itch.io

This was less a game and more an interactive story, you do make 1 decision and this results in a different epilogue but the experience is primarily that of just sitting and meditating on the character’s monologue and the mood and feeling of driving down a highway at night alone.

You can tell it’s a fantasy because it’s set in LA, but there’s no traffic =)

Seriously though, this game is a prime example of “aim low and hit”. You can’t do much in it, but that means that everything you can do is satisfying and works (with one exception, more on that later). The dialogue is fully voiced, items in the car have clear, useful highlights, and the audio is clear and consistent.

The highway features some oncoming cars and a good semblance of the feeling of driving under American overhead freeway lighting. It does not feature vehicles traveling in your direction, and so there is no reason to control the car prior to the highway exit you can choose to take.

In fact, if you do control the car, you will probably regret it. Personally I did, as it’s a distraction from the good parts of the game (the monologue and scenery) and putting it back on autopilot proved a challenge. If this entry lives beyond the jam, I’d consider either taking driving controls away or adding a reason to use them, either/or.

Your enjoyment of this one will come down to how much you relate to the story being told and the mood; I felt it was a really impressively polished effort for a weeklong jam!

I had a ton of fun with this one. In my opinion this jam entry is exactly how a puzzle game should be: there are few mechanics, but you need to be considering all of them to win.

The thematic tie is obvious and strong in the gameplay; you will find yourself, by the last room, having internalized thinking “How should I die?”, not “How should I survive?”

The li’l guys are cute (although the worm gave me flashbacks to X-Com Apocalypse) and the practice of providing the (very few) instructions needed on the margins of the puzzle worked really well.

Puzzles were tight and the game did not overstay its welcome - once you understand a mechanic you won’t be asked to do it by rote again.

I’d love to be more critical but I really think this one was very good; my one gripe is that the projectiles used by the turrets don’t always look exactly how they act, and that got me killed a couple of times.

Thanks for the game!

This entry’s bursting with creativity, there’s a lot going on! Very impressive depth for a small team in a small time.

First of all it is hilarious that Noah’s sons follow him around everywhere in Stage 1 in a line, I dunno why but that cracked me up, imagine childhood actually being that way!

There is a lot to figure out about how to capture animals. There’s a crafting system and each animal requires crafting a different contrivance to capture it. Since you’re on a timer, this means your first time out you probably won’t get all the animals.

I appreciate that the game lets you “win” no matter what - even with a score of 0 - but I’d have liked to be able to repeat Stage 1 after doing badly, so as to get a little practice in.

It is very simple fun to just get a bull mad at you and then laugh as you are yote 3 screens away. I suspect the pushback is to compensate for the fact that the animals are not genuinely dangerous; I don’t know if it works as intended but I do know I had a great time, please never fix this!

Stage 2 was a good idea, but I enjoyed Stage 1 more, and not just because the music was a bop. In Stage 2, I could not fish, so I was losing animals? at the maximum rate - but I didn’t have any animals, so I figured maybe we were cannibalizing the sons from earlier. Even this motivatingly macabre consequence of failure did not inspire in me the genius of how to fish.

Ultimately the fun of this one is in seeing how fast you can craft enough stuff to nab the animals in Stage 1. I think easy big improvements would be the ability to turn the music off and the option to replay a stage you’ve just completed.

Great work; thanks for the game!

Things you won’t experience unless you try this quirky, extremely surreal entry: the feeling of wondering, “Is that me saying ‘What the shit is that?’ about it, or is that it saying ‘What the shit is that?’ about me?”

Wow, this submission wins "best skybox" among all the games I've played so far!

In general it's always impressive when a game jam entry seems to have achieved a good basic loop, and this one has.  It's spoopy.  You can lose, you can win, you know what you have to do for each, etc.  A lot to do in a few days!

The game's overall concept was very ambitious and only partially realized, meaning there's some untapped potential left if development is continued after the jam.  Having a monster that employs hearing+sight is a fun trope of horror games, but it works because of the presence of certain other design choices like hiding places - in this game, line-of-sight-blocking terrain comes in small islands, so there's nowhere to meaningfully hide and you can afford to treat the creature as if it only has one sense.

The extreme darkness of the game *certainly* served its atmosphere (and enhanced that awesome skybox), but how little the flashlight affected it meant that the whole "creature sees flashlight" mechanic was of no importance to my play, I just left it off.  It also resulted in a sort of 'meta' way of playing in my personal case; rather than reasoning about where a bell might be on the map and looking for one, I started randomly wandering looking around for 2 white pixels horizontally aligned amid black.

Both of these issues could be solved by utilizing a brighter, smaller play area.  Players could see it well enough to learn it, and would need to because the creature would be "around" them much more of the time.  Meanwhile, with similar clutter in a smaller space, hiding becomes more viable.

Some of the real gems of this submission are in the details.  The menu is super good and everything's laid out clearly.  There are lots of options, and even instructions.  It's a short game, so you owe yourself giving this one a try!

(RIP Skye)

I sure would like to give this one six stars for graphics, as I really found it exceptional how moody an atmosphere the lighting and asset choice create.  Sharp, low-poly models combined with modern fashions and harsh nightclub lighting gave me a feel that was way higher than the budget of the title would suggest, and had real VtM: Bloodlines vibes, if you enjoyed that title.  It also had some Else Heart.Break(); to it, unless I miss my guess.

I had some trouble talking to characters, as it was not always obvious where I needed to face to engage the text prompt, or whom I'd be able to talk to vs. whom I couldn't.  It wasn't too much of an inhibition, as it's far from the only game (even in this jam! I've had that problem with.

One thing that deserves especial callout is the quality of the dialogue presentation.  Despite the audio being relentless, the visuals are engaging, obvious, and technically well-implemented - it's hard to get into a state in which the text you're meant to be experiencing is not visible or obvious to you, and that's a lot to say for an in-scene-text implementation done for a 7-day game!

Overall I was very impressed, thank you for the game!

I'm putting off rating this one because I think I must be missing something - the idea is you grab the bottom of a vine, ADADAD until you're swinging as far as you can in the direction you want to go, release SHIFT, then hit SHIFT again to grab the next one, right?

For some reason there's just no amount of ADADAD I can do to get above an absolute crawl; could absolutely be a skill issue but I can't play enough of the game to rate it.  Any tips?

(So far I can say that the vines being randomized is fire)

This entry was really fun and especially addictive.  It's got that "just one more try" magic.

I don't play a ton of platformers but I found it very funny and entertaining that I could jump off of the air.  The platforms are kept relevant by the fact that jumps off of them work much better; I found that mechanic fun.

I don't think it's particularly on-theme; I cannot tell what's different per-run.  If you switch it to  'Gamer' mode (because there's so little room for error) it becomes very apparent that the platforms and enemies are in the same places every time.  So, endings are not beginnings in any way that they are not in a normal arcade game with levels and one life.

One last thing I'll say is that in game jams, menus often fall by the wayside - there's just not time for them - and so I particularly admire this entry for having easy-to-use, complete menus at start and on pause!

A crushingly lonely game in which you do dishes, pay bills by telephone (I won't miss doing that IRL, but the game makes it comical!), and decide how to respond to your estranged wife via a letter in which you can potentially wax poetic about the World of Warcraft.  Needless to say, this one will make you smile, or at least wince.  Observe: 



I had a good time playing the game; a few things like camera height and FOV/movement speed in such a small gameplay area had me moving around like I was drunk - but probably so is my mans, his wife just left him.

More chores could've extended the playability to further days, but content's the hardest part of a game jam.  I think this submission's a great start, and the repetition of the chores is quite appropriate given our theme.

I don't know much about dating sims, but found it absolutely hilarious that the dialogue for "tell me about yourself, Duncan" just goes right on by at the bottom of the screen while you're trying to survive a bullet hell at the top right that's influencing the relatability of what you say.  I was laughing so hard I probably woke the neighbors up.

When I saw it was a dating sim with minigames, I kinda figured it'd work like the fishing one or the QTEs do - time would pause while you "decided" on your next response by succeeding or failing.  The fact that it didn't remain that way was just so good.  The loop of "mess up the minigame, look to see what hilarious thing you just said, mess up the minigame because you were reading, look to see..." etc. was very enjoyable even though it made me lose.

The only thing I gave this game low marks for was the theme tie - I see it, but it's not strong.

Thanks for the submission, surprising and fun!

Loved the art and music for this one, clearly a labor of love to have produced in only a week.  I loved the vaguely bureaucratic jazziness of the soundtrack.  Appropriate for an infernal magistracy.

I enjoyed learning about the ghosts.  A very inspired choice to include multiple time periods' dead.  I desperately wish there were some consequence to judging them one way vs. another beyond the counts on either side, a "Papers Please"-style process of inferring from the documentation what you ought to do.  I get that that perhaps wasn't the point though!

Boss's dialogue is good and although it is disappointing that your biggest choice results in different end screens vs. an actual difference to your run (I assume they just ran out of time), how closely you hew to boss's rules produces 2 totally distinct sets of dialogue conveying the same information.  This is a high level of investment on the part of the writer, for a game jam piece!

One sore point is that because of text size and mouseover issues I had a tough time actually playing this game, purely technically.  Even using the executable, it became necessary to lower my resolution to read the game's text, which is where most of its action is.  Even with the lower res and the exe, I still had extreme problems keeping a ghost's profile in view using my mouse long enough to read.  Oh well, technical difficulties are expected on a short timeframe.

That's the toughest puzzle by a significant margin in my opinion. I think a lot of folks will probably get stuck there, and it won't be their faults.  It was our intention to provide a little more signposting/instruction in the game generally, but alas time ran out on us and that room remains very "...?"

Thank you so much for your feedback, I'm especially excited to tell Rick someone agrees with me on the quality of his shortcuts!

Bullet hells aren't my genre but I still had a good time; enemy variety seems pretty important to this kind of game and Renatus delivers, with the enemies looking and feeling different and having different roles on their "team" against the player.

All the audio was there, and I enjoyed it; I do wish in an entry with so much of one act so fast (shooting in a bullet hell for example) that there was >1 piece of SFX for it.  pewpewpewpewPEWPEWPEWPEWPEW will be in my dreams tonight.

The core mechanic of "you get *significantly* better after each death, but you have finite lives" is awesome, I love a good 'shoot the moon' mechanic in games and this definitely fits the bill.  You can stay weak but preserve lives, or get risky but be as strong as you want, as fast as you want.  This is a much more fun way to allow a player to choose difficulty for themselves than, say, a menu setting!  However, I could not tell how you were supposed to know how many lives were remaining (except having played before).

This might just be that I'm not used to bullet hells, but I kept trying to get the environmental kitsch to do stuff.  Oh, a green carpet, I wonder what that does vs. a blue one!  Oh, an open chest, I wonder if that's got something in it for me?  Ultimately no, the game is you and the enemies - which is fine, but I wish I'd figured it out sooner!

Overall: easy to pick up and play, not so easy to beat.  That's how it's meant to be IMO!

LOL, this was a fun one.

The design is that of a maze game - walls, pickups, enemies, a goal

The strength of this game isn't in its gameplay design, but in the atmosphere and adherence to theme.  Evolution is a perfect example of endings being a new beginning, and the mouse *does* evolve in some way - she's not strictly an action-RPG character where Number Goes From Down To Up; numbers of deprioritized things also go down

It's obvious that the assets aren't flipped and someone put love and time into everything on the screen.  I found the atmosphere sort of Pikmin-ish - the fact that the predators just crash through the walls of the maze and are enormous really had me scared for my already-doomed mouse.  The deranged principal investigator's notes also added to the general "is this cute or horrifying?" vibe.

Wow, what a jam entry!

There's a lot to like.  Controls are intuitive - "what's this bell for?"  Well, it's the only thing in front of you and you can't move, so... it doesn't take long to figure out that you should try it!  Things like the sell mechanic being added by just plopping a new item onto your table was very fluid.

I really enjoyed interviewing people.  There was more depth than usual to the consequences of my decisions vs. most game jam entries. E.g. you can just *not hire tutorial guy* and completely remove the advice mechanic from the rest of your playthrough.  Very ambitious design!

I found a few softlock states (if you don't hire anyone Day 1, you can't progress but don't lose) and a couple of "your best effort's not good enough" situations (if you roll a bad Knight you can lose the Day 2 battle despite hiring everyone beneficial to your performance in that fight).  I think these sorts of things are to be expected.

Overall the only place I slammed this entry is on theme; technically the writing fits (the king is dead, long live the king) but you don't engage with it in any way during the gameplay.

Thanks for the game!

This game has a great sense of humor; not every game jam game has an intro, but this one has a *funny* intro

Gameplay design is seemingly unambitious on purpose - the game is short fetch quests, the fun is in the writing

I was charmed by the music but could not give 5 stars because no SFX

Enjoyed it!

I've got 0.25 liters of gas
a portrait
no money
a truck
someone's going to the Shadow Realm