very eye-catching art style and creative application of the theme! i'm definitely impressed you guys managed to get a full options menu going in a jam game, that can be quite time consuming haha. i did have to play in windowed because the UI is a bit obscured at more square aspect ratios, and my laptop screen is 1920x1200, but it wasn't a huge issue

the gameplay is very satisfying! the animations for decaying plants are super smooth, and its fun to line up plants in a row :) especially near the end of a run, when you get to infect plants on diagonals, that's superrr satisfying when you get big chains of plants. i do think highlight spaces should be on by default as i feel it makes the game immediately easier to understand, i personally preferred it that way anyhow :P

either way, i had a fun time! the experience of your team definitely shows in this game, nice one ^^

This game looks really cool but I couldn't get it to run on my mac for some reason. Usually this is pretty standard when downloading software that isn't on the app store but the fix is usually to go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Scroll all the way down to the bottom where it'll have a warning about the unidentified developer and hit 'Open Anyways'. In my case, I don't even see that warning at the bottom so I'm not sure what's going on.

If you have any idea if this is just an issue on my end and there's a way to play it on Macs please let me know, would love to give this a try!

The game really makes you think about the next steps. It's cool when a developer achieves this! The graphics are also very nice. There are not enough shadows and some kind of post-processing. But damn, I enjoyed spending time here!

Great music! Great art and animation! Lots of mechanics packed in and very nicely polished.

I took me a little bit to figure out the strategy. I could have started with the smaller map size and highlighting, but I just jumped in. I think not being able to gain more than 100 HP became the bottleneck at the last stage. Luckily, I was usually within two tiles of something, though it sometimes took a lot of searching and some planning ahead. I liked that the world wasn't flat, but some of the larger differences in tile height added to a difficulty in playing, rather than just being a nice aesthetic.

Anyway, I scored 420 - I'm happy. I might try another round later, too. Great submission by a talented team!

Liferoot

• 3D navigation using the mouse inputs are fluid as hell. Very easy to look around—though I wish there was a pan function to better strategize movement. It happened a couple of times where I seemingly went past the world boundaries.
• The environment and plant generation is strong mechanical work. Good job!
• The all-important tutorial label is cut off past the bottom of the viewport (at least on fullscreen).
• Without a backstory or any type of player motivation, I couldn't really digest the gameplay, so initially just clicked tiles wherever available towards the nearest water source, and progressed like that. Once I figured out the idea is to do likewise and navigate adjacently to the required plants, this infused more strategy on my part.
• The jump in metrics is too abrupt, I feel, and it's difficult to get a sense of how much you're going to get taxed or incremented health-, projected decay-, and turn-wise.
• I wish some thought was put into what this world is, to more organically tie into the "Decay" theme. As it is, it feels very shoehorned in.
• The bright, cartoony 3D graphics and solemn music are very nice individually, but seemed a stylistic mismatch.
• Animation work solid! The way the herbs sprout from the tiles makes the game feel polished.
• Clicking "Setup" through the escape menu irreversibly forces the player to start a new game (was just exploring the UI).
• Like the font and style choices of the UI, though detest the awful template that's been going around on this scene for a while now (which shouldn't be allowed anyway, on the same basis that AI-generated code isn't permitted).

All-in-all, Liferoot is a solid effort by Godot Wild Jam veterans that makes up in style where it lacks in substance, and shines a light on the often difficult-to-achieve need for coherence. Evaluated separately, fantastic 3D graphics + animations, functional gameplay programming, and thoughtful sound are sure enough reasons to sample this submission.