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I really like the style you're going for here. the music and visuals are all nicely made. I especially like some of the enemy sprites/ player character designs, and the 9 lives gimmick is a clever use of the character design being a cat and trading their lives around.

To be honest I could not stand the combat, it gives almost no feedback to what the enemy is doing and feels like I might as well just roll 4 dice and see if me or the enemy instantly dies. I also somehow one shot both enemies in the last area while on my last life just by using guard and then 4 breaks. 

It feels like the combat could have worked better if there was some indication of what the enemy was going to do, maybe if you could see the first few moves they would pull out, or if it started off with less actions than instantly throwing 3-4 of them at you, meaning with bad rolls you can lose the first battle in 2 turns without knowing what's going on at all.

As others have pointed out too yea, the text moves by far too quickly and while gameplay is still happening so I pretty much gave up reading it after the first corridor. I usually dont have too much trouble reading quickly but the font used tripped me up enough times to just not bother trying.

Also just a small note on the models: You should use a custom material rather than unity's default material settings, as it makes everything have a bright plastic-y glow by default. You'll want to set the material roughness to much higher than the default to get rid of that.

Thanks for playing!

About the running sections, they're actually designed in a way that if the enemy can't see the player they gain a really large speed boost to make sure the player always has the feeling they're right behind them, but their actually movements arent that fast when they're close. In the third chase particularly the section at the end is definitely the harder part since whenever you turn the corner the enemy will quickly boost to the corner you just turned around, which really added to the effect of being close to dying. 

Far as I know i've not had anyone ACTUALLY struggle to complete the chases, as you said maybe one or two deaths on the third chase but other than that I think it's balanced enough to feel intense and close without actually being frustrating. The first chase is also extremely slow when close to the player, since it's the first chase the player encounters so I didn't want it to feel unfair to suddenly have to start running super quickly to escape. I think you can actually just auto-walk and still escape from that one.

And yeah I figured out the 4th levels encounter rate was actually a mistake on my part setting the encounter rate to 50% instead of just the escape-chance to 50%. oops. In a way the pray to light mechanic is kind of intentional as a reward for good situational-awareness, but it definitely might be too strong

Thanks for the feedback.

You know i'm actually only now realising why everyones been saying that about the last area. Turns out I think I accidentally made the encounter rate 50% while changing the base escape chance in the area to 50%.  Every other area in the game is set to 30.  I do think I could have also put a few more lights around the items to make them more worth picking up. 

In a way I expected the chase scenes to be quite a surprise for players, that's why there's always a save point right before them most of the time, so if you get caught out the first time you won't lose anything.

Thanks for the feedback.

Very nice pixel art/low poly assets. Really liked the consistent style of everything and the shadowy figures appearing. However the lack of any kind of saving combined with the kind of slow movements outside would definitely turn some people away from finishing it. Personally if i'd died outside before the end I definitely would have given up. 

I found out the final room with the blue orb has no collisions so I used that to go out of bounds and skip back to the room with the magic circle since I was so low on sanity I don't think i'd have made it there in time otherwise.

The lock picking minigame/defend your sanity minigame was a nice addition and I suppose the only thing close to combat here but it works, however I would have liked it if sanity didn't drop in the lockpicking sections as it can be kind of rng how quickly you can get through them.

Overall I enjoyed it though!

Honestly i'm not sure what was up with the shark, it seemed to appear at the start of the area then float off the map, then sort of floated around randomly and ended up in the room outside the captains quarters where one of the banshee's also followed me. I didn't kill the shark the first time since I kind of assumed it was a patrolling enemy I'd have to avoid based on it's movements. 

The comment about difficulty definitely makes sense, and I agree with you it's better to have an easier game for a jam like this. my own game kind of has that "fault" with being too easy as well haha.

Also makes sense about the map, I find there's always going to be something that suffers from the time-limit in a game jam and the maps probably one of the more acceptable things to be a bit weaker here. 

Probably the tensest entry i've played so far. Very good use of atmospheric sounds to effectively give off the feeling of being buried deep beneath the sea in a cramped ship. 

The dedication the ps1 styling is really nice, and definitely helps it feel like a polished and completed package. I didn't really run into any bugs or issues besides the gun being removed after switching levels (although that didn't really matter). One thing I can say is that it felt quite easy up until I got trapped in a room with a banshee and a shark which was right at the end, but I came out of it alive so I guess that was like the final boss.

Personally I would have preffered it if the map didn't show any locations until you entered combat, it kind of ruins the suspence if you can just see an enemy on the map waiting there for you to turn around the corner.

Very solid game!

A shame you couldn't get the gameplay done in time, because the art is really high quality! which to be honest was probably your downfall, too much time on the art/making it look nice not enough on gameplay but, it's a common pitfall for a game jam. 

I will say, for what little combat I got to do was a fun idea of having many different abilities of each party member you can all use on cooldown, on use items and everything like that, but after  a couple encounters the enemies sort of just stopped attacking/being able to be hit.

Also I noticed the use of unreal 5 as the virtual shadow map flickering was straining my eyes. you might want to look into how to disable that for now. What I did for my unreal game was to set shadow maps back to regular shadow maps in the settings and force dynamic lighting as well. Keeps the quality shadows you want but prevents a lot of the issues unreal engine has at the moment.

Also since it is unreal engine 5 this game is quite rough on the optimization, once I loaded into the main area my graphics card was hitting 95% usage and that was even after I changed the FPS cap to 60 in the nvidia control panel, when it defaults to my 144hz monitor refresh rate.

Interesting game!

I enjoyed the fast movement letting me zip around the levels collecting loot.

The combat however, I feel was very unintuitive. I kind of understand it now as the last gem/focus being set to either heal or attack but I have absolutely no idea how i'd tell what the other ones did. I pretty much just set it to whatever gems i'd collected most recently and hoped for the best and then just left it there until they ran out, which seemed to do the trick? 

I was also not really sure what to the objective was until I randomly got stuck between the boss enemy and a wall and then found out the enemy with a red glow has to be killed to move on. After getting that down I didn't find it to be any worth to fight enemies and they were pretty easy to avoid since they rotated/moved very slowly.

I feel with a bit more polish and a better explanation this could be really good! I'm guessing the different gems could do different abilities but the presentation doesnt really make that clear, at one point the enemy threw some "zzz"'s at me, so I assume I slept it somehow? Maybe some kind of description in the inventory to show what attributes each gem adds would go a long way.

also probably worth noting this game was HAMMERING my GPU for some reason, like using 88% capacity of my 1080ti, not really sure what could be causing that as usually godot games run fine.

Nice game here! Very impressed by the consistency of the art style and the music/audio. 

I liked that the failure condition is more about your actions rather than having combat, and the dialogue I found to be quite well written for the most part. the 4th ending was... interesting. 

I find it a bit strange your forced to take damage when interacting with "danny" for the first time, and it took me a couple playthroughs to even understand the joker bit was a riddle since i just happened to press the right door the first time and the majority of my playthroughs went through the right. I thought the voice was just yelling at you if you didn't talk to the joker first lol.

Also a nice detail to have a name entry screen at the start, not actually seen that in another game yet, so it was a nice detail.

First of all, I absolutely love the style of this game, the pixel art and retro-menus work super well in my opinion. Using the dungeon crawler movement to fly through space and control a space ship was really cool and unique. The atmosphere on the mining planet particularly was great as it left a spooky atmosphere just long enough that when things suddenly appear it pays off well. 

Only a couple of small bugs/oversights, dying to the final boss caused the projectiles to still be there in the ship leading to a few extra deaths, and after defeating the final boss it's not very clear what to do after that, I only found out by looking at this page you're supposed to go back into the ship afterwards. The game doesnt really do the whole looping thing very well as you just kind of go back out of the pod and can instantly just go back into it again as you still have the 3 warp crystals and if you go back into the ship it acts like you've just killed the final boss again.

I also felt the movement could be just slightly faster sometimes, not by much really just a little bit for the slower/tenser atmosphere you were going for here without making it feel like you're being weighed down.

Overall very good! I had fun with it and would be interested to see it expanded upon!

The results are interesting. I definitely was aware the pray was designed to basically be a get-out of jail free card if you were aware of your surroundings and near a light, this is why it's got quite a high cost so if you use it poorly and end up in another fight you'll be in trouble.

I was definitely thinking of adding a stronger guard at some point midway through the game but couldn't really think of a good reason to suddenly give you a new ability. I want the player to feel quite weak and, well, defenceless so giving an upgrade midway through the game just felt wrong. 

Swipe honestly started out as just being an ability that added more escape chance at the cost of more sanity, but I found I never really used it so I kind of redesigned it be a bit of a gamble to add some escape chance while also having its own chance to instantly escape the battle. I actually added a mechanic quite close to the end of development to it where if you use it at 80% then you can instantly guarantee your escape by using it but i'm not sure how useful that was. maybe if it came with a reduced cost it would be worth doing.

Thanks for doing this analysis! It's interesting to see as I was unaware of a way of doing some raw data testing on the combat before.

Thanks for the feedback! Interesting point about the combat. I kind of balanced the defend actions around being useful for fights that start at lower percentages as they give you a bit of protection from the attacks from longer fights, it might be better mathmatically to spam escape but you could also very likely just get killed before you actually succeed that way due to damage the enemy deals. 

My general strategy revolves around using guard first then attempting escape on the next turn with a slight defence boost and increased chance, not sure if that would still be mathmatically better to just escape twice but you'd also probably lose more health that way if it were to fail 2 times in a row. 

It was definitely an interesting system to try and balance but I think it was worth it for the theme.

I'll add the inventory key to the games main page, sorry about that I guess I assumed people would try escape anyway lol. I suppose putting it on "I" could have helped too.

Obviously the quality level here is very high, the detailed sprite-works and original music is all nice.

The random generation mechanic was cool and worked well to keep things interesting after deaths, however I think revealing the whole map from the start made me end up relying pretty heavily on just looking at the map unless I had to do some combat which is a shame as the sprite-work on the environments is good. 

Personally I'd have liked to see different tile-sets for each dungeon you go through as it was difficult for me to actually remember which dungeon/level I was in after a while. as there's nothing on screen telling you that either.

One frustration I ran into which I admit is partially my fault is, since I'd just played a dungeon crawler withQ/E turning and A/D strafing, getting into this one I kept accidentally strafing into the lava at the start and actually completely wiped out my health in like 3 moves in a few seconds doing it. For some reason the lava does a crazy amount of damage like 1/3rd of the health bar from one movement. That mixed with how little the potions healed caused more deaths than the enemies themselves.

For some reason the keep going button at the end wouldn't work for me (Playing in browser)

I found the actual combat to be quite satisfying dashing out of range of enemies and quickly dodging in with a whip-attack. Simple but effective!

This was fun! 

I enjoyed the implementation of looping and being stuck with no real way out. Even after escaping into the light you still loop back when you press play again anyway. 

I think the UI was the weakest point here as in my opinion it was a little too big on the screen which meant I couldn't see much of the tile I was on leading to me getting a bit lost at times and you can't see health/sanity in the inventory.

Sound design was very good for instilling fear as you can hear the enemies stomping around you. I didn't use stealth much as it was a little hard to pull off with the movement system and a lot of enemies would just be blocking the path anyway.

Balancing health/sanity with the items was an interesting mechanic and I like that you had to use consumables to get stronger rather than traditionally gaining permanent power.

The escape chance is actually just exactly as shown far as I know, although I do question how unreal engine does probability sometimes because yeah sometimes you'll escape really easily a lot of times in a row and sometimes you just wont so idk what happens there.

The encounter rate is set up to be very high in dark places but areas near light are immune to random encounters, which i'm not sure how many people picked up on but I'm also aware there are some areas that force you to go through a lot of dark spaces (particularly in the third level).

Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

The art style was very nice, reminded me of dark souls 1 style almost. Strangely the music isn't set to loop so I played half the game in silence lol. As others have said you can't actually die but the combat was simple but fun. Nice job!

To be honest this is a little rough. I like the idea of the simple limited-colour art style and the UI looks nice but I found the method for using items to be VERY annoying, having to constantly swap out whatever was in the hand slot manually while the entire game is on an oxygen timer got very frustrating. Also took me 3 playthroughs to figure out the full path to go since I kept running out of time.  Honestly the drag/drop inventory thing could work well if you could just activate stuff directly from the inventory or drag it onto the thing you want to interact with (drag keycard onto door from inventory to open door, for example).

Also not sure why the game defaults all the sounds to 0 but even after setting the volume sliders up there was still no music present which could have helped add some tension to the atmosphere a bit.

I think with a bit more polishing you could have a good game here, just needs a bit more time I think. Nice work though.

Very cool! The ending was really high quality for a jam like this. Personally I think the use of some very high poly models hurt the retro style of the game a bit (looking at that toilet in particular) and maybe some combat would have been nice but overall very fun and quality game!

Very nice quality game! The voice acting and options menu particularly stood out to me as something not usually dont to that level in a game jam project. I ran into a couple bugs with the ammo count not being reflected correctly and think it might be something to do with reloading/changing scenes.  Also I felt like the very start of the game was harder than the end as there were few health packs and a lot of enemies. 

I like the textures and lighting. The sound design was very atmospheric and was nice as an indicator of where the traps are. However, I feel like the FOV was very small and lead to me getting disoriented at one point when I kept getting killed by arrows and then not knowing where I was respawning. Also would have been nice to see a more stylised UI but it's not that big of a deal.

Can you tell me specifically where these inputs were happening? Is it with the grid movement or the menus. I'm aware the rotation is quite sensitive and if that's the issue I can understand it. 

My movement script is simply a script that starts a coroutine to check the current input every .15 seconds and move accordingly whenever an input is started and I have a script that disables that attatched to cancel input.

I'm using the default button input system for the menus but with the navigation changed from pass-through to value as that's what fixed my issue of having inputs going missing which on further research seems to be an issue with it being on fixed-update rather than dynamic. I'm not sure how to check the input cooldown.

Strange you had that experience with the inputs as for me that never happened. It's potentially something to do with the Input system in unity as I had to change some settings to stop it from just missing inputs entirely so that may have been a side effect on some systems. Also I agree with you about the levelling UI, I had planned to add arrows to the menu but unfortunately never got around to doing it as I was too rushed getting everything else ready. The random encounters actually get less common as the game goes on. The reason encounters are so high at the start is because if the player goes straight to the mirror and only gets one or two encounters it can cause them to be underlevelled and get stuck. Honestly just an issue with the first map being so short more than anything I think.

Thank you for the feedback!

Nice art and an interesting combat style. Found it odd how the end doesn't actually end the game but other than that no complaints. 

This was a fun simple classic RPG.  Good creative use of RPGMaker to make a dungeon crawler.

For some reason the camera was stuck pointing straight upwards when I had my controller plugged in but it works fine if that's disconnected. 

The dungeon traps are good, like dodging the fireballs and avoiding the poison.

Biggest complaints I'd say would be that it can be hard to tell where I am on the grid sometimes, especially in the lava area and the camera turning felt very slow.

Overall Good experience!

Thanks for the comment! Unfortunately I didn't get around to adding arrows on the level up screen for full mouse support. I definitely felt the time pressure in a few places.