using food expiration dates as a countdown is a really creative take on the theme and tetris-ing all your items together to find crazy combo builds is satisfying. the ui definitely needs a bit of love since it can get buggy with overlapping elements and placing larger things without a grid outline can be a bit of a hassle. good work!
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Shelf Life's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artwork | #1192 | 3.964 | 3.964 |
| Creativity | #1820 | 3.836 | 3.836 |
| Narrative | #2932 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
| Enjoyment | #3068 | 3.255 | 3.255 |
| Audio | #3685 | 2.945 | 2.945 |
Ranked from 55 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Your items have a Shelf Life! Food will count down each day until it expires. Manage your inventory to gain money and pay your rent each week.
Comments
Loved the spice in the worldbuilding, art is very cute and cool.
As others have pointed out, the bugs do bring the experience down a tad (tooltips, stacking items), and the lack of a visual grid can be kinda maddening sometimes. I also wish effect items were guaranteed at least one per shop cycle, but that may just be a skill issue on my part, as others didn't seem to have a problem with it.
Overall, good game!
This was really fun. I liked the fact that there were "builds" you could make (although sometimes it felt a little OP - I stacked a couple cauldrons and couple of the other one that gave me 2 Gold for Drinks with a million Lightning in a Bottle a few times for enough gold to basically get me through all three weeks). I really enjoyed the art and puzzle of rearranging things. The music loop was a little short/repetitive but that's super minor compared to how much good is in here. Nice work!
Honestly there's a lot of potential here. Figuring out which items work with each other was fun and the whole concept is cool.
The world is so fascinating! All of the items make me want to understand how they came to be! I really liked packing the items in the most efficient way, trying to find the combinations that worked best! Great work!
This is such a fun game with an amazing concept. I really love the art style.
Drink meta!
Great game, i have no notes other than maybe an outline where the item is going to be placed, i had a little bit of trouble with the bigger items snapping to places i didn't expect.
Expiration dates was not an idea i have seen or had, so very creative. Art and music was top notch. Overall a great submission. Awesome job!
Nice looking game! Grid underlay would really help to play :)
Interesting game idea that I would have NEVER thought of from the theme of countdown but somehow you have, this is really cool and i really like the art as well as the silly selection of items xd, really good game :>
Fun game, Maybe If I have an Indicator/Grid Like view in the shelf I'd feel better and know where to put. Still Enjoy it Love.
This was a fun one, and a great take on the theme! I agree with a lot of the other comments, currently the game is a little bit too buggy to reach its full potential. I personally had this happen (I choose to call it the Infinitest Sausage) which was funny, but other times mostly frustrating. At one point my tooltip also bugged out, and wouldn’t show me what the items in the shop did, which was also an issue.
Overall though, despite the issues, I enjoyed it a lot!

This has so much potential, I hope you'll continue working on it. I really enjoyed the puzzle overall, it was hard but quite rewarding. Only the UI was a bit of a hassle to deal with some elements overlapped/"fell off the screen! or weren't displayed properly (wrong discriptions for items). With some readability tweaks this could really shine! I had a great time already <3
Great concept and well executed! Could benefit from a bit more work on the UI like showing price and time left without needing to hover over the items.







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