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Very cool idea. I like how this turns a typically-realtime game into a turn-based game, and still keeps the gameplay interesting. Nice sound effects and responsive animation.

Great layered art style. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy the control scheme but it was surprisingly intuitive and arcade-y! I like it! I agree that I didn't seem to need the dash mechanic to beat the game, but I didn't even notice it until I read the previous comment. I enjoyed the extra flair in character animation and hit animations. Very cool.

Cute graphics. I liked the general motion of the jump, and how I could bouce off the walls. Also, the frequent checkpoints were helpful to avoid frustration. Sometimes the spikes would kill me when I touched the side (not the pointy part), which seemed odd. Seems like maybe I shouldn't die, or maybe the sprites should look dangerous on the sides as well as the top. Overall a fun play-through!

So much fun. My kid and I alternated turns until eventually I ricocheted to the sun! Very original game mechanics, and I like the collision sounds. It was fun to figure out how to grow quickly, and when it was time to reach for the stars. The slow-mo was critical. Would have been nice if the game zoomed out as I got larger, similar to Katamari Damacy.

Are you sure this is your first game? :) You designed and implemented it really well. Nice job. Thanks for the level select; I wasn't able to solve the 3rd stage, but got through the others! It was really fun and made me feel smart. The audio fit the theme. The graphics are super cute. I like that the game gives me a limited number of re-spawns, and makes me choose who I want to re-spawn as. I look forward to see what else you create!

Haha, you're right, I should've read that description. The difficulty seems fair, knowing level 6 is the last level. I'm a casual/weaker player than the target audience, probably, but I could have probably survived after a few more plays.  Thanks for the tips!

I have mixed feelings about this game.

On one hand, the game is ridiculously difficult because the clues are very obtuse and the game is expecting a single specific answer to each puzzle when other potential answers exist. I never would have guessed some of these answers. At least one puzzle appears to be broken for me since I couldn't connect to the wikimapia site to load the clue. That said, I'm a casual player (not an expert puzzle solver), and this game might not have been designed for my skill level.

On the other hand, the puzzles are usually very novel (new to me) and clever. Once I know the answer, the clue usually makes sense, and makes me smile, and makes me interested in what the next puzzle will be. I just wish the leap from the clue to solution were as reasonable as the leap from the solution to the clue. Players who get stuck on an earlier puzzle are missing out on some pretty cool puzzles and fourth-wall-breaking experiences later in the deck.

You've got some really cool ideas here, though it feels like the difficulty might need to be tuned with more play-testing. For example, maybe accept alternative answers, and/or re-order the puzzles so the easier puzzles appear sooner.

I was stuck on level 2 as well. HINT: You need to interpret the clue very literally, and punctuation matters.

Wow. For 2 days of work, you prioritized your efforts very well, and  boiled down the gameplay to its fun core. At first I thought it was going to be boring, but the actual gameplay was really fun. The aggressive timer, 4-letter limit, first-letter restriction and inability to repeat words made the game a frantic burst of excitement. Dictionary seemed to have decent coverage; the words it didn't accept from me also weren't in the Scrabble dictionary so I can't really complain :). Good interpretation of the theme.  Audio-wise, it's a minor nitpick but the success tone seemed louder and  more annoying to my ear than I'd prefer - though a different tone or volume controls would probably take care of that. Nice work!

Oh cool! It's great to see another word game in the jam. It's lonely in word valley. :) I tried to play it, but was unable to get it to run on my playtesting machine ("Your video card driver does not support any of the supported OpenGL versions.") so I can't rate it. But it looks like a cool idea!  Interested in trying the Web version once you post that.

Thanks for playing, and the feedback on context clues! One of the play testers had a similar suggestion, so you're not alone! I was hesitant to add the clues because I wasn't sure if I could come up with a good clue for each of the 90+ puzzles. But now that I think about it, ChatGPT (or similar) probably would be able to do the heavy lifting for me. I'll keep it in mind for a future version, thanks!

Thanks for playing, and the constructive feedback!  I created the ~90 puzzles (i.e. the "answers" and the "clues") manually while searching Wiktionary phrases and Google 2-gram data for ideas. Since I already wrote a website that parses that data, the data was already available for me to query. I mainly focused on ambiguous words with the hope that they would have a bunch of phrases (since they'd be used in a lot of contexts).

Thankfully I didn't build the list of partially-correct words manually :D.  I wrote code that uses the 2-gram data to build the list of the top 500 strongest connections for a given clue, and builds that into the level data.   Hope that helps!  TremblingInferno had a similar question so there's a slightly longer response below in case that helps!

The human character's movement looks really good, I like the motion of the arms and the way he leans. The ghost mechanic is new and neat as well. I had trouble getting the initial ghost "jump" to go as high as I needed sometimes, but it was still fun to experience the transition.

Thanks for the feedback! It's not obvious, but there's enough levels to play about 9 rounds. (About 90 puzzles.)  I'll make that more obvious in a future version.

Clever visual twist on the ol' snake game. It looks so pretty! I wish the turns triggered more immediately than they do - but I understand the delay might be related to how the game runs on a grid system under the hood.

I couldn't figure out how to die, so I never upgraded my ship. But the teleport mechanic is cool and new to me! Neat idea.

Good thing my employer pays me cash immediately for every enemy I destroy. That way it's available for my "friend" to take and spend when I die! :) A little hearbreaking to see them loot me like that, but I find comfort in knowing that my "friend" has a "friend" of their own!

This was fun to play and get to a more comfortable firing speed. I'm not sure how many waves there are, but I don't think I got past wave 6 even with all the stats maxxed. Would've been cool to have a carrot in front of me, to let me know how close I am to beating the game (e.g. some indication of how many waves remain). Liked the music. Glad I could hold down the space bar instead of tapping it for every fire.  Nice job.

Tight controls. I like the speed, and the mouse control rather than strict up/down/left/right turns.

That's awesome, thanks for sharing the love.  There are about ~90 puzzles in the deck , and the game avoids giving you questions that you've already solved (except for a bug where you might see the tutorial puzzle an extra time), so you should be able to play about 9 times with unique puzzles as long as you use the same browser on the same computer!

And I don't know how you work that phrase into a conversation, but if you can, that's amazing. The Great Armening is only 199,089 years away and we need time to prepare.

Fair and fun! I had a good time. I like that it's easy to try again when my ears get shredded.

Impressive level design.  The "you lose what you use" platform mechanic is really cool, and you use it well. The puzzles are clever and unique, beatable without ragequitting, and the meaning of each type of platform is telegraphed well.  Thanks for the controller support - that helped me reach the end, for sure. The background music was spookily chill, and fun to listen to. 

This is fairly  minor, but my biggest frustration was that sometimes I had to fully restart a level after wasting a double jump.  I wish that the double-jumps were restored similar to how the platforms are restored, when the player is returned to a checkpoint. (I.e., if I reached the checkpoint with an unconsumed double-jump, I wish I got that double-jump power back; or if the double-jump item was on the map when I reached the checkpoint, it should be restored to the map when I'm reset to the checkpoint.) Hope that makes sense.  That said, it wasn't hard to restart from the beginning of the map, just a little annoying to have to reach the checkpoint again.

Really fun game, I enjoyed it a lot!

The death animations look sweeet!  Especialy the swirly shadow beasts.

Wow this game is punishing, even on Easy mode. :) Over 50 potatoes later, I probably only made it to the start of the drop area about 5 times. It would've been cool to have more checkpoints.

That said, the potato looks awesome and I want to be them. I want to take them out to dinner - not as dinner - and learn and smell the horrors they and their family have endured. Love the color scheme and lighting effects too. It's a lot of fun to watch, just difficult for me to play on a keyboard.

Oh! I get it. Thanks again for the feedback. Yeah, I needed some cheat codes to make test certain edge cases related to ending the game, and exercising each puzzle. :)

Who knew arms could cause such a commotion! Thanks for the feedback on the difficulty - you're not alone. I didn't have enough time to figure out  and group the puzzles' difficulty, but I wish I had! 

If you didn't make it to the end and want to see that short end-of-game cutscene, there's a cheat code "XRIGHTO" that basically acts like you typed the correct answer. So if you guess "XRIGHTO", it's like guessing the correct word. 

Thanks for the feedback! I haven't heard of Mystery League, I'll check'em out. Thanks for the tip!

You gotta pay that finish-line painter a little more money. Looks like they should've added a coat of white paint first. :)

This was a lot of fun! I especially enjoyed the dive mechanic, which I hadn't seen before. The bottom-of-screen commentary made dying a little more enjoyable. Wasn't a fan of the grinding spikes (or whatever they were) that ate my body - though more checkpoints could maybe mitigate that. Also I was able to use the dive ability to clip through the ceiling, in the area where there's a narrow hallway of spikes. It didn't really help me, but I felt the rush of Super Mario Bros Level 1-2 for a minute there :).

Excellent polish with the faded particles, menu screen, etc. It feels like a Game Boy game, remastered for 16:9.

Cute penguin! I like the core of this puzzle platformer a lot - the puzzles themselves weren't ridiculously hard, and I appreciate the compass you added to each character's head.

As others mentioned though, the controls could use some tuning. In particular, something seems off about the collision detection, that gets my character stuck in the vertical middle of a wall instead of sliding up or down from it. If it were easier to slip up and down walls, that would be so much more fun.

What a cool, original game mechanic. When I saw the thumbnail, I was curious how a dandelion game would play....but this is great. I had fun jumping from cute and unlikely-but-fertile locations. Easily the most elaborate jumping mechanic I've seen in this jam. :)

I got stuck on the airplane/statue level, and gave up after probably 8 tries to land either on or near the statue, or at the end of the level. Not sure what I was supposed to do there, but it was a fun journey .

Hahahha. This game wastes no time getting started, and it knows how to make an exit.  A short blast of intense fun. I didn't understand the mechanics of the cookie or math puzzles on the first playthrough, but the rest were intuitive. The second playthrough was smooth sailing ;).  Love the snarky-yet-realistic marketing angle.

Now that's what I'm talking about. A lot of jam entries try to match the theme by having you replay the same-ish level, but the replays have been pretty boring for me because the mechanics were nearly identical to the previous playthrough. I like how you significantly varied the strategy to complete each level. You folks earned it. 

Cute atmosphere and attitude.   Getting some serious "What the Golf?" vibes from your level choices and titling. It's just enough information to convey what the player needs to do. Very well done.

The golf mechanic was my favorite and a very welcome surprise. My least favorite was the spike level because I kept getting surprise-spiked. I wished that the spikes were telegraphed better, (e.g. with a short partial-spike graphic just before the spikes fully kick in). But once I realized the spikes were deployed in a deterministic (not random) pattern, I was able to make it through!

Lots of great aesthetic polish here. Sprites look crisp and interesting, and the rotated levels were a nice touch. I was getting SNES Mode 7 flashbacks. :). The game got too difficult for me in the level with the "too easy" hallway.

Jumping felt good, but the attacks seemed to be slower than I was expecting for some reason, especially for a ninja. (Maybe they start with a delay, maybe they're slow overall.) Not a big deal since the game doesn't seem to require precise attacks, just wanted to mention it in case it helps.

This might be the first jam game I've played with intentional controller support (where the game explicitly acknowledges controller support). Thanks for that!  Platformers are way more enjoyable to me with a  controller.

Free-range brains, and organic sound effects. The vocalized sounds were a nice touch, and kept me smilin'. I can understand why all the "help me"s might be grating to some folks, but I thought they were charming. You've got me wondering what's in the hole, that can crack open a skull so fast.

Yay I'm glad the absurd humor resonated! That kind of goofiness makes me giggle, and the giggles are what keep me building  :D. I'm  not sure how much you want to know about the word association stuff, but here's an attempt to answer! Sorry for the wall of text.

I think you're asking about how the game knows which answers are partially correct (checkmark vs cross)?  That is largely based on the Google NGram dataset . The 2-gram data lists the frequency of certain 2-word pairs [as found in books], which can be used to figure out which word pairs have relationships or special meaning, relative to other words. Around 2020, I wrote code to slurp that up and make it searchable via my Dillfrog Context Search website (example) . So for the jam, I used my internal  API to search that data and  write code that "bakes" level files from my manually-generated list of correct answers and clues.

To generate the puzzles (i.e. the "inputs" to the baking process), I manually read through a list of "ambiguous" words that had multiple meanings , in the hopes that  they led to more interesting contexts and puzzles. For each word, I  searched Wiktionary (primarily) and my Dillfrog  Context data (secondarily) to see what words might be recognizable clues.  Then I created a TSV file that included the intended correct answers, and the clues to use.

Then, to build the  JSON "output" that the game will actually read and use, I run that baking process. The baker  slurps the TSV. For each clue, it uses that Google NGram data to spit out the  top ~500 words that occur before or after each clue (based on a PMI score if I  remember correctly...), so it can acknowledge the partially-correct guesses [for the top ~500 results].  It also adds correct answers that I missed  (e.g. plurals, if I listed the answer in singular form), based on the top ~500 connections, and does some other cleanup.

Hope that helps explain it!

Original gameplay! It was fun sproinging around to get to the top, and I can't think of another game that's implemented with these mechanics. Very cool art and lighting effects. Also I appreciate the in-game educational materials regarding quick brown foxes and their natural tendencies, especially in the context of lazy dogs.

My favorite weapon was the grappling gun.  I had a lot of fun jumping around with that. The shotgun jumps took some practice to jump the gap, but eventually I figured it out :-).   The most janky aspect for me was the idea that I need to beat my former self in order to advance. Some of the levels were challenging enough that I had to artificially slow down my first run, just so my second run had a chance.  

Beautiful sparks and shadows, had fun playing through. Thankfully the bad guys blew me into the final room :)

Super fun and juicy physics game. I wasn't expecting the cat to climb up the rainbow lines, but I really like how that feels. Lots of great feedback and distruction along theway.

Oh my gosh this is really polished. The puzzle design, length and pacing was perfect. I'm not amazing at puzzle/zelda games, but I was able to make it through the game after some deep thought, and had a lot of fun. I like how each level adds a twist that makes it unique, and the puzzles were challenging but not impossible.

Hahah,  the sheep look so cute. And the shark creature's grumbly mumbly voice kept me laughing. Think I got a sheep stuck in the bottom right corner that a left-click couldn't fix, but after restarting the game it was smooth sailing.