itch.io

Interesting concept and well done. I liked the “old folk tale” vibe. Was it my old eyes or did the font get a lot smaller half way through?

There were a few errors in the first few paragraphs which made me stumble a little.

Cool idea and flowed nicely.

I did find it a bit hard to believe the girl’s transition from “grin and bear it” student to blood-drenched murderer. I think maybe fleshing out her motivation a bit more might have helped?

I “ooohed” when I opened the PDF, it was quite startling to see colour after so much monochrome!

I’ll admit I’m not a huge lover of riddles, but I think you did very well here weaving an adventure from the little notes.

An enjoyable read. I liked the way you played with language and had different narrative voices for each of the characters. I agree with others in that some of the abbreviated sentences were a little awkward, maybe “Am” could have been replaced with “I’m” in some cases, or even just e.g. “Into the walls”.

Ah man, this is exactly how I feel after my first coffee of the morning… for all of about 15 seconds :) Nice work!

A bitter-sweet story - and taking a new angle. Nobody thinks about what happens when heroes retire! Nice work.

Ewwwww! (Also, nicely done!) It took me a little while to work out what was going on - I’m not as across the Grimdark lore so I was a bit confused that the Sisters were the “baddies” - that’s more on me than the writing though.

The only piece of feedback I can think of (and its very nitpicky) is that the “pacing” of the writing was pretty consistent throughout. A particular example is that the sentences were about the same length throughout the story. I wonder if the use of a few more “punchy”, shorter sentences in the second half might make the action more intense?

A really well written piece. You managed to get a lot of character-building and description into the word count without feeling forced or like a huge dump of exposition. It had a real mood and was easy and interesting to read.

My only very minor piece of feedback is that I also struggled a little with the link to the theme. I understood that Vex was the “creative resource”, but it felt a little … I don’t know, obvious, or maybe less nuanced(!?) than the rest of the story? I’m not really sure what I would have liked to see given the word limit though :)

Enjoyable, good use of the theme and well-paced.

Nice work! I thought you did some fantastic world building given the world limit. I do agree with some other comments in that the pacing was maybe a little slow at the start which left the end a little rushed, but overall a very enjoyable read.

Nice work, I definitely had a chuckle at the end, seems a very Dwarf-like attitude.

Cool idea! There were a few places where I stumbled a little over sentences, so maybe another round of editing might have helped. I also got a bit confused by the flow of the story as it seemed to jump around a little in time. Having said that, I really liked the description of the main character at the start, and the “narrators voice” was neat.

Nice work fitting in two complete threads within the word limit! I wonder if breaking the stories up and telling them a bit more in parallel (rather than one at a time) would increase the tension?

Also I kind of wanted to read the ending from Jahro’s side instead of from Sgt Vansen - that way you could have a sort of “triumph to tragedy” roller coaster, where as from Vansen’s side there was almost a sense of… I don’t know, maybe indifferent satisfaction?

Nice work for trying something a little different. I think there are a few places where the tenses are mixed up but I suck at grammar so who knows :)

Well written and a good “descent into madness” almost gothic diary. I don’t think the theme came in particularly strongly, but an enjoyable read. Thanks!

Thanks for reading and replying!

Yep that’s correct! I didn’t want to be too in your face with the theme. But if I’m thinking about the lore for the human empire I tried to imagine the sort of thing a noble may see as a way to get a win over the guilds.

Thanks for reading and thanks for the feedback!

Well written and fun to read, but …. something is a bit fishy! :P

Nice work squeezing a lot of action and dialogue into the word count :) I didn’t see that use of “creative resources” coming, that was pretty neat.

I did have to re-read the first few paragraphs to understand all the action as it was quite dense. I think you mentioned on discord that this is part of a series(?) but if I think about it in isolation, I think the story may be stronger without Halfdan? That would let you focus on the relationship between Hrothgar and Unas and the banter between them (“I had hoped you would have downloaded some flying lessons by now” etc etc).

Anyway just my $0.02 - it was a really neat story and fun to read!

Neat idea. I poured just enough into blocking early on to avoid damage and the rest on myself. It got unbalanced pretty quickly :D

I’m surprised you don’t already know everything there is to know about whales! :P

Thanks!

I really enjoyed this puzzle game. There were some minor quality of life things that would have made the experience a little better:

• it needed a reset button I think,
• once I’d solved a level there was often quite a long wait until enough bits of treasure were returned. A “speed up” button would have been great,
• the “back to main menu” button in the dialogue box got me a few times, I expected this to be a “close dialogue” button.
• the game started before I could interact, which meant I felt like I couldn’t look at a puzzle and understand it before the adventurers started dying.

Overall an interesting idea, lots of puzzles (I got stuck on level 9) and very well developed given you only had a week.

Nice work, a very interesting take and the graphics and audio all fit the theme really well.

I would have loved the option to use WASD as well as / instead of the arrow keys and space.

Windows 10 version something something Firefox 128.0.3 (64-bit) AMD CPU Nvidia GPU

Impressively detailed and complex for a game jam. I have to admit I created a few circles and turned things on and off but have no idea what I’m doing haha

Fantastic and well thought out puzzle game. Nice ambiance and tonnes of puzzles. The mechanics were introduced at the right pacing.

I ran in firefox without any audio stuttering.

I did find a bug that if you use the hamburger menu to switch levels while a level is animating in things go pretty wrong and it gets stuck :D

What a really cool idea. It sounds great too.

I found one or two runs ended mostly because there weren’t any “movement” options in the upgrade screen so I had four or five attacks and only one move. It made it pretty difficult to avoid taking damage when there were big swarms of enemies.

Fun and unique!

Very nice graphics, and I loved the “drop into a new screen” animation for the character.

I got stuck on the second or third level because all the enemies despawned after about 3 seconds and I couldn’t progress.

For some reason I’m a sucker for these kinds of games so I played this one for a while and really enjoyed it.

I did have to mute the music at one point because it got a little repetitive, but reading other reviews it sounds like I should have stuck with it a bit longer.

There does seem to be an issue with Saturn, but I’m not sure its a balancing one. I had it upgraded so it was generating something like 8.6B / sec, but when it completed an orbit (after something like a minute) my “cash” only went up by about 40B. So this feels like a bug to me and not a balance issue?

A little more explanation about what moons and satellites and what each did would have been good, I’m still not 100% sure.

Some keyboard shortcuts for bulk buys would have been good too.

Having said all that, this was a very polished, nice to look at game and I really enjoyed it.

The art style is great and the warm background noise is nice too. I’m not sure if its me or the game jam time limits, but I clicked on the phone then couldn’t do anything and got stuck.

Cool to see a wiggly triangle mesh collider thing, that looked like a tricky technical detail. Thanks to Vrixyz I spawned outside but was was able to drive backwards and get into the canyon.

I think with a bit of work on the controller it could be fun!

Nice job and a very unique concept. Quite polished.

I did find planning was a little difficult given it was “double RNG”, i.e. what was on the circuit and where I landed. Despite this it was still fun!

Some keyboard shortcuts for the buttons would have been helpful.

I got 200k in one move on the “short mode” but it didn’t seem to end?

Fun game, I really like the premise and it was very satisfying to smash through enemies especially once I got powerful.

There did seem to be a fairly huge jump in difficulty on the Wizard Tower + lava level. I could basically one shot everything and clear all the other stages, but would die in about 1-2 seconds on these screens (at about cycle 30). Edit: oh and some of the collision boxes on obstacles seemed a bit too big?

A neat post jam addition would be a lot more “juice” and visual effects as you get more powerful, and some way to view your stats.

Fun entry though, thanks!

Great job on your first game jam!

I liked the “vibe” with the quirky art style and music. It was good to see another walking simulator in the jam too!

I’m not sure if I finished it - I seemed to get to a point where I tried walking off all the edges and it didn’t change screens again, but it wasn’t clear if this was the end or I missed something?

Lol, this was a very quirky game. I had fun.

It took me a while to work out the dash - i.e. I missed the line under the controls table in the description and couldn’t work out what I was meant to do for a while.

It was also a little tricky with the camera view to reliably dash in the right direction.

This was fun though, I enjoyed myself!

Cool game. It took me a little while to get the hang of the systems and work out how everything linked together. I also lost the first couple of play throughs while reading the tutorial, so it would have been nice to have the game paused until I hit a “start” button.

Other than that, I enjoyed building a little engine and turning the business around from “massively in debt” to so rich I owned about 20 people and sold enough alcohol to supply a small country!

I think this has the bones of a really fun strategy, and with the seasons turning it fit the theme well.

Neat idea! I liked the chill music and the gentle crackle of the sun. There were a few abrupt transitions between screens where the wrong level flashed up for half a second before being replaced, but a fun jam entry!

Getting strong “elastomania” vibes from the early 2000s. Cool idea, I’m not sure I made things any better with my A and K key mashing!

Great work, a really polished puzzle game with a tonne of levels. Fits the theme very well too!

One minor UX tweak would be that when you succeed in a level to show a “next level” pop up (something more obvious and with a bit more juice than just the green button) and prevent further inputs, otherwise its easy to think you haven’t finished yet.