Yours is super clever, loved it. Everyone here should check this one out! 

This game was a delight. Very charming visuals and audio (especially the voice acting). Great macabre sense of humour. 100% the sort of thing that I'll be coming back to later to try and get all the endings.

--- SPOILERS BELOW ---

The moment that the rampage started at the end was one of my favourite moments from the jam. Such an awesome surprise to get to rip and tear through the town that I was already familiar with. I did the whole thing with a huge smile on my face. 

All in all, a super impressive entry that clearly has a lot of love poored into it. Great job devs! 

Really cool game and a very clever application of the Speed Run wildcard. Visuals are obviously fantastic and well deserved of all the praise they are getting. 

Not much I can specifically point to in way of recommendations for improvements that haven't already been mentioned, so well done for the inovative game guys! 

Great job with this one guys! This one was actually on my to-play list for a while so I was more than happy to give it a go once I came home from travelling :) 

Great work with this one. Super atmospheric with a cheerful vibe. The art is great and the world feels suitably mysterious with the labyrinth-like level design. 

My main critique would be the jumping controls. I messed around with it for a bit and I think the reason why it doesn't feel quite right is that the player loses its horizontal controls while jumping. Seems like horizontal velocity is only applied when the jump button is pressed (either on the ground or mid-air in a double jump). I think fixing this one thing to allow the player to control the direction of the character mid-air at all times would do wonders for making the game feel more responsive. 

Otherwise though this is a superb entry, and well deserving of a great rating. Well done team :)

Glad that you had fun and that you liked the puzzles!!! I played your game too and throught it was great :) 

Thanks so much for playing and thanks for leaving a review! 

Thank you so much, glad you had some fun :) 

Also, thanks for the feedback, you did indeed encounter a bug (or I guess in this case, an exploit) with HammerMan. The intended solution for getting him out of the desktop is to have him break out of his window, onto the desktop, and then jump on top of the various desktop windows to get him up to the top left corner of the desktop screen, where there's a group of breakable blocks through which he can escape into the main menu. HammerMan is a glitchy little fella in his current state but I'll be fixing him up in the post-jam version.

Thanks so much for the review, I really liked your entry as well so I'm sure it'll go far in the jam! 

Added Screenshots

Added a few screenshots of the game give people a preview of what to expect in the spooky world of the haunted mansion before they play. 

Unfortunately there seems to be a visual glitch going on with the screenshots and you can't see the mansion very well... not sure what's going on there, maybe some other devs might be able to tell me what's happening??

Hey hey here's my game, give it a go if you're up for a puzzle-adventure with a twist ;) 

https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2024/rate/3149163

Thank you so much that's very high praise! 

I'm particularly pleased that you found the puzzles engaging. It was pretty tricky to know if I had made things too hard or too easy. I was able to test-run things a few times with friends playtesting but since it's a puzzle game, you only really get one test-run per person which is challenging 😅

Your game looks super cool, I can't wait to play it! 

Really thought-provoking entry. It feels like reading one of those darker children's story books like The Giving Tree or some of Shel Silverstein's other works. I've always been impressed by the combination of maturity and innocence those books manage to balance, so hats off to you for managing to evoke it so clearly.

I also get a sense that this is a very personal tale for you (the developer), and the emotion definitely comes through the screen. Well done! 

Thanks so much for playing, glad you enjoyed the metaness ;) 

Very cute and genuinely fun platformer with a beautiful art-style and a lovely story :) 

I really get the sense that you've spent some time tuning the platforming controls here and it makes for a genuinely challenging platformer (I can see the Celeste influence here which is definitely a good thing ;) )

In terms of constructive feedback, I have two main things. Firstly, I think the difficulty could scale a little better. The very first jump in the game is actually a pretty precise one, and it felt that I was thrown immediately into the deep end without any real warm-up. The other thing is that I actually think the coyote time is a smidge too forgiving. Perhapse this is by design, but it actually felt like my character had a little air-jump ability. I've always felt that coyote time works at its best when it makes you feel like you did actually press the button right on the edge of the platform (which is of course an illusion). Again though this might be by design. 

Beyond that I loved this game. Definitely one of the highlights of the jam for me :) 

What a great entry. Loved this one. Very cool and engaging vibe, great art, and intriguing mystery. I managed to get all 4 endings and I never felt like the game was spoonfeeding info to me or that it was unnecessarily dificult to figure out how to get the next ending. 

I'm getting a lot of H.P. Lovecraft's 'Color Out of Space' here, as well as some 'Silent Hill', which is a very effective combo. 

I was also shocked to see that this was all done by one person!!! This definitely has the effort of a team-made game to me, so this is a huge achievement for the dev. Well done! 

Really impressive visuals, extremely professionally done. 

The gameplay is simple and the jumping mechanics could use a little tweaking, but the real triumph here is the atmosphere and the environment. There's a moment in this game where you start climbing up what looks like some sort of rope, but when you get to the top you realise it's a doll's hair. To me that was a perfect execution of environmental horror story telling.

I'd love to see this expanded out into a longer experience after the jam. Really great job team! 

A fun open-world platformer with pleasing visuals. I particularly loved the cutscene at the beginning I thought that was very well done. 

A humerous game with a murderous santa. Top notch would play again ;) 

Yours was actually already on my to-play list so I was more than happy to give it a go. The game very much lived up to my expectations and was an absolute joy to experience. I recommend everyone in the jam give this one a go! 

One of the most beautiful games in the jam (for the art, the audio and the story). It all comes together for a super engaging atmosphere that really pulls you into the game. 

Definitely one of the highlights of the jam for me, I'd love to see this one do well when the results come through! 

Sorry it took a while for me to get around to yours! 

Had a lot of fun with this sniper game. It's light on reviews as well so anyone in this thread who hasn't checked it out should check it out!!!

Great concept! Love the limited sniper scope perspective, and the art style is perfect for this sort of game. 

Unfortunately I had the same issue as the previous comment had with the same level. I would've loved to keep playing though since I had a lot of fun with the levels I could play leading up to it! 

Sorry it took so long for me to get to yours, it was great fun thanks for sending it to me!! :) 

Great little dungeon crawler! Really cool to see a game with procedurally generated levels in the jam - I believe this is the only one I've encountered so far. 

The art style is perfect for this sort of game. You've got the bones of something really addictive here with honestly not that many extra things to add. A few different enemy types and some different ways to attack them would be great but other than that this has a huge amount of spark. 

Great job dev! 

This is a visual and auditory feast of a game. Very unique atmosphere in the best way. LOVED the voice acting. I'd absolutely love to come back and play more levels later! 

If I had one bit of feedback, it would be that due to the comicbook-panel non-euclidean geometry of the space, it's almost impossible to figure out where the demon is going to go when it spots you, so I often found myself running directly into it unintentionally, which felt a little unfair. The way that the space works though is a really interesting concept! 

Great job guys :)

Super great and unsettling entry. Truthfully, it took me a little bit to settle into the format of reading through each file, but once I started to get a grasp of the story and what happened I was completely hooked and I believe I read everything in the game (gladly). As a previous comment pointed out, the real-life photos that you've added really add a whole other level of immersion, and the careful choice to only add music at certain points in the game was really effective to the point where my heart was genuinely racing in fear at the ending and I was scared to keep looking at the screen. 

--- SPOILERS BELOW ---

I have my own theories as to exactly what went down at that facility, but I actually really appreciate that you left a lot up to interpretation. Feels like I'm a character in an SCP that is still part of this ongoing freaky story. 

If you do end up expanding this, I think a great addition would be a little bit more user-interactivity. I think a small amount of this would go a long way. There's already a code that we have to obtain to access the admin files, so why not have the user input the code themselves? That being said, the biggest strength of this game is its real-life-feeling immersion, so I'd recommend making sure to preserve that above all else. 

Really great job guys! 

Thanks for playing and well done finding the sapphire! It's a huge achievement as it's very well hidden. 

And yeah, no idea about the red square character. None of the characters in the mansion match that description so it's very confusing... must it's some weird bug that people are encountering idk. Could be related to an unused feature that I intended on adding but ultimately decided wasn't worth including in the final product...

Glad you enjoyed, thanks for giving it a go :) 

Thanks for reporting the bug as well. We'll chock that under the "HammerMan is generally a bit buggy" bug. I'll be tidying up his code a lot in the post-jam version so I'll be sure to include this as well!

Thanks for sending it through :) Great moody entry. Loved the artwork and the story :)

Really great entry :) very intriguing atmosphere. You've managed to achieve a specific dark medieval fantasy vibe here that's really quite effective. 

The thing that stood out to me the most was the pick-pocket minigame. I think that one in particular has the bones of something truly great with a bit of tweaking and some extra mechanics. Getting through it required a surprising amount of skill and understanding of the mechanics, even though it seems like a very basic concept from the outside. I think it could be a game in itself if you spent some time on it, and it would work with mobile too because you just need to drag your mouse around (although reading through the comments, sounds like you'd maybe have to dial back the difficulty a smidge ;) )

I also got the sense that there's more to this world than what we get to see in the game so I'd love to see it expanded! 

Also, I mentioned this in another comment reply, but really bizarrely, I've never actually played "There is No Game". I looked it up after they mentioned it and I definitely recognised it as a game that I must have watched a letsplay of back in the day. It's 100% a core piece of inspiration for my game, but the inspiration seems to have occurred entirely within my subconscious 😂 I'm definitely going to be playing it over Christmas though :)

Glad you enjoyed, thanks so much for playing! 

Yeah HammerMan is definitely a buggy little guy at the moment. I ended up implementing that part of the game pretty late in development and I think it shows 😂 In the post-jam version I'll be working on fixing him (and the rest of the desktop) a lot more and tightening up the environment interactions. I'll also be improving the actual HammerMan.exe game since the controls could definitely be improved. Should make it a bit more fun and less frustrating to play. 

If anyone else has trouble with HammerMan glitching off the screen: Closing the HammerMan.exe window and reopening it should reset him, although you'll have to play through his game again to get him back outside of the game window sorry ;)

Thanks for sending your game! I couldn't seem to figure out how to play yours unfortunately. I've left a comment explaining on the submission page. Feel free to let me know what I'm doing wrong and I'd be happy to come back and try it again! 

Unfortunately any time I tried to play this, it would just cut to a scene with my character and a police officer that I can't interact with, and all I can do is move back and forth on the screen. Seems like there's more to this game that I couldn't figure out how to get to? 

I used the 'barzil' cheat code and it gave me access to some other cheat codes that could skip to later moments in the game, but it didn't seem possible for me to get there organically? 

Maybe i've missed something obvious. Sorry if that's the case! 

Cool game, lots of ideas coming together for an interesting concept and vibe. The battle controls were hard to figure out at first (even with the tutorial) but once I got the hang of it it was pretty fun :) 

Well done! 

Thank you so much! Thrilled that you had a good time :) 

The feedback is much appreciated. The letter hunting was definitely a bit of a conceptual shortcut for me to be able to easily compartmentalise each individual puzzle during development. For the post-jam version, I think I'll be adding a few more puzzles that'll reuse the existing items in different ways, which will hopefully make it feel a bit more satisfying. Particularly, I had a lot more plans for the final "boss fight" that would get you to think outside of the box to use all the different tools you've acquired in the game so far to defeat HELP BOT. 

Anyway glad that you had a bit of fun. Your game is already on my list of ones to play so I'm looking forward to checking it out! :) 

A wonderful entry. Very peaceful, I'd definitely come back to play this one again and find the chocolate pallette ;) 

I think I agree with the previous comment about the cooldown mechanic. I think you do still need it in order to reward well-thoughtout platforming, but it would be nice if the jumps came back a little bit quicker when you're on the ground. That's definitely a very minor gripe though. I loved this one. 

Great game guys!! Yours is chock full of content especially for a game-jam game! Really impressive stuff :) 

Great game!!! It's very impressive how much content you were able to fit into this in such a short development time. Very cute art-style and the audio choices were great as well. 

Was great fun managing to get to the end and [SPOILERS] defeat that pesky armadillo >:)

If I could change one thing, it would be to have the character be able to push things a lot faster, as many of the puzzles rely on pushing mechanics, which can sometimes feel a bit tedious with the current push speed. 

Great job team!

What a pull!! Yeah I loved those games. I literally played "This is the Only Level" again for the first time in years while I was making this one

Thanks for playing! Truthfully, the music selection happened only a few hours before submission while I was very sleep deprived so I'm glad it worked out 😂 

Thanks! Glad you had a bit of fun :)