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Swing's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Community's Voice | #150 | 2.767 | 2.767 |
Ranked from 30 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Creative Vision / Rationale / How Did You Incorporate the Theme
Swing is a short action-narrative game about maintaining connection at a fragile threshold.
Inspired by the theme image of two hands almost touching in a space without clear time or place, I framed the game as a dream-like memory space where emotions are constantly reconstructed rather than clearly recalled. The swing became the core mechanic because it strictly follows physical rules — it must fall back — yet always gives the illusion of breaking through. This ongoing motion serves as a metaphor for “maintenance” rather than resolution, similar to a heartbeat or life-support line.
The act of pushing is both mechanical and narrative. The mouse cursor is designed as a pushing hand gesture, and the player’s repeated actions represent effort, care, and resistance against separation. Enemies evolve from small disturbances to abstract, symbolic threats inspired by medical imagery, reflecting pressure, illness, and overwhelming forces that cannot simply be erased.
Dialogue and roles are intentionally ambiguous, allowing the experience to resonate from multiple perspectives. The game avoids clear answers, focusing instead on sustaining a fragile connection through repeated, imperfect actions.
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Comments
Hey! I had to zoom in to start the game, but I hit a bug where the swing wasn't showing up at first. The visuals are really nice; I liked the effort put into the dialogue and the narrative's creativity.
However, I struggled to understand how the swing mechanic actually works. I wasn't sure if I was doing it right, or if the browser zoom was preventing me from performing the correct mouse movements, so it was hard for me to judge the gameplay. Overall, it’s a very nice entry for a jam!
I almost gave up on trying to play this game because at first I could not figure out how to get past the main menu until I read another comment here that mentioned that zooming in on your browser helps a bit. Overall this is a cute game with a very cute art style. I enjoyed the character design a lot. While the clicking mechanic was simple enough to understand I felt that the feedback you are given as a player that you are making progress or even affecting the world at all is very lacking at times. I was also a bit lost as far as what the story was trying to convey to me as far as the overarching story goes and never really understood what the larger realistic hand represented. Overall I think this is a good entry to the jam that had an interesting take on the theme.
Struggled a bit with the swipe actions (dont know if it's because of the screen ratio or browser version) and failed so many times in the swing-attack motion during boss fight hahah, but glad I made it to the end! Woohoo!
I really like the way the narrative is conveyed and promoted through the “pause” in this game. The pulse signal was especially impressive at the beginning, and I loved how it was called back again at the end. Expanding this foreshadowed pulse further or more frequently in the whole game might potentially strengthen the emotional impact of the ending.
Vibes from the art are very compelling, but I too got a little stuck by how the game seems to not show the bottom bottom, text, or even the swinging girl until I zoomed in on my browser window, and even then, I couldn't get it feeling like a true full-screen experience. I wasn't sure how many times I needed to push the swing to shake the cats away so I wish there was some indicator that I was making progress and it wasn't just a bug?
The screenshots clearly show there is more to the game so I wish I could've accessed the rest of it!
Tried to start the game not realizing that the start button is at the edge of the screen and there is no full-screen button. The story is interesting, but I wasn't sure who's talking sometimes, maybe that's intentional. The instruction was hard to follow at first, but then I could make it through the early game. The battle sections are long, because I wasn't so accurate and not sure if I could aim better. And then I completed the game.
I got stuck in the scene with the city on the background and the hand at the bottom moving back and forth. I tried clicking pretty much everywhere on the screen, as well as dragging the mouse around to mimic the motion the other hand is doing, and nothing seemed to progress me forward.
I'm probably missing something obvious, but would have been nice to have basic instructions on what I'm supposed to do in the description