so i got addicted to this holy shit

I could compliment legitimately a dozen things about this -- the stat building, the short-but-effective character writing -- but I'll just say that your grasp of hypno writing is PHENOMENAL. Little snippets like "made the bat look way too close for way too long" or "trap her in a tunnel of light" hit so hard, and so often, that they became the main draw of the game. I wanted to get all the endings, because I could see all the writing. I wanted to gather all the thralls, so I could see how we entranced them.

This game held me longer than literally any other game in the jam, and it's all thanks to the writing. You absolutely fucking nailed it.

(Also, the mechanic of luring thralls to your lair and draining them for less and less until you get one final boost is vv good and resonant and again reinforced by REALLY GOOD WRITING HOLY SHIT)

big fan of roguelikes and grid mazes and cubes.  not so big a fan of doritos, as discussed elsewhere, but c'est la vie.

you have requested: Beam

this is one of those games where i don't know if i would describe it as "fun" and yet i kept playing it anyway, which makes me wonder what i think "fun" is just as much as it makes me wonder how else i might describe the game.  wandering around mysterious hallways is compelling, after all.

i think my problem is that i hit the point where the game abruptly transitioned from a Space into a Spreadsheet.  i know the library always needs Transform at the end, so if i set foot in the library and i don't have Transform, i shouldn't even bother.  this meant an immediate pivot away from exploring and into doing as little exploring as possible, which is perfectly rational given that exploring drains my Juice.

but then it struck me that i wasn't really making many meaningful decisions, either, which is a classic balancing issue in roguelikes.  (by "classic" i mean i think about it a lot, not necessarily that anyone else talks about it.)  i can't see beyond the Power Cubes, and i can't tell what a room is (or if it's a room at all) before i go into it, so all i can really do is bumble around and hope i get something useful spawned.  if i find a stairwell then it's most efficient to take it immediately rather than explore the floor, since the cost for doubling back is twice as high, and there are ultimately only a finite number of steps i can take per game.

by the end i had the sense that the main cerebral element was trying to remember if i'd already gotten the whatsit from the coffee shop or if i'd be wasting N steps + 30 * M cube breaks checking

on the other hand there's an obvious correspondence with hunger in nethack and other, ahem, serious roguelikes, but that's a bit different since it mainly serves to drive you forwards -- you can't twiddle your thumbs indefinitely because you need to, at the very least, go find a lichen you can eat.  here the Juice Meter serves to limit how much of the game you can play at once, which is normally the function of health, a resource that's usually easy to lose and very difficult to restore.  in a way it's sort of both, a slow (or fast) drain that sends you inexorably towards a soft game over.

the only way to avoid it is to do nothing.  i wonder what metaphor might be found there

i think this would probably work better, as all roguelikes would, with more variety -- different possible gates on different rooms, perhaps (or is that equivalent to shuffling the order of skills, as you've already done?), or just a much wider selection of rooms and little guys, six of which are selected per game.  i ran through three times and i am feasting on the same raccoon my grandfather did.  he's like an heirloom except i have to luck into bumping into him.

and the luck factor is what gets me.  i assume you have to collect all six guys and their thingamajigs to win, but i have almost no influence on whether that actually happens.  i can't do anything to increase the odds of finding the thing i need to finish the game.  completed rooms will happily spawn again with no external indication that i've already beaten them, so i suspect i could traverse an arbitrary number of floors without ever winning.  i can't even meaningfully plan a route through a floor.  the only real decision i can make is to minimize how much Juice i spend while investigating as many rooms as possible, which drives the experience into minmaxesque territory pretty quick, and i don't think that's good territory.  somewhere to visit, not to live.  especially since the optimal thing is to avoid breaking any more cubes than necessary, and now i don't even get to watch number go up.  i love when number go up!  let me number go up.

i wonder what would help here.  i have all these vampire powers but none of them are "see beyond a cube" or "listen for heartbeats on this floor".  but sprinkling in gameplay upgrades amongst the skills would make the narrative skills feel worthless, i think.  tricky.

anyway

the narration is interesting but feels like it's balanced on a knife edge.  on the one hand it's deliberately compact, crammed into a fixed-size box, in the sort of self-limited way that encourages imagination.  on the other hand the rest of the game is so abstract that for the first ten minutes i was completely baffled by it.  i hadn't noticed the room name in the upper-left corner, so i would approach what is clearly a Video Game Lock and be told about a person doing an action with an object in a place, none of which were present anywhere.  it read like a surfacing memory, maybe?  only a couple delves later did it click that these were literal things happening, abstracted away so many levels that no visual cues remained.

i feel like there must be a middle ground between drawing all of that stuff and showing a literal lock, and that i've played games that employed such middle grounds, but i can't remember any of it right now, so, that's not very helpful.

but i think the real lesson here is that there is nothing to fear from vampires, because if they so much as jog a hundred yards they will collapse from exhaustion

The fact this is built from scratch is mind boggling, holy shit. There’s a charm around the game that really drew me in and made me want to understand the mechanics.

I struggled to figure out how to remove blocks (and agree with your musings in another post that audio feedback on that ala Minecraft mining would go a long way to educate the player). I also can tell there is strategy to be used here, but can’t quite out the logic behind it.

It’s the little details that I come back to the most - the different characters all have great personalities and I wanted to find them all. Also the effect on the walls as you move through the level is really unique. It’s a fascinating piece!

It was unique and capturing, also it's easy to pick up and hard to put down.
I have no idea what part of the core loop of the game is so addicting for me but well done.

Charming, unique, and (fittingly, perhaps) sucks you right in until you wonder where so much time went. It echoes the frightening yet alluring danger & calculated charm of vampire fiction. That it's built from scratch in a custom engine is even more impressive- it feels like a bite of what's to come, but a thick, satiating one. 

Love the abstraction and the classic dungeon delve feel. Enjoyed the feeling of collecting thralls and cruelly using them up to go further and enjoy more little bits of writing as I dove deeper and deeper. I felt like I was being treated to little charming crumbs of the world scrounged from the cryptic depths. Tight, solid, and strong

It's out! Thanks for your patience.

ACK! You'll probably note you can't play this yet. While the submission is up, this is still in playtesting, so I haven't made the page public yet.

Come back closer to March 1st and you might have access!