itch.io

Really great artwork and atmosphere across the piece, nice work!

Thanks so much!
And thanks for hosting this very fun Jam!

That's a good point about giving the player a heads up about the dangerous nature of the creatures in the dark world!
As the creators, we always have blind spots about how players will understand our games. We possess full knowledge, so cannot easily pretend to not know how all of the mechanics work or what they mean.
I have some ideas about how to inform the player without requiring the fatal 'trial and error' so I'll try adding something in an update soon.

There have been so many useful pieces of feedback we've gotten from the community that I have already implemented as changes just waiting to be able to push :)
One of the main focuses of this jam for me was to try to created a fully rounded project and I feel like we got pretty close!
I'm very proud of my small (large for a game jam) team and of what we created, so it feels like a no-brainer to make little tweaks here and there and turn it into the project we know it can be!

I really like this little piece.
Originally my team wanted to create a story about someone who had chosen to isolate themselves, but we found it too challenging to write!
I think you did a great job writing this and there are some nice messages to be found.
Really well done! :)

Thank you so much!!
There will be an update soon that will fix the game from getting stuck during a cutscene. As you might have guessed, there is more story to be told!

Glad you enjoyed!
We're going to be updating the level layouts very soon, in case that's what you found weird about it.

That's an unfortunate thing to discover after submissions are locked!
I hope you can get that fixed after voting is done, because I would love to play it again 'as intended' 👍

There are some really good bones to this project.
First of all, the art style is AMAZING. And the level isolation is a unique and cool idea (once I understood what it was asking me to do). Clicking and dragging an empty tile to separate the enemies into different combats was not intuitive and I only accidentally discovered how to do it when I was frustratedly spam clicking the tiles trying to understand what that interface was asking of me. I didn't really get what the instructions were telling me at the start.
Perhaps if instead of the current method of breaking up the level by click-dragging an empty tile, you could select where to set off a bomb (Bomber-man style + shape). Heck, I would even have it blow up dudes on the tiles it hits for even more interesting choices for the player to make?

Either way, this project is absolutely dripping with style, the artist(s) took it to another level. Just wish the interfaces were a lot more intuitive and the controls felt more responsive overall. I love the ability to leap, dash and grapple my way up a level, but 80% of the time I was trying to do that, I was just unable to control it in a smooth way and would just fall to the bottom floor instead, aiming the gun while dodging around felt a little off as well, but I loved all the little details and features like swapping to a shotgun blast point blank and the unique enemy behaviours and designs.
Really impressive work, would really love to play this again with tighter controls, also I had to turn the SFX to max before starting to hear them. Would  be nice if I could get to the settings without having to restart the game.

Totally fair, Game Jams are a fantastic challenge that require us to ultimately "chop" those extra features we would have liked. Still, you built a great feeling experience with so few elements, that is hard to do well. Great job!

Much appreciated, thank you so much for playing!
Check back soon and the frozen cutscene issue will be fixed, allowing you to complete the whole game and enjoy the full story! 😅

This is a really fun game. I like the presented mechanics, visuals, atmosphere and overall ideas going on in this, it's quite well done!
I did find the spike pop hitbox very unforgiving and spoiled my fun very quickly. Just barely grazing any spike from the side would pop/kill me and it made level 7 & 8 unplayable as you had to be positioned in exactly the right pixel for your balloon to pass through the required path.
Definitely a very challenging game, but with better collisions this would be a very solid complete feeling game.
Really fantastic work!

Thanks for trying out the game!
Aside from a bug in the Level Select window and About pages not letting you use the back button, once you're playing the game, you should be able to hit the Esc key at any time! Doing so pulls up a pause menu that allows you to reset the level.
Not sure why that might not have been working for you. 🤔

The premise amused me, and the music choice was cool (but too loud).
The gameplay itself wasn't super clear or offer much to engage with in any real specific way. I ended up simply sliding back and forth spamming lemons non-stop without really aiming them until I beat the game. I did enjoy watching the expressions sour when they got hit though!
Perhaps if there were fewer targets at any time and they take more hits to convert, it might encourage the player to aim with more purpose.
Fun writing 👍

Thanks!
🔦🧭🥚🚗‼ ;)

Thank you so much, we really appreciate that!

For sure, that is a lesson I failed to teach properly in the first level. There will be many more tweaks made to ensure the player knows all of their options for how to interact with the game properly as they progress and smooth out any of it's rough edges.
Glad you liked the look and feel of it, thank you for the great feedback!

Also, I loved your game, it was a little masterclass in teaching the player about it's rules of play as they experience it.
If people reading this haven't tried it, go play it now! :D

Yeah, there is a lot of really good feedback we will be taking into account and making adjustments with.
Thank you so much for playing and sharing your experience!

The visuals and atmosphere are fantastic, but the controls and platform sizes and placement need work.
It took me too long to realize how the light increase worked, and you really have to be right on top each other to get the benefit, so the moment you jump, you can't see where you're going.
For a long time I was just learning the map by jumping blind, but even when I would wait for the light boost and knew exactly where to go, I would miss/hit it and slide off and run all the way back to try again. 
I really wanted to see where the story would go because it looks like there was a lot of thoughtful work put into the visuals and design, but the platforming became too frustrating to continue.

Controls felt good and the reload mechanic made it an interesting challenge where you had to stay close to a pickup without letting it get swarmed. Gameplay was easy to understand and when I died I felt it was because of my lack of skill, rather than the game being unfair.
With a bit more polish, this could be a really solid game, well done!

It was a nice immersive experience. I found myself wanting to interact with the items in my cabin just cause I got caught up in the idea of living in this cabin in the middle of nowhere.
I like the axe mechanic, though in practice the more I tried to make a big swing, the less % I got and eventually just found the "sweet spot" which unfortunately required minimal swinging movement.

I enjoyed the twist on how you win. That was pretty fun.
I think the more you Obey the more obvious it could become that it is the source of your problem "For being so loyal to me, here, have another special friend"
Neat idea, I like your take on the theme.

Really solid first pass on the game! I enjoyed the art and theming. I really struggled with figuring out how to play at first. I assumed I had a way to fight back using left mouse button and I died several times before I managed to get my first upgrade and earn the slingshot.

Once I discovered the dash key and that the slingshot fired automatically on a cooldown (first time I got the slingshot I was still spamming left click trying to fight stuff, so I didn't get to read the description) it became quite a lot easier and fun to play.

I found that the game started hard but got easier the longer I was alive. I did notice that monsters would get stuck on objects, so maybe that made it easier than intended?
I would recommend starting the player with the slingshot and introducing higher health monsters the longer it goes on.
Also I see you wanted to have "start with weapon" as a permanent upgrade, if you start with a weapon by default I think it would be a smoother experience, but you could have "piercing shots" as that permanent upgrade instead, I think something like that would make a very interesting difference. 👍
Either way, great job!

Simple but effective. Kinda sad it was so short, I would've liked to had more story beats to build it up more. I liked the atmosphere a lot. Creepy occult mystery in a dank old light house :D

Thank you!
Yeah, there are a lot of tweaks coming soon, thanks to everyone's very insightful and constructive feedback!

Yeah, the frozen cutscene is a known bug that snuck into the submission build, it unfortunately prevents you from playing all of the levels. It will be fixed along with other improvements, as soon as the Game Jam voting concludes!
Thank you :)

We all really appreciate that, thank you so much!

I completed the game and the other more final ending.

Admittedly the hints were hard to pick up on and I found myself struggling for feedback throughout. I couldn't tell if I was making progress and though I eventually figured out all of the secret rooms, I never figured out what to do with the deeper secret until I had discovered what the hint was trying to get at and how to even 'activate' said hint by skimming through your dev-log.

The puzzles are solid brain twisters and well done, but the hints were not clear enough and inability to progress are likely to leave most players in an unresolved and frustrated state.

Loved the look of it, I only managed to find one of the easter eggs and I accidentally pushed a box into it that I couldn't get back so had to restart. Neat little puzzle game, but I did find myself holding the run key the entire time I was playing (except for when I wanted to swap between the walk and run animation in time with the music)

Played and beat!

I like the simple but effective puzzles you created. The atmosphere was neat. Also really neat that you integrated a leaderboard (which I made it onto, but surely will be knocked off soon enough)

Thanks so much! I'm very proud of the artists that worked on this and so thankful for the hard working art lead that made it all so cohesive!

Thank you so much! Our lead artist did such an incredible job really bringing all of our visuals together, so proud of their hard work and of all of the art put in by the team. This was my first attempt at composing music ever, so I've been quite shocked at how much people really seem to enjoy it.

So glad you enjoyed and appreciated our hard work! :3

Great feedback! You're completely right on both points and will be making those changes. Thanks :)

This was my first time working in Godot, and I was having issues with slightly off aspect ratios severely impacting the camera positioning. To prevent the potential of elements being cut off I opted for a fixed resolution, but that would likely make it quite small for anyone playing on an HD monitor.

Now that the project won't be rushed by jam deadline I can look into opening up the resolution options.

Thanks for playing, hope you enjoyed!

Ah, that's a great point about the visual feedback of the portal visuals. I think that makes a lot of sense and I feel it would be worth it to tweak the artwork so that is more clear. Thank you for your great feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)

I really like the atmosphere for this one. I did feel like I was fighting the controls at times. There is a particular corner that I got impaled on quite a lot!

Very nice message. I expected it to be darker going in, based on the title. I quite enjoyed painting the wall to a soundtrack I created. Thank you for that :)

It was a fun game with some neat level moments, I enjoyed dropping foes into spikes. The start of the boss fight felt a little too sloggy, but the boss fight was a nice conclusion. I like the interpretation of a computer virus you have to 'isolate' (through destruction!) so the final boss being an angry computer amused me.

I enjoyed exploring this interesting world and even escaping out of bounds a few times.
I would even prefer if it didn't have the health constantly depleting so I could feel less rushed through it.
I enjoyed unlocking different abilities as I progressed, though the pads and items felt confusing for the first half of the game. It would be better if they didn't draw so much attention to themselves, before you are capable of interacting with them.

What a wonderful gem. I really enjoyed the incredible tension this game achieved, the hidden respite at the end was a wonderful decompression after that final challenge. So good!

This blew me away. Such a captivating experience. The tension it built was intense and exciting, and the respite at the end felt very deserved and rewarding. Thank you for that wonderful experience :)