Cute' lil puzzle game that has a lot of potential for more! But good for what it is in the timespan of the jam!
PkGam
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A member registered Mar 17, 2022 · View creator page →
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I don't have a Reddit account (and don't plan to make one after the Spez/API stuff as that is some horrible mismanagement of the site and mistreatment of users), but lurk r/AnarchyChess because I found the stuff posted there to be hilarious. This too is hilarious! A collection of in-jokes wrapped up in a functional game!
Pretty neat idea! Trying to figure out the way through by thinking ahead across the piece switch and enemy moves so you don't get trapped is interesting throughout. You can sometimes get trapped when you blindly enter some rooms with certain pieces, which is a bummer. This is seems to happen mostly with the knight though (bishop trappings are rare and king/queen/rooks seem like they never trap you), so I guess in theory you can try to avoid capturing knights to keep them out of the switch queue and minimize the risk. It's also a little odd that to restart you have to refresh the page. But that's pretty minor.
Looks' neat, though oddly difficult to tell what each piece is in the shiny/glowy graphical version and less hard to recognize them if you use the other one. Piece recognition is pretty vital so this is an odd thing to overlook. I mean sure you can still click your own piece you are unsure of to see what it is (by it's movement) if you forget, but not opponent's pieces.
The AI is quite easy to beat (and mess with) if you are somewhat adept in chess as it often lets you have free pieces and doesn't always recognize mate threats, but that may be a plus as oftentimes chess games are inaccessible to many because the AI is too strong, lol! I think that's because too many others underestimate how hard chess is because they are already adept at it when they make a game and go: "This seems about right!" Then it slaughters most who try it. But some higher difficulty levels would be welcome if possible for a "play how you like/can" experience.
Some oddities I found are that sometimes it'll start playing itself even if you set one as human. You can just try it again until it does. Also on occasion it'll "take control of your pointer" in the browser version as you click on it. Which doesn't seem intended since it otherwise doesn't and still works. The game also doesn't seem to have concept of mate other than just taking the king. Which works. It's just unexpected. After a win, you may also see opponent's pieces look like they are being clicked on to move. But this is really minor as it doesn't do anything.
Pretty cute and heartwarming! Not' sure why, but I expected a dark or sad twist after the black time skip screens at some point. But I was pleased to see it was simply nice through and through! Maybe I played too many things and just reflexively expect drama in a story, lol! Or maybe one thing that's sometimes hard to interpret is what the conversation is about because your mom "................"s. I think the idea is to interpret it your own (Maybe personal) way or to just wait for the revelation, but it can lead to all kinds of potential guesses and kind of makes me feel like I missed stuff.
Really aesthetically pleasing design for a chess game in both visuals and sounds!
*Spoilers*
I think some boards are a bit unbalanced depending on whether or not you go first due to zugzwang potential. But I could be wrong as I'm not some pro. There also doesn't seem to be much difference between CPU difficulties as games seem to play out similarly if you make the same moves. But yet it's kinda fun overall anyway. Maybe because games aren't too long so you can experiment a bunch without worry of a lot of effort lost. Sort of like something to play around in and just zen.
Stalemate not existing didn't make sense to me given the tightness of the boards and how many setups can lead to everything being stuck, until I unlocked and tried the other play mode types. Then it made sense because even just king VS king could end up coming down to luck of the draw since they can be next to each other waiting for a winning move to come up. There's also no threefold repetition which also is likely due to the extra modes. But you can end up getting into basically infinite loops until you purposefully move your king where it can be taken to just try again. I mean if a game would otherwise be a infinite draw due to piece shuffling, you may as well just chalk it up to a draw in your mind and throw the game to move on, lol! "Sometimes" in such scenarios you can win by trading down to break out of lock and waiting for the AI to flub, but it's seemingly random if/when it happens and sort of rare. So it'll be up to the player to try and see if it'll work out or not.
A hilarious game that is remarkably well thought out! Like, your hacks are indeed overpowered...
*Spoilers*
...at first. Then things start taking turns and it becomes more and more balanced.Even the nuke, which is preposterously powerful, only usually can chip off around half the queens in the final battle because the opponent's king gets in the way. So it turns into quite a interesting battle of unique rule additions that you need to utilize to the fullest.
The gameplay is relaxing which works out well for the idea, though it gets pretty grindy with how many flowers you need to grow to reach the next part of the story getting progressively more lengthy as the flowers take longer to grow (Starts' reasonable, but ends at 50 of each?). So I think it could be re-balanced pacing-wise. I also noticed that money from customers is more sparse when you are growing something. Which is odd since that leads to odd lengthy time spans of inactivity.
But the story is fantastic! I was always wondering what would happen next with all of the characters and that kept me going. While a lot of the ires that took place were fantasy-based, it was the symbolism of what they represented that hit home. They all had some sort of relatable trait or scenario that you could empathize with and parts got me a bit teary-eyed. There was also a bunch of good advice sprinkled throughout to boot.
Very cute game of vampire world and relationship building! Gakuto for instance warming up as you go was really touching. Plus building trust for the donation part. (Or not if you pick that of course. :P) That also sounded like what I heard regarding actually donating blood so it should do a good job telling others what they will experience. Well, besides the vampire bite part of course, lol! Though I have also heard there's something similar where they numb the area before a stick. But I haven't experienced the process myself because I have always been too nervous (I am very weak to pain plus have anxiety) to try donating.
Not too many paths to take through it though. Whether you get perfect scores or not doesn't alter the dialog much for instance. (But will reorder or skip the re-quiz of course)
This is way more thought out and funny than I expected despite first impressions, lol! Couple of weird hiccups like not being able to search some objects if too close and getting booted to the title screen if you pick a seemingly invisible answer, but even that it minor as it still seems to remember where you left off despite hitting new game.
I got puzzled by that myself when I was finally beginning to sort the contents of that huge bundle in collections recently and...
I found this post:
https://itch.io/post/5507338/view-in-topic
...Mentioning:
https://lampysprites.itch.io/egg
...Which is deleted and corresponds with the deleted link you get in the bundle:
https://lampysprites.itch.io/deleted-1
That doesn't help too much because I don't know what "egg" is either, lol! Based on what lampy makes though, it may be some egg sprites, blender egg or a game based around an egg.
Ah I see! Yeah, that was my thing where I was looking all around for something, then couldn't tell where I was looking at, lol! So I did slow spins while looking up and down until I re-found it. But keeping the eyes on the horizon would eliminate that since you wouldn't be able to lose sight of the portal for long. Although that may eliminate the idea of it being somewhat disorienting. In hindsight, I probably should've picked up on that and was careful how I looked, but was tired at the time. So maybe it was more me.
Came for the Fennecs.
Found the end of the Feno... Err... Demo.
Joking around aside, when I seen "nothing else happens", I of course figured something else happened and thus was intrigued, lol! It ended up being surprisingly entertaining with the atmosphere changes and the dialog. It's also set up pretty neat in that you can't accidentally come across the secret rooms in the museum without first getting the dialog that unlocks them. So one couldn't just check walls and find the end of the demo by mistake without experiencing the rest.
One hiccup is it's a little easy to lose where you are in the dark space if you first and try to explore thinking there's a solution before trying to exit and finding a pink thing appeared with new dialog. I did find my way back to the portal with some flailing, but I guess if you don't, you can just restart as at that point you are not far in.