itch.io

Gameplay is well-crafted. Puzzles are intuitive. Music and sounds are fitting.

A well-rounded entry for the jam.

I ended up emulating the windows version, but I do now have that installed from a different game jam game.

I got thrown off track because I was effortlessly able to uncompress it with XArchiver. Whoops.

I'm not sure how to describe this. I feel shaken by this game in a way standard horror doesn't really do. Perhaps it's that it finds horror in the ordinary and mundane, but improbable. The sort of thing that can just happen, with no rhyme or reason.

The storytelling here is top notch. The visuals stellar. Sound and music are used deftly to add to the tension, the dread.

My heart is still beating fast several minutes after playing this.

Neat little puzzle platformer. Didn't get super far, but it seemed mechanically sound once I figured out how the controls worked.

Was it an intentional choice for the spikes to look like candy corn? If so, a nice touch, yet weirdly disarming. They look so harmless, even when they're placed like you'd expect spikes in a platformer.

Well crafted all around. The place is labyrinthine, but distinct enough that can know where you are with enough familiarity.
In hunted mode, it seemed like the reaper was a lot less aggressive early on, so the ratcheting difficulty (assuming it wasn't random chance) adds to the tension well.
The controls are a little sluggish, but I can only assume that's precisely so you can't just run past the reaper easily. It's done well enough that it feels fitting for the game, and adds to the tension.

The cats are a good way to spook people in Hunted mode, too. That flash of movement of a cat running around as you round a corner is a nice touch.

Hunter mode's online leaderboard felt a bit un-GameBoy-y, but it's basically a speed challenge as it is anyway, so I know why it was done.

Couldn't get far enough for aiming the chain to be useful, but I appreciate that the control scheme here captures diagonals.

Very Castlevania-inspired, and a solid game at that.

As far as I played, the enemy monsters seemed too slow to be of any danger to me.

I also seem to have snowballed much faster than the enemies, so I think the pacing could use some work. I opened a new tab to rate and comment on this and it seems none of the monsters have reached me. I haven't collected souls or even moved in minutes, and they still haven't been able to make it through my summons.

But, seeing as it's essentially a Vampire Survivors or Brotato abstract (I'd argue closer to Brotato with the enclosed space), there's definitely ways to make this work. I've seen a couple video essays on the psychology of Vampire Survivors and what makes it fun, so that could be something to look at for ways to improve upon this.

Controls are very slippery, making it difficult to platform.
I couldn't make it off the first screen, so it's hard to tell things like spookiness. And hard to have much opinion on things outside the platforming controls at the start. I think there's potential here with tighter controls and (as datagoblin mentioned) input buffering and coyote time.

Interesting concept with solid execution. After slipping up thinking the game glitched out (and then reading the project page telling me that's the game start), I managed to successfully get lost in the labyrinth.
This game uses the absence of backing music to great effect, increasing the tenseness of the feeling by avoiding music..
Though I think it might've triggered my motion sickness.

Despite the slow swing speed, I found the bat to be better than the gun.

Gameplay worked fairly well, though the repeatable control tutorials were too easy to accidentally retrigger. Found some animation glitches, such as going into a wall slide from standing on the elevator as it descended. But the game played fairly well in spite of these. Movement was on the fast side, but controllable. Upgrades gave a very Metroidvania progression pattern.

In short, a good little game.

Character art is great. Would hug dragon fren.

I see someone commented on the sounds, but I didn't get any when using the browser version. Unsure if I'm getting tricked or if I encountered technical difficulty.

I was just going along, figuring out how the game worked, noting the janky pickup mechanics, the emotionally distant parent, and such.
Then that cat. Geez. Terrifying. Really caught me off guard.

Art and soundtrack were great, though I found the way the camera only panned when you moved to the edge kinda annoying, and would've preferred some lead space on the camera panning to see in the direction the ghost is going.
In all, a good blend of spooky and silly.

Managed to get an enemy stuck in the ground by jumping on them lol.
But good work all around. The sounds are pleasant, the music unobtrusive. Controls are smooth.

The platforming section reminded me of Commander Keen games from the DOS era. The stiffness of the jump animation reminded me of Commander Keen 1-3 even, and the level design gave Commander Keen 4 vibes.
The jumps were small (at least with the werewolf), but the levels were designed so that larger jumps weren't necessary. There seemed to be areas accessible with specific characters, and a myriad of options for defeating enemies.

Quite well-rounded for 10 days of effort.

Rocks 'n' Diamonds, which itself was a reconstruction of some older games (Emerald Mine and a couple others).

The Linux/Mac version seems to have messy enough external dependencies that simply running the game (I assume main.lua) is a bit of effort.

Figuring out the correct version of lua to install, for one, is so far an exercise in trial and error. My distro provides packages for lua 5.1 through 5.4, and I'm just kinda guessing which one will work at this point. Found 5.1 is too old (::continue:: is 5.2 and up), and the 'peachy' package is not found on the others.

I see a folder for peachy in the provided files, but my lua is looking for peachy.lua at the top level instead of as a folder with its own files.

"Surely there is something edible after 40 years" for the fridge sent me.

There's some Linux game I remember growing up playing that is like this. I saw the first map ad knew exactly the type of game this is. Took me back.

The heart-eyes frame was supposed to be when they get gold, although without the context of the game that is absolutely not clear.

Gameplay is very buggy. Collision boxes kept misaligning to the point I'd clip into walls and through doors, the game would occasionally fail to process a full fear meter, letting me wander with impunity, Fullscreening the app.makes the key indicator draw outside the intended game window, all the way in the bottom right.

Without the bugs this game seems like it would be genuinely difficult. Instead you just wait for it to glitch out and go solve the level.

The art is great, the music is great, the use of a fear meter instead of a health bar is clever. The bugs make it hard to play as intended, though.

I keep trying to wall jump lol

Aesthetics very much feel like GB/GBC Legend of Zelda. Gameplay feels in the vein of Angband. Very polished for 10 days of effort.

Minor nitpick: I was under the impression the GameBoy lacked a triangle wave channel for its sound system. Musically this sounded more NES than GameBoy to me as a result. Sounded great regardless, though. (Edit nevermind I'm pretty sure that's the pulse instrument and I misidentified it)

Hmm.... that font is definitely anti-aliased, and the border frame for the text is unscaled for the full 640x576 viewport you used.

The sprites are upscaled by a factor of three, which, if I'm mathing correctly, means an unscaled screen size of 213.3x192.

I may have had no idea where I was going, but at least I was a delicious snack for the big bat friendo!

Hmmm.... the use of Alt as a control seems to introduce a lot of friction with my Window Manager. I get stuck going a direction even after letting off all the controls. I've seen this happen trying to play DOS games using DOSBox when I haven't rebound Alt, too, so it's definitely something that happens consistently to me.

Unsure if this is a problem for other people (using XFCE in Linux is probably relevant here), or if it's just my untypical setup.

(Found a workaround -- it seems z also works as an interact button)