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Sundown's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Narrative | #381 | 3.882 | 3.882 |
| Audio | #410 | 3.824 | 3.824 |
| Artwork | #826 | 4.118 | 4.118 |
| Creativity | #1331 | 3.941 | 3.941 |
| Enjoyment | #3737 | 3.118 | 3.118 |
Ranked from 17 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?
The impending countdown until nightfall is pervasive across Sundown.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Audio assets from Zapsplat.com
(Optional) What would you like to be called if GMTK features your game?
HouckDev
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Comments
a very atmospheric and intense experience. The screen shake was a bit too much for me, and so was the difficulty but I cannot wait for the post-Jam update to try it again. The Horror Survival Hotline Miami vibes were pretty incredible
I really love Darkwood and this reminded me of that a lot. It was really difficult to tell when I was actually damaging an enemy though so I kept dying over and over. But this has a lot of potential and I think the sound design is spot on. I really love how all of the game mechanics feel. I wish I could actually have a bit longer until nightfall to really sit with the world a bit before combat. But yeah, solid game!
Thanks for playing! Once post-jam swings around there will be an update addressing some of those difficulty issues and giving you more time to let the atmosphere simmer.
The art and vibe for this game is really good! It feels very scary and I like how dire it feels to get wounded. Kind of reminds me of a game I saw on YouTube called "Casualties: Unkown". Unfortunately, the combat feels a bit unfair as I couldn't figure out how to avoid getting mauled by 3 guys. But that's just life I guess.
Overall, good job!
Thanks! C:U was def an inspiration for the health system- I really appreciate just how dreadful not knowing the extent of your injuries can make things feel. The combat is certainly stacked far too much against the player in the jam version for sure, jumping the player with a full raid mid-day was definitely a decision that was made... The post-jam version will have a much more reasonable failure spectrum in that regard, giving you more options to handle fights and a smoother curve into learning to deal with them.
And thank you for playing the game on stream! Despite the game kicking you to the curb it was really fun to watch you play.
this is incredible, i’m honestly blown away!
the narrative is very well designed and constantly drags you along for more and the visuals are incredibly stylish
only hiccup for me was I ran into a bug that turned the entire screen black (bar some UI elements) after I tabbed out, restarting the game fixed it though :)
you managed a lot for such a short time and you should be proud, well done!
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
This is in a lot of ways the best of the dozen or so games I've played so far, the atmosphere is incredible, it does a great job of being mysterious and making you curious early on, the art and sound design sell that experience really well too, There's a really solid inventory and crafting system which seems like it does a good job of doing what the game needs without being overcomplicated, you can immediately tell a lot of work went in to this one and it feels super polished from the beginning. I spent way more time playing this then any other game in the jam so far because it did in an incredible job of making you want to explore the town and I love that they went for an extremely difficult game that makes you want to overcome a real challenge, but I think they may have gone a little too far in this direction. My experience after an hour or two of playing was that I was just starting to get the hang of the melee combat, which was also brutally difficult out the gate, immediately 2v1 against enemies who feel much stronger and take a lot of hits to kill, but then you very quickly start seeing enemies with guns as well, at this point in the game (basically the very beginning) on all my playthroughs the only weapons I could find were the lead pipe or baseball bat, and beating an enemy who had a gun using one of those isn't something I'm sure is possible, which makes sense, but also causes problems if the player doesn't have a gun. I guess the idea is you spend the countdown to nightfall finding weapons and items and then hopefully are equipped to do ok after that, but I was never able to find a gun or figure out how to survive against a gun using the melee weapons and that unfortunately stopped me from seeing most of what seems like a genuinely fun and well made game. I get the feeling if I gave it more time and kept looking around different places I would either find a gun before nightfall at some point or figure out how to survive without one but I think I have to move on to other games. I really do love the idea of a brutally difficult game like this but I also think it would benefit a lot from a just a slight ramp up in difficulty at the beginning or a little bit of onboarding for new players. I like the feeling of being thrown to the wolves in some ways and how the tutorial text even emphasized that but for me at least it was just a little too far in that direction, but for other people it might be perfect, difficulty is hard to get right largely because everyones ideal difficulty is different. But regardless a super fun extremely polished game that is well worth the frustration.
Thanks for checking it out and leaving such detailed feedback! I'm glad you liked it. The difficulty is definitely something I wish I spent more time tweaking, since a lot of it centers around game knowledge. You're right that the enemies with guns are supposed to be significantly more difficult to handle- I would have made them significantly rarer to encounter given a balance pass. The intent is that you'd have to find a firearm of your own to combat them- which you can find in specific locations (Gun store, church) or repair from one dropped by a enemy. I think for a post-jam update I'd include some notes and clues that can be found to hint at those spawn locations more, in addition to adding more ways to acquire them. More so a larger problem may be that I'm missing more ranged/indirect options for fighting enemies, sharpened stick traps, molotovs, electrified wire, were some planned options that got cut for time that would absolutely help deal with the difficulty spike that ranged enemies introduce.
And again, that you so much for diving head-first into the game, I'm glad you got some hours of enjoyment out of it :)
Interesting idea, but there's no countdown on the screen so it's a bit difficult to figure out how long you have until the dark
Yep! One of the main techniques I use to build tension is to obfuscate information until the final moments, so every choice feels like a risk. You'll have to instead rely on environmental clues (sunlight, church bells ringing, clocks scattered throughout the town, etc.) to make decisions.
Really cool atmosphere at concept, but I'm not really sure what to do when the entire town jumps me all at once when they seem to track you down from anywhere
Wow, feels like a full game, and a real world. I got jumped, and then next run I got sniped XD, curious to see how far the experience goes
Thanks for checking it out! I'm glad the feel of the world came across- definitely what I had the most fun building. There's probably a few hours of playable experience, depending on how quickly one learns the town across several runs and manages to repair the car.