itch.io

126,300 gang (idk if this is a good score but I had fun)

I really like the writing in this game, the jet pack feels pretty nice too! I overall thought the world was cool, and the main gameplay reminded me of solving puzzles in Outer Wilds~ 

For some feedback: Some of the clues completely leading to dead ends didn't feel great, specifically one of the leads you pick up at the alignment tower saying to check the beams behind the rocket, just to point you back to the alignment tower. Personally I felt like the 4 color palette was a miss as well, but the shader was cool. I think if the colors were slightly more subdued it could have worked a little better but the lime green and blue really hurt the eyes after playing for a bit. All of the music tracks were produced well, but some sounded a little out of place for the game. There's a lot of great things here that could maybe just use a little more refinement to be excellent.

Oh my gosh this game is so cool, I really loved the concept of this. I think there could be a slightly better on-boarding process for the player, but once you understand how to play it's relatively smooth outside of sort of weird controls. What impressed me was how tense the game felt. I found myself in a flow state, keeping at least one set of codes in the printer and one on my desk trying to translate as quickly as possible. Loved this game, great job.

Super cool game, I've never played anything like this and it's a really rad concept. I think some of the hints towards the beginning could be cleaned up a little e.g. nowhere (as far as I could tell) says "reboot" in game for the router so it relies on outside game knowledge to type it in. I had a great time playing this and it's incredibly ambitious. Excellent work!

The mouse sensitivity is extremely low on my computer making this really difficult to play. For reference, I have to move my mouse almost 1ft on my desk for the camera to rotate ~5 degrees. The atmosphere is really cool and I like the writing so far, but am having trouble finding anything besides the battery, ambulance, and robot, and with the mouse sensitivity issue it's hard for me to really check out the environment. Would love to give this another shot if that can get fixed!

Thank you for the kind words, I'm really happy you had a good time with the project!

Absolutely loved the writing and art direction in this! I was very impressed by how the game really felt like being in an interview, where you needed to slightly adapt your responses depending on the interviewer. I also felt like the punishments for "wrong" answers was super fairly balanced, which can be really hard to do in these kinds of games. Great job team!!

Fun game,  I'm surprised John Nintendo didn't make this themselves. Tons of content for a jam game! Good job!!

I liked the art style and music. It was a little unclear on what to do in certain areas, and the anomalies reset after moving through levels so if you accidentally backtracked by stepping on the pad you need to redo an entire section. The ball enemy also does a little too much damage for how quick it stays on you. Fun game regardless!

Thanks for playing our game! The team worked really hard to make it as high quality as possible

The leaf blower that launches you is fun to use and I had fun finding different ways to get to the dungeon!

This is super cool, love the atmosphere, art direction, and definitely got spooked the first time I saw the NPCs walking around. It was fun putting together what happened, I felt like the writing was really well done. Great job team.

Conceptually this is pretty cool! I really like the use of the small palette restriction and the vibes of each level were great.  The only bug (i think) I ran into was that once I got to the third level, none of the enemies aggroed so it made it hard to find any of them without using the scanner.

A little bit of feedback to consider: The gun has travel time when you begin shooting and shoots immediately as you click, so your first bullet or two almost alway fly off to the left/right instead of directly in front of the player. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if the player had unlimited ammo, but in the 3rd level specifically I ran out of ammo so I couldn't defeat all of the enemies, and it didn't seem like there was another way to progress. Maybe making the gun snap towards the center would help once someone starts to shoot. I think that also adding a slow, but passive recharge to the scanner might help since I don't think I ran into any battery pickups.

Great job making this, it's super unique and it has a lot of potential for expanding on the idea!

Theme interpretation is a 5 there were so many secret codes and one of them did this so now I can't find anymore. I liked the idea of looking around and solving puzzles to type the codes into the console, the only thing was the console took both the center screen input and your mouse input leading to typing in two letters at the same time. I'm not sure if the codes being typed in did anything, the only one I noticed was typing in 1337 because it blurred my screen.

I got the secret ending where Ivar murders everyone

Love everything about this game, even if I didn't finish it.  The writing is full of color and life, the music is nostalgic, the art direction almost makes me able to smell fresh baked cookies in the home, and the minigame to get the words for your word bank is innovative and cute!

I think I missed something early on, or just had a hard time interpreting the clues to figure out the three word combo, so my only point of feedback is to maybe provide a little more of a hint, or maybe even provide a few less words for the word bank in the first area then start to expand this as the game progresses, similar to Curse of the Golden Idol. Take all that with a grain of salt though, because I may just be dense and totally missed something!

One major bug is that this combination did not unlock anything and I think it needs to be fixed or the internet will explode. Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger for the boss of the internet and that's what they told me.

Either in the form of a minimap like MGS1 or directly in game

Solid game, I do wish that there were vision cone indicators for the npcs since if you enter it they automatically aggro. It was pretty fun going through and blastin all the agents

ill be following this then because it was super dope!! Love the formula yall got going here!

Hahaha this game rocks, I love the idea of being the cleaner after a ritualistic murder. Something to consider is adding a sound cue for when the ladder opens up in the attic, I hit that button like 20 times and didn't know what it did, mostly because I didn't look around after hitting it once. Super fun and unique concept though. Bonus points for cute cat.

Ending up beating this game after struggling for a little bit. I had fun because I love obstacle course games but I do have a little bit of feedback.

Pros: I think the movement in general feels smooth and pretty well tuned! The main audio track really fits the vibe and sounds great. I really like the art style used for the environments! Slide jumps are super fun. The checkpoint system works really well, and I think for the most part they're put in good locations.

Improvements: it could benefit greatly from audio cues (for the spike traps especially) and more obvious hitboxes for the saws and the fire. The saws don't look like they are possible to jump over with the current player jump height, and I think for most players they would try to avoid them rather than jump over them. Additionally, I think some of the platforms move based on a trigger box which can mess with the timing causing really hard platforming moments, especially when traps are involved. 

Really had fun with this one, again the movement is stellar and I really liked sprinting through, crouching under some sawblades, then jumping over fire it felt great.

I really like the art style in this game! I think there could be a little re-balancing for how much damage is done by the traps, especially the unavoidable ones. It feels like there's only one build that works for the North maze, because you take a total of ~5 damage from traps that block progression points, and you can only gain so much health in the map. 

I was only able to find two endings, was looking for a third and couldn't find it :( Narrative seems promising and the writing + art  are wonderful. 

A little bit of feedback: if possible, during the conversations with folks I would stop the slide in animations from looping, especially with the kid whos outside of the restaurant since his loop is like every 2 seconds. I think another quality of life thing that might help is changing some of the conditionals on the dialogue trees, like making the bus accessible without talking to the train station man, and maybe adding a line after the kid mentions the drunkard that's along the lines of "oh, he can be a little wary of strangers, but with the right whiskey he'll get right to talking. Lucky for you, I have just the thing, for the right price.", that way you don't have to backtrack as frequently. 

Overall I had a pleasant time playing this and really enjoyed the atmosphere. Great job team!

I enjoyed the shooting, movement, and the undo mechanic has potential! I'm not sure if I just took a ton of damage and didn't notice, but it'd be cool for the undo to also restore your health to where it was. It's a challenging game for sure. I also really liked the sound design, but felt that there could have been a sound cue (or another indicator) for when enemies spawned in. Whenever I'd get an encounter in a hallway, I'd turn back to the nearest arena to try to manage the swarm and it worked out, but it felt like a lot more backtracking than I'd like. Had fun with my time playing this, good work team!

I really enjoyed this, love the art direction and how the puzzle mechanics are introduced to the player. 

I ended up playing this for way longer than I expected, it's really fun. The movement in general feels great once you get used to the acceleration. The wall jump could use a liiiittle work, I found it to mess with some of the other inputs I was using, especially when paired with the dash. Didn't really see a use for the slide, but maybe I never got a level that needed it? I ended up collecting about 6 of the research notes and had a great time playing. Thanks for putting out a fun experience :D

oh no here I go killing again. Really enjoyed the atmosphere of this game, the hook is great and reminded me that I trust decrepit old fiends that do yoga in coffins. At some point, after strangling about 9 people (who all wanted to die), I wasn't able to drag bodies so I don't think I was able to complete the game :( but I did enjoy the experience I had playing this! 

This game was so enjoyable. Exploring the ruins  with that amazingly relaxing soundtrack was what I needed this morning. Loved the puzzle and world design! Thanks for putting out a fun experience :D

I really enjoyed the visual aspects of this project. The intro with the title text rotating and the mix of brutalism/non-euclidean geometry in the environments is pure bliss. The lighting in most areas is great as well. The audio, while used sparingly, was also great.

Some feedback to consider: The character movement and platforming feels a little janky. There were a handful of platforms that felt inaccessible, where I ended up using some weird jump physics in specific places to get my way around them. I was not able to complete the first level because one of the platforms felt like it was too far away for the jump distace, and there were no visual or audio cues that indicated I should go explore another area. On both of the other levels, I collected all of the memory fragments, but nothing happened so I used the skip level cheat there as well. I'm not sure if the weird jump physics is intended, but if it is, I think there should be a puzzle early on that focuses in on that, so the player makes the connection when they see spots that use it. I think there's a really great base here that could use a little bit of gameplay updates to make it an overall great game! 

Keep up the good work, would love to see a version of this with a little more polish because the aesthetics and story are super.

I really like your writing style, it fits the world well and the first town feels like something out of an early 2000s CRPG (in a good way). 

I agree with Grubwall on most of their feedback, especially locking and hiding the mouse cursor, I got very distracted seeing it fly off my screen while playing. I also did not see the Lady in Red walk into the forest, so it took a little bit to find her. Something that may help folks visually find her is if the forest is a little darker, but a dim light (candle or magical flame) is in the distance. Alternatively, you could alter the textures to look like grass that's been walked over so there's a slightly less obvious visual cue, but still something.

You should keep working on this project, I'd be interested to see where the story goes!

I didn't turn back

I like the vibe, sound design, and how the combat feels! I ended up getting to what I'm assuming is the last boss (the tall mage with a mask) and they did not aggro and could not take damage. I think that the hidden wall mechanic could have been communicated better in game, I believe it's only communicated on your jam page and that's the only reason I started checking out the walls. Additionally, it was a little difficult to tell what exactly the levers were opening, if that's intended that's fine but I found myself just walking around pulling them and not hearing a sound cue or anything that would indicate something changed. Overall I think this was a pretty fun experience, really liked slashing through the skeletons.

Thanks friend that means a lot!

This was really fun to play! Also big agree on loving seeing the cat through the x-ray it was a fun surprise haha

Hi, I tried to get this uploaded on time but it ended up just missing the 9PM window because I hadn't verified my email :( Hoping to get it submitted on time next time.

https://veeyuh.itch.io/outside-the-box