itch.io

I really like the painterly textures, the non-euclidean level structure, and the whole idea that the game isn't really telling you what to do and you just have to instinctively figure it out. I do wish there was maybe a stronger narrative hook, as for me the game was just "weird trippy scenes" but I can imagine that being hard to nail down during a jam - or maybe not even a goal for you whatsoever.

I think this would make an amazing game for children if you made it a little more obvious who's the dog and who's fake, so that it's a little more about perceptivity than guessing? But then a lot of fun is in how surprising the answer is so I can see that taking away from current appeal. And I really like that the prompt is to find the real ones, not the fake ones, it kinda flips the way I would usually think about this type of puzzle. And the art is gorgeous so well deserved #1.

A lot of smart design here! Mix of dodging, shooting, getting close to the sun but not too close - clever, elegant and tight. Alongside the audio/visual presentation it's certainly one of the highlights of this jam for me.

I think this is a really interesting exploration of how you can tell minimalist stories with game mechanics - quick, to the point, very intuitive. I'm not sure if I would play a whole anthology, but the idea of having access to quick bits like this for various individual fragments of history I'm looking into is really nice.

Great art, fun idea, I don't hate the puns - the intro was a bit long for my taste, wish I could skip the text as soon as I'm done reading, but I get that you wanted to set the mood.

My minor complaint is that I would rethink the note icons design next time. Internalizing which icon corresponds to which button takes time, and for a game jam game I would much prefer to have straight up "left right space" icons at the cost of stylization to avoid the frustration of hitting the wrong button. Remembering the spacebar was easy enough, but maybe you could move the arrow on the left key icon to the left of the gun? So that way it would be easier to make the connection "I click left when arrow is to the left of the gun, and I click right when arrow is to the right of the gun", and you maintain the stylization that way.

Cute art, really fun idea, and I think these sort of "figure out what to click" games have a lot of potential. The theme makes me imagine I have some sort of limited reality-manipulation powers and need to figure out what will work which is a cool fantasy.

My only gripe are the controls - if I don't guess where I'm supposed to put the object (and it really is guessing) or misclick, I then have to wait a second or two until I can click again, and the audio cues make it feel kinda unresponsive, or at least confusing. I would've skipped the mechanic of object slowly falling back to place and just make it immediately clickable again. I think that would be an easier change than adding more objects or hovering, and that way clicking around and looking for interactive elements would be more fun.

I think one way to make the game more engaging would be to make the fear level of each house individual, and if any of them drop to 0 it's un-haunted and you lose a ghost? But instead each haunting is shorter? So you'd have this cat-and-mouse game of trying to keep all the houses haunted while also trying to take over new ones to get more ghosts so that it's easier to maintain current fear levels. Maybe that would make the game too stressful, but you can always include further mechanics like a "grace period" where haunting a previously-haunted house is quicker than starting a new one, or random events where there's a scary night because of a blackout or something like that and all haunting is 2x faster just to make sure every player eventually reaches the end. Of course I realize any additional features during a jam are no easy feat, I just wanted to spitball some ideas.

Anyway, I'm seconding all the praise for graphics, UI and tutorialization, everything's clear and slick, not just by game jam standards.

Brings me back to oldschool shock-value flash games - I think it was just surprising and vulgar enough without straining into full grotesque, really well balanced, doesn't overstate its welcome, thanks for making it!

Cute art, cute idea, easy to understand and play, and including procedural generation is certainly a value add. I like that you have to dodge bullets and it's not simply "bait the robot and then run in straight line to exit".

One thing I would reconsider is the camera angle - you can see where robots are "above you" and plan accordingly, but I can't do the same for the robots "below you" and it ends up being almost blind game of checking where you might bump into a robot and lose health before you can react, or even fall into the water if you misjudge your distance from the edge. I think a more top-down perspective or a minimap in the corner would've done wonders to make the game even more fun and pleasant to play.

wooo world record (for now!)

EXTREMELY FUN, my favorite game of the jam easily bar none.

Really cute! Gotta love these big pixels with a limited muted color palette and cartoony shapes. I think this idea is super clever - it plays exactly like I would expect a reverse fishing game to play, you can feel the struggle of the fisherman and it really feels like your instinctively fighting for your life. Great stuff.

Very cute, these ideas of each room being sort of its own little universe is super compelling and makes travelling between them and connecting them really engaging, especially in the laser puzzle. And most of the puzzles are very organic and self-explanatory so props for that. In the end I couldn't figure out how to get the red key, I felt like I've interacted with everything I could and had no idea what else to try 😅

Up until finishing I couldn't get used to the fact that turning into the bomb was a hold, not a toggle. Because once you get lit, you no longer have to hold it, nor when you are in a tunnel - so for me it was very instinctive that "turning between boy and bomb is an action that gets disabled under certain circumstances", rather than "being a bomb is a tied to rolling". Something I would think about in a future when deciding on such controls.

I realize this is intentionally a rage game, but I would look into lessons of your kaizo marios and meat boys and celestes of the world - making the hitboxes generally smaller than the sprites, so that the game looks more oppressive than it is, rather than being more oppressive than it looks; giving the player more degrees of movement precision, so that nailing an angle feels more intentional and less random. But of course it's all subjective so I get if this is the game you wanted to make 😉

I really enjoyed the creative vision and it's pretty visually cool, but I don't think I ever want to play a game with character this slow to move 😅

The aesthetic goes hard, good stuff. I especially appreciate the intro, it felt really authentic to the era. Props for making a whole bunch of levels too. My one personal preference is that I wish there was more air control, to more closely match the responsiveness on the ground, as jumping felt a little cumbersome and once I fell out of flow it was hard to recover. Also, I might be misdiagosing the issue so bear with me, but it feels like the viewport wasn't actually 160x144, so the camera could move on "sub-pixel" values and it felt like the objects on the screen were sometimes weirdly snapping or shaking as a result which was a little unpleasant and prevented me from really feeling like I'm playing a GB game? Of course it only bothered me because of how great everything else in this submission is.