Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Tomb Service really shines with its strong art style and atmospheric presentation, including a great intro cutscene. The game is very authentic and well-structured, and has an engaging premise. The platforming controls feel a bit rough and could use more polish, which might frustrate some players. Overall, it’s an engaging experience with great potential once the gameplay is refined.
• "Solid escape room design with engaging puzzles and good use of environmental storytelling. The voice acting and dialogue add real personality, and the lighting creates effective atmosphere throughout the tomb. The back-and-forth between console and rooms creates a feedback loop structure, but not having the objects affected by the console in sight makes it tricky to understand what does what with precision. Art placement and usage works well. This demonstrates strong presentation skills, though the core puzzle communication needs clearer visual or audio cues to guide player understanding. This is a great example of a jam game. The concept is clear, the puzzle design is excellent in that it is pitched at exactly the right difficulty level for a jam game. The audio cues give useful feedback to the player on their actions and the result of their actions: this helped with interacting with the control panel in a meaningful way and learning what did what. The length of this game was also well calibrated for a jam game. It felt full, but not over-long. Some points for improvement would be the following: It halps to have the volume faders affect the sound audibly in real time as they are adjusted. Some games help the player to understand their affect on the game mix by playing example sounds from each category while in the audio settings and adjusting faders. Having a UI type click or smilar on each slider adjustment also helps with this. The scales puzzle can be bypassed: It is possible to get to the artefact on the right platform by jumping via the diagonal scales, without balancing them first. Finally, intelligibility is always a priority in dialogue design. It would be possible to sell the idea of the mummy's voice coming from within the sarcophagus while being less muffled and masked by the reverb. Excellent game, well done! Strong under every point of view: visuals, writing, sound and desing. It was not immediately clear that the voice was coming from the floating ""mummy"". The section with the multiple buttons and levers was probably too complex to be presented all at once and governing 3 different puzzles, I would suggest making the experience more gradual, split the control panel in multiple smaller ones, add a room or two if needed, to improve gameplay flow. The puzzle using ""light"" was great."