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Buried's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visual Design | #1 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Engagement | #4 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Functionality | #5 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Overall | #5 | 3.560 | 3.560 |
| Representation of Theme | #8 | 3.300 | 3.300 |
| Gameplay | #8 | 2.900 | 2.900 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
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- I can't say I got far in this one, but the presentation was interesting!
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Comments
I liked the "vibe", the animation style and music and the setting described
Love the presentation and feel. I would love to see this expanded on with separate puzzles/ciphers that connect! I found it tough to keep the client open long though due to the extremely short musical loop. Even an additional bar would have gone a long way! I ended up "playing" the game mostly with the client closed. Super interesting submission!
Haha yeah that was a last minute addition just to make it not silent. You can always turn your volume down lol.
Really great vibe/visuals/music. I really tried to figure out the substitution, but it was a bit too tough. I imagine I just needed to figure out one word that I could latch on to but after trying to look for various keywords from the sticky notes and having trouble nailing anything down, I gave up.
Regardless, there was a lot here that kept me interested in figuring it out, I think I just needed something to be a little more obvious to get me started. Or possibly a simpler version first, to give me a bit more confidence about what information was important.
I don't even know how to begin deciphering these messages. I trust it is solvable. Love the atmosphere.
The high point for this jam, and I don’t think any jam will ever top it, was deciphering the messages in Buried, and then typing them as stories into Rotten Ink. :)
I managed to break the cipher, but couldn’t see what to do next. And the big purple message, it seems to be all gobbledegook towards the end…. but what does it mean?
Two technical gripes: It would be much better to build for web, and sometimes clicking on a thing picked one from behind.
But all in all, the vibes are great. And the opportunity to play with old-fashioned code breaking was just awesome, thank you for that!
One of the yellow sticky notes has a hint for that gobbledegook!
Ha ha! Thank you, I’m getting closer now!
Can I beg for one more hint? The gobbledegook uses 25 glyphs, but only 21 of them are knowable from the other plain-substitution text. I have a pretty good idea of what needs to happen next, but I can’t do it with any outstanding wildcards.
The glyphs in question, I’ve named them: TwoDots, BackwardC, Jay, and Staircase. Can you tell me which letters these correspond to? (or guide me to the hint in game if i missed it, totally possible!)
I believe those 4 characters can be found by process of elimination + some guesswork but I will hand check.
Edit: it should be possible to decipher without any additional hints (though not trivially). You can DM me on discord @somn and I can give some more hints (so that I don't give too much away here).
The visuals and audios are fantastic.
I thought I could get it with the transparent ones that overlay but didn't have luck at unlocking the machine. I almost missed that there was a lockscreen underneath everything.
Oops that transparent layering is a known issue. Happy to give hints!
I would love a hint.
The glyph language can be solved using only the glyphs themselves and some careful guesses. I'd recommend looking up substitution ciphers for an idea of how to go about that.
The mood the game sets is great, the different pieces your supposed to work with all looks great, but I'm really struggling with figuring out what kind of order I need to put them with. It might just be that I'm dumb and can't find the clues though.
Yeah it's a bit of a steep curve. You can solve the glyphs using only the 4 instances of glyphs that appear in the game, but it may require some research into cracking substitution ciphers.