What started as a charming, but regular dungeon crawler ended up really epic.

I broke the game first time by reaching the goal, but I persisted and completed it properly on my second try.

Graphics and sfx are really charming, returning me back to the era of early Windows games or late MS-DOS games. Stylistically it was very solid, I cannot put my finger on a specific game which it reminds me of, but there was a plethora of early Windows games which had high resolution graphics and limited palette and were probably drawn in the MS Paint :D

I didn’t get too engaged in the combat. Stunning, healing and feeding was the most useful options here, but it would be cool to see more variety in the attacks, so you can choose between something like increased damage, but sacrificing your defences for example.

The ability to go up and down a level made it even more interesting, but what really got me is the whole idea of the end game. I spent so much time thinking about what to do best there, which is really cool!

Here’s my play-through:

What do you do when you find two nice old persons wearing inappropriately short dresses despite them looking like 1950s grandmas? Why you kill them of course! As for the color scheme and the text I love it. I mean, no surprise that DOS-era text and a forced window is going to excite me :) All the numbers and stats, it just makes me happy.

I really want to try your game, but I cannot get it to launch on linux inside my linux vm using proton/wine. In the off-chance you have some idea this is what the logs output:

I liked the idea of being able to go up the walls and the whole interface was quite original.

I had a bit of a hard time actually starting the game because there was no indication of which key to press (or I was too lazy to check).

I'm not very good in this kind of games so I didn't go very far ;( but I'm sure there is probably some nice content further in the game :)

That music was unbelievably good!!

Great game thanks for making it.

Itch is flagging but I think that might be because of the batch file! I'm not sure if you could use a Jar launcher which might help?

Wasn't sure what to expect after itch did the dirty on you there, but this is great and really fun. Love the gfx especially.

I really enjoyed this game! The aggressive grandmas with their dogs and the stray packs felt just like my hometown
with one key difference: here, I can actually fight back haha 

Climbing up to the rooftop and discovering you can explore three different levels was such an unexpected and awesome moment. The game feels completely different before and after you find the map  like day and night.
I especially loved how unique the enemies are. The candy snake creatures, the boss, and the little mice all looked super cool, and the piranha was pretty funny. There are so many creative ideas packed into this.
It was also great that the characters actually talk to each other. It made the story feel more alive and well-developed. I've end up carrying about my characters and creating personalities and visuals for them in my head

Also i liked the music! Would like to hear it more during exploration time 

Thanks for this submission, I've had a lot of fun playing and my teammate watching me play :)

The time skip premise is super cool! I saw you mentioned Earthbound in a comment and it kinda reminds me of the vibe of the ending of that game, and some of its movie inspirations. The art is beautiful!

I fixed the timeline! I had some trouble with the difficulty, before taking advantage of the stun mechanic and moving more prudently. I really like that the minimap has to be unlocked even though I nearly missed it entirely, and not finding it the first time around is probably why I failed during my first attempt. I'm not sure if there is a way to increase your stats to make things a bit easier, but I was eventually able to win.

I really enjoyed the enemies art, it kind of reminded of a mix between saturday morning cartoons and Earthbound. The city is gorgeous, too. The contrast between the 2 time periods is great, the postnuclear design of the 2019 enemies does a lot for the ambient storytelling. The music is perfect for the mood of the game, it stopped playing at some point but that's minor. Cool story, too!

Out of curiosity, I edited my save file right after starting a new game to see if I could actually "reach" the stadium as the young selves, and I unlocked the "you broke the game" ending. That was a very nice touch, I laughed out loud!

It's always a lot of challenging fun to play your entries and this one was no exception. Great job to you both!

Every year I find your games to have beautiful art with a cool looking old school interface, and while I usually manage to get at least decently far in the games, this year I feel like I stumbled around and barely scratched the surface.

I definitely got that death in the first section is expected, but good god the rest of the game is brutal. My attacks seem to rarely hit and when they do don't do that much damage. I'm getting constantly surrounded by enemies, and even when I stun groups of enemies they still follow me around and damage me.

And I really love the verticality and variety switching from the ground to sewers and climbing on the rooftops. But I cannot keep track of where I am so I'm constantly getting lost, and I somehow seem to always drop off the rooftops to the same section I was just in. I know you mentioned in another comment there's a map available as a pickup, but I would personally be unable to find it even if you told me exactly where it is. And because I spend so long wandering, around more enemies hone in on me and I die. And since there's no way to bring back fallen party members it just got to a point where I felt like trying to progress was pointless. Even with the save system (which I really appreciate this game having) I just had to tap out.

But back to the positives, again the artwork is gorgeous! The backgrounds are all varied and very atmospheric, the characters designs are fun and feel old cartoons, and I really love the little details like being able to see in through windows when close up!

The music and sound effects were also solid for this type of game. Only exception maybe the walking sound effect, I thought it was a little too high pitched and loud, but it does at least sound authentic to the era.

Another very well made dungeon crawler, but the combination of gameplay factors just made this not a game for me I'm afraid. Good work!

Another game in this year's jam with fantastic 2d artwork. If i had to give score to the graphics of the game out of 10, i would probably rate this game 8 or 9 which is a quite big considering how beautiful the games look in this year's jam. It has this 80's game vibes but kind of has the mid 90's Window 3.1, Win 95 game look as well.  Sprites look high-res and sharp. I totally loved the enemy designs and their animations in particular. The enemy designs also have this cartoonish and humourous quality which i enjoyed a lot. The environments look also great. The building and their proportions in the 1985 city area reminded me of Bard's Tale games.  I love that you can walk on rooftops and can jump between buildings with a success roll. I like the  interconnectivity between the maps as well. They are divided to 3 layers. Rooftop, streets and sewers. Also i think enemies can follow you when you changed elevation too.

There is this exclamation mark warning which i think warns players that there's an enemy nearby. I think enemies respawn in certain intervals in this game and i have to say that i didn't find that very balanced.  Especially in the future levels i got chased by 4-5 enemies at once sometimes. Also i think in this game there is no aggro system  or anything like that. Enemies start to chase you immediately after they're spawned. So it seems very hard to avoid combat in this game. 

The main issue i have with the game is that i cannot progress in the game at all and that's mainly due to game's difficulty , at least for me. Too much encounters and too little resources, or i just suck at it idk. I think i played the game at least 4-5 times from the beginning. I died at the old lady and 2 dogs encounter at the 1985 level everytime. I can live longer in 2019 levels bcs we start with medikits and stuff and get medikits and stun grenades as loot. I managed to find the digital map as well. But again after a few encounters, i ran out of medikits and die. I couldn't find a way to revive KO'd chars either. Apart from that , i actually liked the combat system, i think it's pretty solid. You can stun enemies with stun grenades and stuff that is cool. Without stun grenades we got immobilize skil to stun enemies but it has a very low chance of success. It failed most of the time to my experience.

Overall it's a very charming game with gorgeous retro graphics. It is always a pleasure to play your game and seeing your entry in the jam!

Was very overwhelmed by the combat, but this is very neat! Very high concept!

I really like how this game starts with a backstory. The material appears to be basic and the characters, if I'm correct are used as billboards instead of actual models which is something I rarely see in dungeon crawlers.

However, I'm not a huge fan of combat randomization in terms of attack and defense. How do you land your attack if it is 60% chance as if I'm playing a card game? All my companions were knocked out minutes into the playthrough.

Finished the game.

The concept of the game was a bit hard to grasp at first but after multiple trial runs I was able to get a hold of things. I was particularily surprised by the verticality of the maps. Exploring was fun as it lead to me finding the minimap, food, stuns, the battery and a few other items. Combat wasn't too complex, but I could see it was designed in a way to stop people from just spamming attack, as there was a large emphasis on stunning/CC first BEFORE landing hits. 

The art is also really nice. It feels like an aethestic you'd see on an old educational game, I can't quite put it into words but that's the feeling I got.

If there were some issues, I would say that the finding the hidden walls without a minimap would be a headache (I found the minimap so it wasn't an issue, but if I didn't find it I probably wouldn't have finished the game). I also didn't realize that the food was basically an instant K.O. against enemies, I was under the impression that it would just make enemies move away for a bit instead of removing them entirely, at least from what I read in the description.

On a side note, not exactly sure how the pathfinding worked for the past version of the group when time travelling back. I assume that those signs you pick up could do something? But I never figured out how to utilize them properly before the game ended. I also got a bit confused by the two groups on the map and was wondering why my controls weren't working (I was looking at the past group moving around and thought I was controlling them).

That being said, really enjoyed the game overall. Good job!

The concept behind this is incredible, quite abstract and especially hard to grasp early on. I think there is the risk than in a jam context that it might get a bit lost.

The art is absolutely gorgeous, and the sounds / music all fit together very nicely. I found the combat extremely tough, such that ended up in a save / load loop where I just couldn't progress. Not entirely sure where I went wrong in that regard, but I was getting absolutely smashed and burning through all my resources in a couple of fights before being sent the the start screen for another go :D.

In that regards, I think a slightly more gentle introduction into the combat systems would have been great, even to just help the player understand the 'correct' way of doing things. I'm a bit gung-ho, full attack, so these issues were certainly self-inflicted, but even reverting to trying to stun and CC I still struggled.

I would very much have liked to have completed this, so if I'm able to better understand how things work i'll be sure to come back. But the 30 or so minutes that I did see, were absolutely fantastic. Thank you.

Interesting concept. I tried mapping it out, but even with that I had a hard time grasping what to do and what was happening. I think a map would be useful for this idea, and maybe even have the younger selves show up so you know where they are, and in that way help them to their goal. I did finally reach the en, but I dont think I did much more than to place the sewer in a reasonable good spot. 
Anyway, Nice little game!

Such a fresh concept, and amazing enemy variety! The layered temporal and spatial gameplay was very hard to get my head around without a map but it was a fun set of systems to wrangle with. I think I managed to get them roughly halfway across the map?

I wish there was an option to see/follow your younger selves without breaking causality.

The enemy sprites remind me of 90s cartoons in a really enjoyable way, I enjoyed getting lost in the map and exploring the different levels.