Love the watercolor style! The backgrounds are especially beautiful, and the text scroll sounds suit the game so well. One of my teammates was so tickled by Mrk'Wylo's designed that he made it his private Discord account icon.
I loved every minute of this. The presentation, the characters, the story, the pacing. Beautifully written and haunting. I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while.
This game has a quality to it that reminds me of the weird things I saw when I was falling asleep as a child. The shapes, the colors, the muffled and indistinct music. I enjoyed how odd and at times unsettling it was! Possible bug note: I picked up the glasses, but the trash can creature won't acknowledge that I have them. Either I'm missing something or it broke on me.
Loved the combination of low-res graphics with the real instrumentation in the music. I chose the 'happily ever after' ending and was enamored with it. Such an interesting story!
I love this concept!! I love the creative use of formatting, the way you hop from document to document, and make choices. The story is solid and exceptionally well presented, the best I've come across in the jam so far. Fantastic work!
The character design in this is so fun! The manager's appearance jump-scared one of my teammates, and Bagorath's squished head sprite gave me a good laugh. I love the color palette, too. Most space media leans hard into either bright colors, grunge, or industrialism. That sort of ' '90s comic book' aesthetic is a cool change of pace. Congrats on a great jam!
This is such a nice concept for a quick game and a welcome moment of peace in the midst of the other jam games. I'm glad you got to participate and make a game!
For having been started so soon before the deadline, this is an impressive little game! The characters are cute and have distinct personalities. The UI is nice to look at, the premise is fun, and I enjoy the little fishing mechanic! I'm gonna be keeping an eye on this one for the facial expressions patch and playing it again.
I love the retro style of this! Bluey is adorable, and her animation & sound font are perfect. The minigames are really cute, too. The font is difficult to read when the game opens at full size on desktop. I made my window browser window smaller, and the font is much more readable that way.
An interesting think piece. The human character reminds me of some people I know, the ones who feel like they're trying to outrun time to do all they wish to do in life. The minimalist assets work well for the two-character story, and they make the decisions you have to make all the more haunting. Your eye can't help but be drawn to the light in the room. It feels like a warning, but what it's warning you against is in the eye of the player. Nice work!
I enjoyed the character dynamic in this! The indifferent, annoyed cat and the old man having small emotional crises was a fun contrast. The narrative is a good balance between deeper, heavier moments and lighthearted ones. Great work!
This was so cute! The character art is delightful, and the backgrounds and UI are stunning. Together with the story, it reminded me of some of my favorite children's books.
This game reminds me of a zine you pick up on a whim and are intrigued by every page. Fascinating use of texture and a stand-out art style. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in and was pleasantly surprised by how tender and interesting the story was.
There’s a lot to love here. The angel’s designs are adorable (and the reason behind the star eyes so brutal and cool). The pacing is good. How often the character’s expression change must have taken ages to program, and it adds so much life to the game. Congrats on a neat game!
Murder of Crows is a great example of a minimalist VN, in a good way! Everything compliments each other. Even the speed of the text & fades match the pace of the narrative well.
The B&W palette is layered effectively and sets nice mood. The backgrounds remind me of very old storybooks. Simple but evocative, even cozy. It’s a great match for the story.
The story is engaging without being too heavy, and the codex was a great addition. It’s nice to have the lore-delving be optional. If you’re intrigued by something, you can dig in. If you’re not, you can move along. (Also, ‘Magistrix’ is a killer NB title.)
An adorable demo! The aesthetic is cute, bright, and on-theme without being saccharine or immature. I enjoyed the game’s take on UI. The layered textures are interesting and suit the sprite style nicely. Fantastic work!
A fun and seamless romp through tried-and-true modern game cliches. Great art, cute writing. I love the music being the same tune changing to suit the different level styles. The character dissolve in the JRPG section got a genuine laugh out of me. It was perfectly abrupt.
The very first section of the game doesn't have the same gloss as the rest of the game. The main character sprite looks great, but the environment and point-and-click assets feel like an afterthought. The rest of the game, though, feels great.
Overall, a particularly good title in the Game Off!
Chad! Loved the simultaneous literal and twist interpretation of the theme here. I also loved that breaking things is what restored your health. Not collecting items from them, no. You just gain strength from raw destruction. It was also a good length for its game loop. It didn't drag on.
I think a game that took just as long to complete but with faster character movement/punching would feel better to play. The amount of health available also made the game a little too easy. Something like being punished by the shop owner for breaking too much china too quickly would have helped balance that out.
This is a great little game! One of my favorites so far for certain. The graphics are cute, the music is a bop, and the mechanics are fun. A nice combo of farming and serving customers. All those different jam colors and flower types were a delight to look at. Great theme interpretation, too. There was always something to be doing.
I think the game loop would benefited from a faster countdown with either the character run speed increased or the flower plots closer. Running back and forth took juuust enough time to start to get tedious. With a slightly faster pace, this would be a pretty addictive game.
Cute story, fantastic artwork, and a nifty battle system! I love that the dialogue sprites were simplified and the in-game sprites had more detail. It was a nice reversal from the usual. The subtle line animation in the dialogue sprites made it work.
The battle system stood out to me just as much as the graphics. In a full release, that could build in a fascinating way. The UI tied everything together phenomenally.
The music is solid, too, and it made it wish there were sound effects. Simple sounds would have filled in the time while you're waiting for the battle actions to play out. I also wish the primary font in the dialogue boxes was a plain version of the main font without all the irregular characters and sizing. In small doses on the splash screen speech bubbles, it was great. In the dialogue boxes, it was cramped and tough to read. A little bit more contrast between the text and the background would also help readability.
Love the idea behind this! I'm always excited when a game forces me to use my health as an active resource instead of something to horde, and it was a great way to put a spin on a classic arcade game. 'Glass cannon' was a great cliche choice for this, too.
The screen shake when things blow up is a neat idea but disruptive in practice. I lose track of where I am for a second, which costs me precious life when there are other enemies on the screen.
Simple but effective mechanics that were nicely executed. And anyway, I'm a sucker for a game with a dog. Nice song loop, good feedback from the sound effects. The graphics made me nostalgic for early '90s games.
The sound balance could use some tweaking. All of the sounds & music start off a little bit loud. Even with the volume turned down, the loudest tones in the music are as loud as the sound effects. Everything happening together is a little overwhelming. In the visuals, some color differentiation between the impassable rubble at the bottom of the hills and the passable rubble strewn around on the ground would also be good.
Playing in browser, I had a weird moment in which the MC suddenly shot forward into a zombie, his voice line glitched out like a skipping record, and I died. I'm assuming it was a glitch, but it gave me a good laugh. That *also* reminds me of old '90s game.
Like others, I was also bamboozled by the launcher at first. Once I got the hang of it, it was a unique addition to the classic 'cook for your customers' genre. I think the cliche would have been more apparent if messing up the launch automatically made the bottle break and the milk spill.
The basic mechanic here is interesting. Luring dangerous things away from areas where you need to go, rather than attacking or just hiding, could be workshopped into a cool horror game.
I wasn't able to see the full intro story, so I'm relying on the game description to understand the cliche. The intro is hitching on the first 'From Inside the House' line, and the only button that works is 'skip.' I think I'll be muttering 'You are THREE deliveries behind schedule' to myself all week regardless. As for the game itself, the art isn't cohesive, and the walls of the rooms make it difficult to see what you're doing.
A really interesting take on a 'deck builder.' Collecting and trading Polaroids of different game cliches and using them to your advantage is a cool idea. Love seeing unusual mechanics in horror games. The music is good, and the art is clear and effective.
I hope you keep working on this after the jam results roll in! Some more sound effects and a stylized detection bar up top would be great.
As someone else said, it's an neat idea, combining a labyrinth with a platformer in a wide open space. I appreciated that a misstep wasn't certain death. You don't fall too fast, so paying attention to your surroundings gives you an opportunity neatly recover.
The main thing the game needs is feedback/guidance for the player. There are no sound effects for jumping or successfully eating a horse. Some indication of where to go, how many horses are left, and where I might be in the map would have been great. I also ran into an glitch where I sank into some of the platforms. I couldn't figure out why, and it would mess up my jumps.
This was goofy good fun. I loved the play on the cliche. The different sandwiches were entertaining, and I loved how fast you could move from level to level. It never felt like it was dragging on. The art is cute, too. Love the MC's smirk.
I did run into some issues with the controls. The combat inputs were either laggy or struggled when inputs overlapped (doing one attack and then another too fast). I didn't always get a 'hit' animation from either the MC or the enemies, but I would be advanced to the next level anyway. The game was fun regardless. Genuinely made me smile.
A cute, well-thought-out, polished game with fun card mechanics! Good music. Good color choices. Nice retro style! Everything is easy to see, read, and understand. It's definitely one of the more fun card mechanic adventure games I've played.
Because the gameplay loop is simple, some visual vvariation in the dungeon levels would make advancement more rewarding. Maybe some different enemy styles or even slightly different tile shapes would really push the idea that you're going deeper into a dungeon. The art is so cute that it would be great to see more!
Great job making such a solid game in just a month!
A great mechanic for a clever, clever play on a cliche! The graphics are simple but effective. There's just the right amount of radiance to the light elements, and I love the little light charge up doodads. That design is just plain cool. Good choices were made with the pre-made sound assets, too. Nothing feels totally out of place.
The mechanic is such a good idea, and I love that the game didn't feel the need to hold my hand. It gives you the controls but lets you figure things out on your own (like pushing the boxes, etc). That agency made solving the puzzles so satisfying.
Also enjoyed the variance in jump vocalizations; that gave me a good chuckle, especially paired with how bouncy the knight sprite is. For what seems to be a one-man operation, this is a killer game.
My only suggestions would be to fiddle with the sound balance a bit and add some visual interest to the knight and the backgrounds. The light charging sound, for example, is pretty loud compared to the music. The backgrounds are also quite cavernous. Tossing some shapes and details in there just to mix things up would make a difference.
A clever and fun combination of genres with catchy tunes! I could easily see this being workshopped into a full release title. The theme interpretation is great, both on basic cliche and taking such an iconic game style and doing something fun with it. I liked the ridiculous story premise, too.
Some of the beats-attacks didn't sync quite right for me, though the on-screen circles were always correct. That may be Unity's wobbly in-browser functionality; I wasn't using headphones at all. A little bit of variation in the enemy sprites, even a simple recolor, would have added some spice, too. Overall a fun time!
It’s always nice to see a jam game with a considered plot! I appreciated the frequency with which you got to choose upgrades, and once I got the hang of the controls, it was pretty satisfying to kill the small mobs. It has a good difficulty curve.
As others mentioned, the clashing art styles were distracting. I also didn’t realize what the gold was for until I clicked the Skills menu on accident. A polished hub with clearer instructions on what your goals are/what you can do in the game world would be a welcome addition.
A cute little game with fun animation. The music and art style created a nice, moody ambiance, and the layered parallax backgrounds were especially well done. The golem's design was also excellent.
It was tough to tell what was meant to be a platform and what wasn't. They weren't distinct enough in color/shading compared to the background. It was also hard to tell when you were successfully hitting enemies, so I jumped and cheesed my way out of all but the unavoidable combat scenarios.
