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The REVISIONARY: Writer of Fate's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Relevance to the theme | #40 | 3.421 | 3.900 |
| Metroidvania | #44 | 3.421 | 3.900 |
| Enjoyment | #51 | 2.982 | 3.400 |
| Overall | #57 | 2.982 | 3.400 |
| Execution | #57 | 2.807 | 3.200 |
| Sensory | #90 | 2.280 | 2.600 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme interpretation and application
The game's visuals are minimalistic, generally lacking shading and only using detail where needed to make it look nicer or convey something better, allowing imagination to fill in the rest. The soundtrack and sound effects use an emulation of the old one channel PC speaker of many old DOS systems, but with a reverb effect added, to try to give the game a unique, distinct soundscape. The writing often leaves gaps to be filled in by the imagination so as to need less words to still say a lot, and overall tries to minimize the word count where it doesn't break a character's characterization too much to do so. Additionally, there's only one enemy type, one mini-boss type, and one boss fight, each.
Team/Developer
Happy Frog Games
Reference info
Discord: happygreenfrog
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Comments
The game was very clever and actually funny some times. Usually I don't like reading much, but this time I didn't mind. The writing just had something captivating in it. And the gameplay was fun, especially the scroll puzzles. Also I'm not really sure, but maybe leaving the default name actually helped me so much because I think I would be tired of writing it again every time :) Excellent game!
If you change the name, it actually defaults to whatever your current name is! You only have to enter something again if you want to change what it says. Had a feeling a lot of players wouldn’t want to change it every time, after all. And then I had a feeling some players weren’t going to want to bother, so there’s a default name to begin with because of that.
Anyway… glad you liked it!
Very nice idea! I liked your writing and narration, although it takes a while for the game to actually start. Reading scrolls to change the gameplay was a fun concept. Doing some graphics and sound improvements and reducing the amount of text in the beggining of the game will improve a lot the experience!
I also would be very happy if you can rate my game too, i am looking for more ratings before the JAM ends.
I had a rather stressful past 2 weeks as it happened, which was very unfortunate timing considering I had really wanted to rate games in the jam… I still have to actually go through my feed before I even can rate games of choice…
But, uh, I was hoping to address that later today, so… hopefully I can manage that later today! Apologies for the delay on things, I would’ve rather it been different from that but at least I can hopefully have time to address it today somewhat.
(As some important context, stress actually can cause me notable health issues, so sorting out my health on that was kind of important before I even considered it in the interest of not being overly harsh on games from being in a bad mood caused by all that. It just… took a lot longer to figure out a good solution than I would’ve liked. Was really hoping to have more time to rate games, but it is what it is, I should still have time to rate yours after rating a few on the feed at least…)
Oh right, and thanks for playing! Admittedly, I did already try to trim down the amount of early game text to begin with to just what I consider necessary for the story, but there might be a few parts that could still be trimmed slightly. Something I can consider if I have time to work on the game more after the jam.
A very cool and unique entry, it's always nice to see a bit more of a narrative focus! The graphics and sound are certainly very minimalistic, but they do the job for the theme and the setting. The enemies were also quite cool and unsettling, especially the big "spawner" type. The powerups were simple but effective, I liked the focus on climbing and growing/shrinking vines throughout the game, and getting a bit of a lore explanation for each powerup was a nice touch!
I quite enjoyed the writing and the story, it was definitely the highlight of the game. Although, I also feel like it tried to fit slightly too many things into such a short time frame between the reality manipulation, 4th wall breaks, the various plot twists etc. Also, I wasn't really able to find any of the "dark themes" that the page warned me about - though it's possible I simply missed something, as I definitely saw at least one book that I didn't quite figure out how to get to.
Regardless, I had a lot of fun with this game and I'd love to see you take this kind of story focus further!
Spoilers for the game: In regards to the darker themes… if one pays enough attention to the story, there’s implications that
SPOILERS
you're taking control of somebody (who may or may not actually be the game's real antagonist, depending on how you interpret certain plot beats) whose entire goal was very possibly implied to just be to have things out for their own twin and went out of their way to bend the reality of the entire world to their whim just to accomplish this. And mind you, probably could have just eliminated said twin from existence if they weren't seemingly trying to go out of their way to make it actively painful.It’s kind of easy to miss… multiple aspects of that though. This is, to be fair, kind of by design: I don’t want to take away from a given player’s own interpretations of the plot, since beyond some of the looser beats that I intended, the specifics are intentionally highly ambiguous, and even the looser intended beats I’m intentionally vague on since I think that makes it all way more interesting.
That being said, because I intentionally wrote it such that the implications can be quite dark if you read it certain ways, it’s in there as something of an abundance of caution.
…ambiguous writing is fun!
Oh! Right, I realize now I should also further clarify: Part of the reason for the warning is in case somebody not in the jam, but rather just familiar with my other games, stumbles into the game and is curious about it. Since a lot of my other games are a lot more tonally lighthearted, or broadly play out in a way that’s a bit more hopeful than this game is barring that, I felt a heads up would be appreciated by some.
Pretty good game. I liked that you start without a jump and having a limit on how much you can climb, I wish those 2 ideas were explored a bit more, seemed like an interesting idea. But they last like 2 minutes until you get the next upgrades that remove those limitiations, which is fine too.
I had wanted to do more with that at first, honestly! Just kind of didn’t have the time to figure out how to make the progression feel best if I was going to do that… that, and an optional sequence break I wanted to be possible with it didn’t quite pan out and was leading to too many issues with softlocks, and thus had to be scrapped for lack of time. (This game might very well have taken a whole week less to develop, and had more time to refine, had I set my ambitions lower and not attempted that sequence break design to begin with, and thus had more time to focus on making the jump take longer to get in the main sequence.)
If I get to update the game past the jam, I’ll see about restoring the originally intended sequence breaks that would make getting to progress considerably in the game without the jump or extended climb possible, since I think that alone would fix that issue!
Anyway, thanks for playing, I’m glad you liked it!
banger had fun playtesting enjoyed the story and atmosphere to bits and had fun with the puzzles and platforming :>
Oh! Thanks again for helping test it out! ^_^
The gameplay was pretty enjoyable and the running gag of re-entering your name was pretty silly. I still have no idea what’s going on in the story though (oh well). I quite liked the animations of the player character’s limbs, I found that very charming.
The map itself felt a little bit linear for a metroidvania, with very few places to go and explore that aren’t on the main path. I also ran into a softlock where I fell in a pit in the lower cave, respawned past the large enemy, hit the checkpoint just outside the castle by the robot NPC, and found I was unable to break rocks to progress, causing me to have to restart the game.
The game felt fairly fun to control overall, I liked the vine climbing especially. It was a pretty charming little game!
Oh wow, I'm surprised that I missed that softlock given how much testing I had going on this thing lol
Was nice to play this again and see the changes. I beat it in 58601 frames! The idea of changing the vines back and forth in the final dungeon was cool, making things feel more puzzle gamey. And what a twist ending! Main criticism I have is that the main character control doesn’t feel great, but the game seems to be more about the narrative and the ideas, so it’s not a huge deal. Fun game, very unique vibe.
Spoilers
Was there a point to the fine leading to the second castle that I missed, or is it just a neat little secret?...huh wait how did you spoiler mark that? Uhhhhh
...anyway, the spoiler marked thing is just a small secret-ish thing I decided to throw in.
Oh, you can enable “Prefer Markdown when available” in your profile to get some more settings. Very helpful.
Also don’t think I didn’t catch that Loss reference in the library…
Oh! Noted! I'll do that in a bit.
Also... heheheh, yeeeaaaaah I started throwing that area together for an easter egg that I'd been suggested and then I realized it'd be a great place to throw in at least one more while I was actually assembling it.
I had fun playing and liked the character and its animation. Every time I had to re-enter my name I laughed. Pretty cool game.