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Theme interpretation and application
You journey to the top a plateau in hope of finding treasure.
Limitation incorporation
We picked pie. You can find a pie in a hidden spot after finding the lasso. There is also a hidden pie recipe towards the end of the game. Both spots are reached through platforming.
Team/Developer
Acade and Peronb
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Comments
Who on earth in their right mind would ever interpret "left" and "right' to mean "backward" and "forward".
Visuals and sound design were good. A lot of the gameplay felt kind of slow and tedious. The lasso is funny and decently fun to use, but tends to only be used briefly while most of the gameplay consists of just slowly walking around. Which was still fine for the first few minutes as I took in the environment, but backtracking was a huge slog as I had to very slowly walk from one end of the main room to the other while checking every lassoable tree to see if it led to progress. Granted I think a lot of the back half felt worse than it might've normally just because I was still fuming over that puzzle solution - it really was a massive low point that dragged everything else down for me. I get that puzzles are difficult to playtest but oh my god I question whether any player would be able to actually intuit it and not just brute force which entrances the non-vertical arrows are referring to - which, doing so correctly requires that you even recognize the way backwards as a valid option, something that's deeply unintuitive with how the clue is currently written and I tried basically every combination of interpretations that didn't involve that before giving up and finding the solution you gave on discord.
The metroidvania elements felt mostly perfunctory and I got more of an adventure game vibe from this than anything. That's not necessarily a bad thing from a general design perspective but does make me wonder if a format that was either more linear or more open might've worked better for this had it not been squeezed into a metroidvania jam,. I docked it a bit on that category score wise, but not a lot as it does still have meaningful ability gates which is all that's really mandatory for jam purposes.
Hi, I'm stuck after getting the pickaxe and finding the note. I tried following the note's directions in the lost-woods-esque cave, but haven't been able to get anywhere. There doesn't seem to be anything else I can interact with either. (edit: could I please get a hint?)
The aesthetic looks really nice btw!
Thanks!
Yeah, the directions turned out to be way more cryptic than intended. We'd probably have added more hints or change it if we had managed to play test it before submitting.
Two of the pathways are more vertical, so the key is to think of the arrows in those terms.
Okay, I finished the game! o7
The puzzle's "right" and "left" were actually the opposite of what I thought "right" and "left" would be. In my head, I had it that "upwards" would also be "forward", not "backward". @_@
I liked walking around the environments, especially with the sounds for flowing water, squawking birds, and howling winds (edit: and the footstep sounds synced to the walk animation). Also, the 2 cloud layers with sampled noise + the sky gradient looks so cool. This atmosphere's amazing. (☆ O ☆)
I think my big gripes are with the lasso being jank, and feeling like there's not much to actually do with each of the abilities. Also, the lasso-reeling animation looks pretty morbid, it's like you're hanging yourself. D:
Overall though, I liked the game! The somewhat silly anticlimax for the tall-tale was a nice finish.
p.s. You might want to change your textures' filtering/sampling to "nearest" so that they look sharper up close.
p.p.s. The game "The Big Catch: Tacklebox" might be a good reference for grappling/reeling/swinging. (it's free!)
Liked the vibe and the hat of justice! That place though... it will terrorize my nightmares.
I love the environment and the lasso mechanic is a lot of fun! I got kind of lost at one point, but I enjoy the exploration!
Thanks for playing!