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This was cool! I liked the doldrum of data entry paired with going insane. I also appreciated that I had a text box to respond to the boss--even if nothing I wrote down mattered, I liked having that outlet, lol.

Cool idea, thanks for your efforts!

Interesting idea, being forced into a bloodsport, but also having to appease a bunch of rabid viewers. Feels very inspired.

Would be interested in trying out a full version!

This game was stellar, and of particular note are all the options and settings. I really appreciate the attention to detail for accessibility here. The story was well told, and there were plenty of creepy moments that kept me engaged. I enjoyed the puzzles a lot.

Great job!

This was great. I like how the arms of the robot feel like the arms of a person looming over you. I definitely didn't know a few of these questions, so other than a fun game experience I can walk away with a bit more knowledge. I liked the ambience the most.

Great work!

I really enjoyed this, even if it was simple. Nothing like having divided attention and the threat of death to amp up the difficulty on an old favorite. This was done very well :]

This was nice! I liked the pixel art a lot, and the comments about the beds and the moved dead body were properly unsettling. Great work!

This was nice to play. Short and sweet. I found the little alien guy endearing, and I like how hit antennae look like the antennae of an old TV. I could see this being polished into a full game people would enjoy :]

This was delightful! I liked the ambience and the assets, it really painted a vivid picture of what this could turn into. The idea of using a TV screen for a ritual instead of a painted mirror is also a cool story idea--makes me think about what other modern versions of old rituals I could envision, and how that translation might lead to unintended consequences.

You should be proud of what you made, especially given the context of the programming background. Feel free to reach out for help next game-jam, assuming you didn't already, I'm sure there'd be people willing to help fill in technical gaps if this is the sort of stuff you're pulling together!

Man, this one really got to me. Once the sounds started to repeat the exact same way I started to get used to them  but I REALLY didn't wanna go looking around that house because of them. Excellent use of obscuring walls, and the mechanic of having to go out to find more tapes forced me to go out into the darkness.

For your first time taking on 3D in godot, I think you did a stellar job, particularly with the audio. Great work!

This was a lot of fun, and the artstyle worked really well for me. You've adapted sokoban very well, the mechanics were very interesting! I have no idea where there could be secrets, but regardless, I'd love to play more stuff like this :]

The ending part where the window goes berserk is the best part, surprised I haven't seen that done more often.

Story was simple but effective. I didn't really get a sense of space as the story went on, but I felt engaged.

Nice work!

The music does a whole lot of good for this game, I was tense throughout the whole thing collecting pieces, and my hair stood on end when the demon actually did appear. Great stuff!

Neat! Being forced into an alternate world where there are hostile giants, creepy stuff. I liked the music choice when being chased. It took me a while to figure out that clicking allowed me to grab edges to climb up, but otherwise I managed to avoid getting stuck for the most part.

I also had the inverse controls thing happen after dying at the room with all the giants in front of the large white screen and then couldn't figure out how to progress, assuming that wasn't the ending. decent game tho!

Very interesting, the narrative really settles you in to the guy's daily routine. I liked the occasional horror elements of people reacting in ways you wouldn't expect, like your co-worker that eats the salad from the place they raised awareness about being hypocritical, and your mom mentioning how you don't pick up even if you pick up the phone every day.

I assumed the endings were tied to whether you leaned into your depression and doldrum or tried to open up with others more, or chose comfortable options versus disruptive ones, and I only ever hit ending 2 out of 3. I'm not sure if the other endings just weren't implemented, or there's something I'm missing. I assume it's something about whether you lean into the depression or not, and if that's the case and these other endings exist then I assume you have to choose options perfectly, and I would hope it wouldn't be quite so hard to do that.

Regardless, this was nice! I don't know that walking around the apartment added much to my enjoyment but I can see the ambition there.

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed my funky dude :]

Thanks Ryan! I learned a lot from this game jam, already excited for the next one :]

That was neat! I liked the twist that the entity that reaches out to you, chides you for being selfish and rotten, becomes sympathetic. I'm assuming it's the same homeless person that the video store owner kicked out was the one that made the video. Seemed like they just wanted to not feel alone anymore, and felt like they had to lash out and be threatening for anyone to give them the time of day.

I like horror games like this one, and I wish more games were like it. Thanks for being in this game jam!

This game was truly excellent, so glad I got to it before the voting period ended. The aesthetic was great, the game mechanics of testing people was fun to engage with, the creepiness of the people interviewed and the things to look for was cool, paired with having to enter the room  of the person you're interviewing which could end up being a threat. I even was sold on the guy from the announcer box--sometimes people do the 'guy who doesn't want to be there giving you the onboarding' thing and it just comes off as annoying or awkward, but this was done really well.

It even ended with a chase sequence. I knew that circuitous path at the start had to be there for a reason!

I think the crystal was hard to read, like I think it was showing me some people had extra shadows, because for one person it didn't have nearly the same trouble hitting the wall and floor around the person, but I couldn't really parse it. Also there were like 6 different things you could categorize someone as, but the only direction I got for identifying any of them was the pulse jockey's, because of the abnormal heartbeat. I don't think it's that big of a deal, but I could see that being adjusted to good effect.

Excellent work, you have much to be proud of!

This was nice! I admit I actually thought the very first minigame thing where you shot the elves might have been the whole game--that happens sometimes. Was pleasantly surprised that there was way more :]

If there's any criticism I have it's that the messages are slow enough that I would sometimes press space too early, not realizing that there was more about to be shown to me. My first go through I didn't know how to resupply the lamp with oil, so I had to restart the game to re-get the tutorial. Otherwise, having to manage both oil and ammunition is a neat idea, though I didn't really know how many bullets I had in reserve, just how much I had in my gun.

That I had to reload slowly was a nice way to add tension. I don't think any of the health pickups actually increased my health, but I was able to get to the end.

A decent game, and a good showing for a game jam. Thanks for your hard work!

The only part I sorta struggled with was knowing where to click when the girl was nearby to do the recording, and then knowing I needed to drag the red dot around. Otherwise, really neat mechanic.

An exceptional showing. I liked how the banality of the tech store kept butting up against the violence of the demon TV. Was fun to run away from the demon, and the voicelines were all pretty funny. Great work!

This was neat! An aesthetic I don't see a whole lot of, a combination of magic and tech, which I find a particularly interesting combination. A great effort for this jam, thanks for all your hard work!

This was nice, a proper puzzle horror game.

That was pretty effective! I liked the viewpoint of being outside the monitor, the voice was really spooky and the images were properly unsettling. Great work!

This was great. I liked the usage of changing channels to change which mummy was targeted. Very atmospheric, calming even.

This was really nice! I really like games like this, where you're in a first person perspective and exploring a vast impossibly huge space, really gets the sense of awe.

I think it's an unpopular opinion but I enjoyed the walking and jumping being very abrupt and thudding, it reminded me of E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy, or of being some sort of space marine, especially with the thuds when landing from a high height.

I think the wandering surveillance bot things work really well in this sort of large and imposing architecture. Like, it's not enough that the space you're in is impossibly high, but it's covered by these automatons, with who knows what priorities. The bridge where you walk above one that passes underby was a special moment.

Great stuff, I hope to make something like this some time.

This was neat, and I'm sure it was a great learning experience.

The soviet aesthetic allowed for some striking visuals, but I don't know that I was particularly horrified by the concept--maybe if I was more scared of communism.

Some of these games I've never actually played, but I have heard about and seen a little of before, so it was actually pretty enjoyable trying to guess them (dragon quest in particular--it was only once I saw the Slimy that it cinched for me).

This game obviously had a lot of time and effort put into it, and I ended up spending an hour trying to beat this game, so you get the full wall of text. You're welcome, but also, I'm sorry.

I try really hard to not review a game until I've beaten it but I'm sorry, the 'rye' hint is too vague. First I thought maybe it was talking about a flour plant explosion since those can happen, but after 5-10 minutes of not finding anything particularly notable I stumbled upon 'killer in the rye', which is a reference to ergotism, or St. Anthony's fire. This I thought must be it, because it links the given hint, death by rye, to something with 'fire' in the name, like how you get threatened with fire in that room. However, I could not determine any particular year that referenced St. Anthony's fire.

• 0857 is potentially the first ever reference to ergotism
• 0994 is when thousands of people in France died of it
• The order of hospitallers of St Anthony was established in 1100, and it's from here that we get the connection to the affliction being called St. Anthony's Fire
• There was an outbreak in Paris in 1129
• There were particularly notable outbreaks during The Great Famine, 1315-1317
• in 1596 a german physician, Wendelin Thelius, connected the ergot fungus to rye
• in 1582, a german physician, Adam Loncier, uses ergot to help with pregnant women's labor
• the blight was called cockspur, and a connection between ergotized rye and bread poisoning was stated in a letter to the French royal academy of sciences in 1676
• The affliction was first called 'ergotism' in 1853

Just to try and cover my bases, I literally checked every value from 1800 to 1927, then all the values from 1100 to 1200, then all the values from 1100 to 1200. Nothing has worked, so either I chased down the wrong rabbit hole or there's something year I missed.

What made this worse is that, after every 5th attempt or so on that room, the floor will no longer function: After a death, you'll reload in the room but then fall into the abyss. There's no resetting manually to a checkpoint or anything, the only this that can be done is re-opening the game.

This results in re-watching the intro, which after 5 times I can tell you is maybe just a tad too long. I'm not sure why the pauses between captioned bits between the detective and the doctor are quite so long, I feel like they could have been cut to make that ordeal much more manageable.

Since we're here as developers, I guess I'll give my two cents on puzzle designs like this. First a prelude: I've heard interesting takes on accessibility in games specifically around language: Usually we consider a game accessible if it's translated into multiple languages, but another take I saw was the idea of removing language altogether. If you didn't have language to get across an idea, how else would you convey that instruction to the player? Of course not every game can obtain something like this, and it's not like such games are inherently better, but it prompts an interesting consideration, a framing or a lens to approach one's game from an accessibility perspective.

With that said, I feel like using riddle that are very UK centric is going in the opposite direction, as far as accessibility goes (this in relation to the whitechapel murders and, I can only hope to assume (see challenges above) the st anthony's fire riddle). In this case it's not a language barrier, but a cultural one. There's nothing wrong with making a less accessible game--I have enjoyed Bennet Foddy's Getting Over It and part of the ethos of that game is that it's excessively brutal and difficult and unforgiving. But, whereas in that game that sort of difficulty is a core part of the experience, I'm not sure what exactly this game is buying from being similarly obscure. Fond feelings from other fellow UK people, I suppose, but I wonder how valuable that sort of thing really is for a game, I wouldn't be able to judge.

Getting more to the point, my only real critique isn't anything with the UK-ness of the game, but with the conceit of the riddles in the first place. You've said in replies and on the game page (and the villain taunts you about it in game) that the intent is to get the player to use resources outside of the game, chatGPT or google or something, to help find the answers, and I'm not sure why that was a priority or what that adds to the game. Or put another way, I'm not sure what the core message of the game is, because the creative decisions go all over the place.

Like, one angle on this is that the character we play as is some test subject: A mad scientist wants to see what it's like when someone records their perspective from literally their point of view, from within their skull. The villain alludes maybe to seeing from someone else's perspective, so maybe the idea is also that video to be recorded isn't meant for the main character to review, but for someone else to view. So the theme is about perspective: how we value our own, the extent to how much we might value it, and what it might be like to literally view someone else's perspective. Also is allows for the creepy imagery of having a camera grafted into one's head, very on point.

But then the villain asks you to solve riddles. I think the riddles are less the point and maybe, it's about recording yourself struggling and panicking? So that whoever watches the recording gets to relive the panic? but then that could be done in so many ways. Being forced to look someone in the eye as you sacrifice them to save yourself, that's something that could have impact and leans more into the Saw inspiration. Having to bodily harm yourself, and having that recorded from your perspective, would add some amount of terror for whoever is watching--I feel like Resident Evil 7 and Village did that pretty good, with Ethan having to heal himself from some horiffic injuries. These are just some other ideas--I recognize that these are probably harder to implement than some voice lines and keypad puzzles, so I'm not even that bothered by these puzzles existing as they are. But if this game is something that's going to see some continued development, and it feels like it very well might (and that effort would be justified, there's lots of good stuff here), I feel like the mechanical gameplay conceit of answering riddles truly should be reconsidered, or at least adjusted.

I'm sorry I couldn't complete your game. I do like the parts I liked about it very much--the voicework, the presentation, these are clearly very well done.

The intro was fun, and the gameplay easy enough once I knew what to do (I'm glad I went to the game page for the instructions).

I don't know much about the show but I think aliens works as a scary thing in MLP.

I don't really have much to contribute that others haven't already mentioned, except that I really like games like this where you kinda just explore a space. Specifically picking up stuff, even though it wasn't a mechanic or whatever, it helped me feel more like I was in the space.

The table and fridge notes feel a little odd to both be placed there, both notes for the player but wildly different in tone, but I get that that's a conceit of this being a game jam thing--sometimes stuff is incomplete!

I'd enjoy seeing more of this :]

Effective at creating tension. The window for predicting whether you need to be on the left or the right is so small, especially as it appears to speed up, that you as the player get more and more focused on the game. And its when your focus is at its highest, when you've made it the farthest in the game, that it's abruptly disrupted with the jump scare. In a phrase, this game used good control over the players attention to elevate the scare.

Impressive you got this done in just a few hours. Good work!

I liked the narrative, or you being the only person left after a screen haunting because you happen to not have a screen, definitely makes one feel alone in the world kind of thing.

I could see this idea developed further, like creating safe spots for yourself by turning on bright lights (maybe the first part of the game you wouldn't even have a flashlight, that'd be pretty gripping).

Decent execution. Thanks for your efforts

Neat experience. I had a little narrative whiplash when it changed from the guy being the last person on the world wanting to escape, to then there being a 4th wall break with the ghost, but it def kept me guessing.

This was good! The heartbeat as a timer was a nice choice, and limiting the experience to 30 seconds probably made it easier to fit into the timeframe of the. If there was anything to critique it's that the endings are pretty abrupt and could be scarier maybe, but they're totally serviceable!

A great submission to game jam. You should be proud!

This was nice! The story was clear (which is harder to do right than people give credit), and the interactions were clear and easy (also something that's harder to do than one would think). I know creating that many art pieces for animations can take a while to pull together, so I respect what's here. Would have liked to see more!

Wow, this game was excellent! I have loads to learn from this.

The constant threat of the dad showing up, paired with not knowing what was going to come next on the TV, kept things constantly tense. The custom pixel artwork and the pixelated old footage fit really well with each other. The use of red to make striking visuals against the blacks and whites was a good idea. Gating progress around finding a particular clickable channel competes for the focus, again keeping the tension higher. The controls were simple and functioned well. When I got all of the hints it took me a second to uncover the ending, and it was chilling!

You have plenty to be proud of, thanks for all your hard work!

This was nice! Good concept, executed well.

I do think Mac laid things on a little thick. Maybe if  the kitchen argument  didn't state outright the twist it would have landed a little better with me.

The art was nice, particularly with the screen effects. I also like the concept of seeing something in the static, spooky.

Good job!

A fun little game, not too long so when I died it didn't bug me at all. The art was nice for what it was, I think it'd be nicer if the game was zoomed in more so that it was easier to see :]

I liked that there were more than 3 skulls to collect so, if I was having issues, I could have skipped one (the jump to avoid taking damage from the dog in the first area is real tricky!).

If there was any criticism it'd be that I don't really have a whole lot to say. That said, these game jams are a lot about gaining experience and familiarity with making games. I'm excited to see what you'll make next with this game under your belt!

Nice! pretty simple, but does what it needs to do. I like the idea of a world where haunted channels just exist and people have to live with it.