I do always appreciate randomly generated games though, and I believe this is entirely procedural? So props on getting that to work proper. The amount of dead ends got me sweating though.

I imagine with perhaps another mechanic or two added this could end up as a pretty great full game.

Is it... over? I killed the final boss (offscreen) and nothing seemed to have happened.

Anyway! This was an enjoyable experience. The combat was chaotic, yet easy and satisfying if you realized how to properly kite (and hold RMB). The general look and feel of the game was really cool. And I generally enjoyed the theme of the killing to show the route, albeit a liberal interpretation of the theme.

The hidden messages however... Oh boy. This is one of those situations where I want to say I like it, as everything was there for it to be awesome. But the execution was... pretty bad on a few levels.
As a fellow dev, it was clear to me that every little blood splurt was an object, and with 10 skellies killed, things got extremely laggy. I felt this was fairly unnecessary. I think one could've gone with particle effects for the large explosion, plus a few blots on the floor, and one larger pool (perhaps growing a bit over time) in the middle where they were killed. This would have drastically reduced lag and also increased readability with larger texts. Which reminds me. Some texts were just entirely obscured because of the tiles on the floor, and the blood splatters hiding under there.
In the end, I only ever managed to read the directional texts before being overcome with lag, which just made me sad.
The final boss was actually engaging, until he killed me with an attack I wasn't aware I was supposed to stop with a melee attack. This could've been avoided by prepping the player with different types of enemies that are immune/resistant to either the melee or ranged, and giving them some graphical identification that would be reflected on the boss (a particle effect and/or sound when a ranged attack hits but does nothing).

Pardon the wall of critique, I hope it wasn't too harsh. I genuinely did enjoy the game, and the more I enjoy these games, the more thorough I critique it, because I can see the potential.

The first level was the most interesting to me, but gosh heck, this could use a lot of spit-shining, and wax, and maybe some duct tape.
I know people are trying to be nice and constructive, but I expected quite a bit more when looking at the other comments.

The shooting; considering this is a mostly shooter oriented game could've been a lot better. You're forcing the player to click a lot, and it wasn't delayed at all, allowing for macros. There's a lot of tutorials out there that can help you make this much better.
The level graphics were too plain and inconsistent.
While the level selection world is always a nice touch, there were only 2 levels, perhaps time should've been spent on a third instead.
As for the theme. It only really shined in level 1, perhaps it would've been a good idea to expand upon that.

Oof. Bit of a heavy theme. Sadly one I'm familiar with, so this got me to choke up a bit.

Don't have much more to add, graphics were plenty decent, paintings were nice, buildup was good. Was a bit tough to figure out what had to be done, but thankfully you left some hints.

Surprisingly, I've seen this concept pop by a few times on the discord, and had a similar idea as well, but I was concerned that it'd take a lot of time to make all the real and fake graphics, which kinds of gets me to the point of this game.
It's short. Extremely short. Napoleon short.

Other than that, the graphics were cute, and the difficulty ramped up as quick as I expected it'd be from the start to end of any game, so definite props on the gameplay part of it.

This was pretty damn good. The graphics especially, the mood, and even the map you wandered were excellent. Even the theme helped make this even more mysterious.

The gameplay however fell a bit short. Not only was there only 1 type of shadowpeople, and as thus 1 type of non-threat, they also apparated through floors, which kind of broke the horror mood of it for me as I was laughing for them to come above the ground so I could vanquish them. Additionally, the road was long, so I kind of expected some kind of variation.

Other than that I enjoyed it, definitely one of the better done spoopier submissions. Even the title is spoopy.

Oof.
I don't want to dim your spirits, but I think maybe practicing a bit more might be useful. That way you can make a much more engaging game.
Definitely don't stop though, it's clear you understand this game design thing, now you just have to start expanding your knowledge.

Also I hope that tune will leave my head some time soon. Maybe a quick dive onto Google for royalty free music next time!

Damn. That ending.

First off, this game needs a length warning, ohboi. I think I spent well over an hour on it (having to restart because I got stuck didn't help).
Second, damn, that's a good and dark twist on the theme. You even got the character to say it.
Third, the levels were large and littered proper and was genuinely well designed. Plenty of props, I just got stuck on the first level due to not knowing I had to hit the critters with items.
Fourth, I'm making this a numbered list just because it fits the OCD gameplay.
Finally, you even added a credits scene. And that just impressed me.

Wonderful game. Thoroughly impressed you made this in a week.

I enjoyed this garbage fire. It had an interesting twist on the age old rhythm game. It actually made m laugh out loud when it transitioned.

However, all in all it's just a rhythm game, which means that the one thing that was important is to make sure the arrows hit the beat. They sadly did not.

This game might have a cutesy look, but holy heck it's deceptively hard. It has some precise jumps, and the enemies are large enough to actually be an obstacle.
It's a smart implementation of the theme, I genuinely really liked it.

Only sad part was how short it was. I feel like it could've maybe implemented ghost-only platforms, and things that only kill the girl, to make for some really complex situations that requires both action and puzzling.

Really really really enjoyed this one. Graphics are great, I love the enemy design and the area, it's simple, yet not flat. And above all I genuinely adored the mechanic. Also got a real Devil Daggers vibe from it. But with drones! And a different dimension!
I have to repeat that I really liked the themed mechanic, and thought it was well executed, including the part where you're forced to stay in the other world until charged, it changes the dynamic of needing to look up the danger, and not really being able to dish any; which; if you stay too long, makes the game a lot harder as well with the multiple spawned enemies.

However, the more I like something, and see the potential in a game, the more critical I get.

The feedback loop of the powerups is not well explained, and it'd be nice if there'd be any kind of feedback on that, seeing it's the most important thing in the game to make any chance of getting to the end.
Sound design could've maybe been touched up a bit to let the player properly know something behind them is firing.
Why does the secondary weapon exist? It's not damaging enough and eats through ammo, once I figured out I should only stick to the shotgun, I actually started winning the game.
Finally, the lack of invincibility frames is unforgivable in a game like this, one can get instantly killed with one small mistake. Why have lives at all at that point?

P.S: I found out that the sword has a secondary ability as well way too late, that made a consequent playthrough flawless.

Also just because:

Oof. Few mistakes were made, some of which kind of cut into your own effort. Don't forget to playtest your built game next time before submitting.

Other than that, it was mostly a button mash and waiting game, not really mesmerizing. Thankfully the ending was pretty funny, which made up for a lot of it.

A fun game that interprets the theme pretty hecking well. Movement was smooth, but required pretty precise input. Difficulty spiked pretty early on, but eased up after a specific hard level. It also had some egregious audio issues on the stairs level, forcing me to lower the volume.

All in all, with some polish, a bit more smoothed out content, this concept could be turned into an actually releasable game.

Fun game! Very Celeste-esque. Cute graphics, well designed levels and smooth movement made this a pretty good short game.

Two pointers I had is: The leniency on going out of ghost form. I've had quite a few times where I died and I felt like I was within bounds. Movement is fast, so it's fairly hard to do it accurately, for me it was mostly continuing to try to succeed.
And second is gravity. Please put a max on downwards velocity. This made the final level extremely difficult.

Cute graphics, short game, fitting theme, cause sheesh, that was a depressing ending. Actually made me regret finding all the interactables.

Enjoyable game, middle was a bit frustrating; having to listen to the dial up noise at least 6 times, until I learned I could cheese that section by going in and out of doors rapidly (which did not work well at the end). Speaking of, the game had a good build up and a melancholic yet interesting end.
The graphics of the gameplay were... minimalistic; which I suppose could have been a choice, but the additional footage really made a difference to me.

All in all it definitely had this old fashioned Newgrounds feeling, which just brings up nostalgia for me.

Thank you! In the end the game did end up as a mixed driving simulator and VN. Grand plans were made (like a car chase sequence), but you gotta make the scope fit with the time we can spend.
Will of course play yours as well!

Haha! Happy you enjoyed it. I tried to implement varied characters, and am glad you enjoyed the biker!

Thank you! And thanks for playing! Will be sure to check out yours as well.

Thank you! I too think the driving has become unexpectedly fun!

Glad you liked the writing! And the assets were definitely a godsent. Thank you so much!

Thank you so much! Props for the entire team all around.

One of the best games I've played so far. Art is lovely, graphics are great, even the book is gorgeous. Mood is awesome. Sound is good and creepy yet childlike, though the open window noises got obscured at times due to camera placement.

Two things that really got me is a bug, where you go practically flying, and can't go through doorways anymore (please add gravity). And the fact that you couldn't really see the doorways.
Once I figured that out, I was able to create a mental map and finish the game pretty quickly.

A very entertaining game, like most minigolf games.
The physics were considerably awful. More often then not the ball bounced off flat geometry due to a wrong setup of physics. Let alone the parts where you had to go uphill, it get very frustrating very quick.
While the theme is fitting, it doesn't really add anything else to the game other than dead ends.

Also, for some godawful reason, there's a lone piece of track near the finish with a checkpoint, which doesn't really allow you to continue anymore, made me ragequit.

Card game breaks whenever you hit the stack twice before it does its thing, after that the queen floats above the stack, doesn't get in position again and isn't interactable anymore.
As for the positions of the pieces. I think I understood where everyone had to go, but maybe I had 1 wrong, and another piece wasn't perfectly on the right spot. It's not as if the positions are perfectly explained. I personally would've implemented a dummy situation and just made 5 possible spots on the chess-y board. Or maybe 10, but at least not being able to fail by having 1 person one tile off.
Either that, or I completely misinterpreted and was a dumb.
Other than that, I liked the variation of the different puzzles. Having the narrative mixed with the answer of the puzzle itself is also really brilliant. (I'm just too dumdum)

I found the game itself super interesting considering the theme, as well as all the information, though I wish the answers were a bit more thematic.

Additionally, I imagine a game like this will sooner help people remember the wrong things, as they need to read all the answers, and you just know some of this wrong info is going to hang in people's brains. I would've personally gone for "Which of the 4 is false"?

An interesting concept, though a bit limiting on the gameplay alone. The voices as theme is either genius or farfetched, and I haven't decided on which yet.

One thing this thing desperately needed was a cursor to know where you were with typing, especially considering you expect people to also type the spaces.

Not bad all in all.

I really wanted to like this all the way, but frustration set in.

Got all 5 pieces, but the amount of choice there was with said pieces made this impossible to finish. Adding to that, the card game broke very easily, forcing several restarts, and at a certain point I was just out of patience to figure out the rest of the puzzle.

As a tiny sidenote, the moving text while speaking was pretty jarring.

The errors were in the web build.

Cute little fun game. Physics was a bit odd, jump input was eaten several times. Other than that, enjoyed it.

Got to 30.

Fun little game. Did get a lot faster rather quick. And sometimes the doors just refused to animate. Additionally, continuously clicking moving targets can be tough, perhaps consider allow for key input.