Incredible take on the theme! This is so creative and well designed and also really enjoyable! I love the style of the art, the sound design is very very well done, and you've incorporated some really great narrative elements into it!

The game was also easy to get into and the difficulty was really well balanced! My only piece of feedback is that the order of the speech bubbles was a tad confusing - it would've been good if the non-speaking character's bubble went away after they said their line. Aside from that tiny little thing though, I'm beyond impressed!

Honestly, I haven’t fully understand the gear mechanic yet, but I’m super drawn to the gear-based gameplay — there’s so much potential there, really interesting! The art style and overall theme are super charming and totally drew me in. It remainds me of a game series called "Amateur Surgeon", though the core loops are pretty different. By the way, if you spend too long on a level, the BGM plays through once and doesn’t loop back — not sure if that’s a bug?

i had to stop at the mayor, sorry :( i got stuck and i couldnt figure out what i was doing wrong… that’s not to say i dislike this game, i genuinely got stuck for like 30 minutes and i have so many games to play i figured itd be best to go to the next and maybe come back later!

that said this is a really interesting and different puzzle game from the other kinds, its fun stacking up gears together and making a path to the core, and the narrative really helps too! its exciting to get new clients and see what they’re about, it gives the game a nice bit of extra depth. i’m a big fan of when games are diegetic and there’s an extra reason for doing what we are doing. dialogue mid-level was a nice surprise, too! i haven’t even mentioned the art and the music which are both FANTASTIC, but the other commenters beat me to it!

criticism… i think the tutorial being outside of the game is a little rough. i do like how you introduced mechanics slowly. i kept coming back to the tutorial to check what the new mechanic did this time. but i think it couldve been done in a way thats a bit more natural, like explaining during the level. having the tutorial image be a “cheatsheet” button in-game could be nice, too! also, some of the puzzles were a little tough to figure out what exactly you needed to do. the other one i got stuck in was the couples one with the person on love, but eventually i found out that for some reason my previous attempts didn’t count, so when i redid it and pressed the button it suddenly worked. it mightve been a glitch? speaking of bugs, i somehow managed to put a piece outside of the screen! its not an issue though because we can restart the level no problem if that happens!

TL;DR an improved tutorial in-game and clearer goals would do this game wonders!

by the way, how’d you manage to do the custom fullscreen button?? that’s so cool, i didn’t know you could do that!

Interesting little puzzle game and very unique art style! Did you draw the artwork on paper and scan it in or did you use digital brushes that look like pencils? Game was surprisingly laggy for me sometimes, no idea what kind of calculations had to be done in the background. I liked the story framing, though I often found it hard to read the dialog while I was focused on solving the puzzles.

What an astonishingly beautiful entry. The hand-drawn art is genuinely some of, if not the best of the Jam, and gives such a weight to the mechanics that so elegantly curve up in difficulty over time.

Speaking of weight, the narrative element: such a touching, creative presence throughout the whole experience; the inevitability of the damage to the heart and the effort you make to mend is both touching and relatable.

Fantastic title from a great team!