I think you're being too hard on yourself. Even if it's not exactly how you imagined it, your game is fully playable, has a definite ending, and is quite fun. Game jams aren’t about making a perfect game, but rather about experimenting with ideas. If you’re still motivated, you now have plenty of time to polish the game the way you want!

Your game is also quite unique—the fetch quest genre isn’t something I was expecting in a game jam. I could even consider it a Metroidvania since you collect objects to unlock new areas, and some items are even saved permanently (the ones in the safe room).

It took me about an hour to play from start to finish. I got stuck multiple times, but I always had something to try, and eventually, I found the solution myself. The only thing that bothered me was the slow walking speed, as there’s a lot of backtracking. Otherwise, it was really fun to explore the map, talk to NPCs, collect new objects, and figure out how to use them.

I also appreciate the little interactions for things you don’t necessarily need to do—like consuming air or water multiple times. It’s technically useless, but the fact that there are unique texts and even a special game over for each is a great attention to detail!

I like the looping adventure idea a lot! Some parts like dialogue interactions and area unlocks could perhaps remain finished between loops, but that's more of a bonus for convenience than something that the game needs. I like the dream-like ambience that the music and color choices create, it sets a pace that doesn't feel too rushed even when the player has a time-limit. The concise level design is a good fit for areas that the player will revisit. The controls are good, and it's fun to ram into things with the dash.

Really good work! You've picked an interesting gameplay concept and put all of the right bits in place to make it fun across multiple loops!

Pretty nice loop-based sequential puzzle, overall, in the end. Having it be a dream loop is a good way to make it make sense that certain items would carry over, though it's not always clear what you'll get to keep. Like others said I found the music loop to be pretty atmospheric and fitting to this kind of framing. I agree that the time limit per loop can end up being kinda tight, though (and "you can't come back until the loop is over" could be read as kind of a lie, given you can pause and end a loop at any time...).

I did have to wrack my brain to figure out how to get to the ladder with free inventory space -- it makes sense, knowing the intended solution, that the pool water would make the water cup undrinkable and it might just get discarded, but i arrived at an alternate solution: fill my inventory up with books so the guy just gives me the card and then go hand the books off to the librarian to get the space back. It's nice to have stuff like that be possible.

Also, i just straight up forgot the guy in the library was researching crystals till i happened to talk to him again, so i was stuck for a good while on what to actually do with the crystal -- something that might make it a bit easier to narrow down the space of options is giving NPCs that don't have any dialogue a more de-emphasized color, one that's closer to the background. After that, since there's no indication that the door in the main room has anything to do with crystals, i just had to take a wild guess with my remaining time in the loop, but that was one of the very last things i did so the number of loose ends was very small.

I don't wanna end on a negative so i just wanna emphasize the puzzle did get me actually invested enough in solving to take the time and complete it. I could even see myself coming back sometime later to optimize for time / how many loops it takes to complete everything.

The unsettling music sets a really good atmosphere (idk if this is the best way to describe it), I like the vibes of this game, nice job.

I *almost* gave up there, but I took a moment to figure out if there were any NPCs or locations I could have missed and managed to get the final item. I think one or two NPCs could have had a better hint about what they wanted. One location I missed for the whole run until I ran through all the stuff I passed by and saw. However, the art was quite cute. Additionally, one of the puzzles had a nice cause-effect interaction. Finally, I could tell there was bigger ambitions, but burnout do be a bitch. A puzzle game is always a big challenge for a jam and you did pretty good.

I liked this! The aesthetic is nice, and while I can see where you wanted to put more effort in places I have to say just simply getting a game into a game jam is an accomplishment of its own, speaking as someone who failed miserably to do that last year and in many jams prior.

The time limit get-things-done-as-fast-as-you-can-while-unlocking-shortcuts-for-next-time formula is one I don't think I've seen as often as I think probably exists (although the only major recentish example I can think of that I've seen outside of other jam games is the second Turnip Boy game). I like the idea but the moving pace with such a harsh time limit did get a bit frustrating, especially as I was increasingly in the belief that I had to spend as much of the loop inflated as possible.

Full disclosure, I did give up trying to finish the game after getting the left-half of the pendant, mostly because I got stuck and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong after getting into the crystal room and not being able to interact with anything but the screen, and I couldn't figure out what to do with the hint about the observation room not being monitored. 

You seem pretty down on yourself from a lot of the in-game text. I certainly understand getting burned out on a game jam – there’s a reason the only thing I did this year was help a friend with minor development on theirs, rather than develop something of my own. But, in my opinion, this is on the high end of structurally complete, playable games that has come out of this jam (or its prequels!): a Fetch Quests: The Game adventure game that gives enough hints in its dialogue and environment design to make its puzzles solvable without trivializing them. There are fundamentally good design and world-structure-based communication ideas here that many game designers miss. This is an effort to be proud of.

I certainly understand regret over not finishing graphical assets out more – there are obvious missed opportunities for cutscenes, inflation state, NPCs, etc. – but this jam has a lot more games with visual assets and no identifiable gameplay than games with a solid core of gameplay and adequate but incomplete graphics. This is genuinely one of the stronger results of the jam. I hope the experience of rating other games will help you appreciate the substantial merits of your own!