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Why does the cat keep saying something about knowing that voice, over and over? Also, I cannot dodge enemies and still press Q and E. I am not getting any weapons early on in my runs, which seems to doom the runs when the starter weapon is so piddly. The active is piddly too, and it's not clear to me why it's an active.

I get the impression that the dialogue only got spammed during the tutorial, and it's also the only time any weapons dropped. Also, gold and kibble didn't drop, but shops did spawn, so that was confusing. This tutorial only serves to confuse, and it does so in several ways.

It's a good start, and looks cute but I have criticisms:

Around the time you hit wave 50, the repetition is way too boring. You're just waiting to be at the same point again, nothing interesting happens. Just grinding for crowns to get a little bit more damage and try again.

There is occasional stutter and it froze entirely once. Fortunately it saves a lot so I could just refresh. Just clicking around on the permanent upgrades screen will randomly freeze it.

Arrow rain does virtually nothing. Even if it did do something, due to the exponential nature of the enemy's power and the player's, it would just be useful right at the end to get maybe one more wave out of it. The same goes for the repair ability, except that one actually might help that one time. If I am still looking at the game by then.

I am never really a fan of economy upgrades. Not the ones inside a round and not the permanent ones. All upgrades boost your economy, economy ones just do it in the most boring way imaginable. It's also really unclear how much money to hold in reserve to maximize the money lender yield.

With the upgrade that gives me starter towers, I don't see any way to get cannon or frost towers ever again.

Is there a difference between castle health and wall health?

Neat and not too frustrating. A few times I regenerated my stamina by resting on something while tethered, something I would never be able to rest on if I had let go of the tether. That felt like a bit of an exploit.

I was bracing myself for her face to be hideous. Relieved to have a happy ending.

I don't see why, if they made the map.

My condolences. They should have uploaded to Second Life instead.

I agree with this. Very cute presentation, but contrary to the screenshots, "convex hull" is the only sensible shape. It would be more interesting if you could find some ways to encourage other shapes.

The most unrealistic thing about this is that the social platform died out. Habbo Hotel, Runescape, the first Everquest, Tibia, Second Life, they're all still around. Maybe you should allude to Google having made it, then I can believe it.

If someone is unconscious for more than a minute, you need to call emergency services. That person needs to go to a hospital. Any amount of unconsciousness from a blow to the head probably warrants seeing a doctor. You are perpetuating dangerous misinformation.

I know it doesn't seem of consequence what you portray in this game, but the harmful idea you can knock people out and they'll just sleep it off is already so widespread and we should be fighting it.

It also seemed very unnecessary to the story that she was actually unconscious and not just dazed or injured. Please change it. It was kind of an absurd sequence of events anyway.

Pretty slick. Comparing alternatives was a chore though, and many item properties were unclear. And flamethrower killed my framerate. It's not clear what I am meant to do on the game over screen.

It is completely unclear right at the start what to do. The cutscene mentions she got a book. Then post-cutscene she says she got a book again. Then the familiar tells her to find a book. There is no book. I did run into some Cyrillic interact prompt though. Never a good sign when bugs are easier to find than the basic objective right at the start of the game.

There is a book on the left but interacting it just magically opens and closes the door. I can do various things to the cauldron but everything tells me to follow "the recipe" and it randomly tells me I messed up "the recipe". I have no recipe.

This game exudes jank and I will not be trying again.

Chaotic, overwhelming, weirdly balanced. Loads of pop-ups that mean nothing to me. What is the point of storage capacity when there is auto sell?

Promising. I completely ignored the slot machine. I wasn't a fan of how each new material more or less obsoleted the last. The numbers (damage, income, costs) seemed a bit more exponential than necessary.

Objects are prone to disappearing. I somehow lost the carrot and the cartridge.

When LMB and RMB have multiple functions, they perform both at once, which is annoying.

It's a cool game. It ran well, despite large numbers of dropped items, and looked good. But I think the balance is not there.

What is the intent behind energy and days? Since refreshing energy is free, and the only cost that it advances the day, I vaguely tried to minimize the days to see if that would matter at all. I beat the game in 4 in-game days. All it ended up doing is deny me the "reach day 10" achievement. If we do not care about days, most energy upgrades seem irrelevant.

I put off buying the temporary buffs, since the currency for them seemed finite, but towards the end of the giant tree stage I realized that it was the only way to get some sort of area of effect to clear the trees in a timely manner. Plus I had so much currency by then. Then just buying "domino effect", and if I felt like making energy extra irrelevant, that one that does that, quickly gave me all the money to buy out every gold upgrade. With no upgrades to look forward to, I stacked the chain lightning with my other bonuses and the game was quickly over.

I did have to search for the last tree while the progress read "100.0%" so I wondered for a bit if it simply bugged our, but I did end up finding it.

I guess I would have preferred for all the crazy, temporary upgrades to be permanent, gradually-upgraded upgrades.

Aside from that, I think many of the costs mean upgrades come a little miss-timed to be relevant at times. I can't say much helpful about that, it is just a matter of tweaking.

I like the concept, and it ran fine for me in Chrome. But here are my critiques after playing the first three levels:

The controls are annoying at times. QE camera rotation is too slow to really want to use, I'd need that on MMB drag or something. Placing stuff is finnicky, and it's very easy to accidentally make barricades that let zombies slip by. It's kind of annoying and unnecessary that the things are placed at a fixed distance from the player. Rotation here could be improved too. If you do place a barricade unnecessarily, you permanently waste finite resources (until some upgrade).

You should really not be using Esc and F1 as binds in browser builds!

One time they ended up smashing my barricade. I guess I blocked the path entirely by accident? I didn't think I did.

I am not sure what the warning about gathering the objective summoning the horde is about. It makes a loud noise, but otherwise it doesn't seem to do anything special. I ended up over-preparing for it.

It seems oddly stressful that locations are not repeatable, so it feels like you may risk falling behind if not farming enough exp before leaving locations.  And then add permadeath to that. Although exp didn't really seem that important, so maybe it's fine.

I am giving feedback on the pacing.

I kind of like your cheese theory, but reflecting on the coffee, I think it's more likely the neighbour hid something in there, like a key. Not sure if it's relevant, but one of the announcement is also that the coffee machine is broken.

I liked this game when it was Reacticore, and I like the direction you are taking it. I always enjoy a good narrative environment around some silly progression game, and a good mystery too.

But, despite the environment being quite good, it was so underwhelming that nothing ended up happening. I guess this is just a teaser, and you have things planned. But the demo sets it up right at the start you will be leaving that cubicle, and it keeps just not happening. Eventually you even get a map and it still does not happen.

Maybe it's because I already played Reacticore so the progression in there held less interest for me, maybe, but I ended up frustrated with nothing really happening in the meta-environment inside the space of the demo. Even when we finally get the drawer key, there is just nothing in there that we can do anything with? Why bother?

Narratively, if you were aiming for "a growing sense that something behind the walls of TOPTECH Industries is deeply, profoundly wrong", you missed! It's obvious right from the start things are very wrong, because you're not allowed to leave the cubicle! This game spends zero seconds pretending anything is normal. And we've seen Severance.

I also enjoy the escape room genre, which the cubicle reminds me of, but nothing like an escape room ends up happening.

Again though, I am into the direction, and I think the environment you've made is cool. But you tease too much.

Just leave them. You don't need 100 coins.

Very cute! I wonder where you'll take it from here, though. Towards the end it already seemed so chaotic, with huge attack ranges and amounts.

Time-based temporary upgrades feel kind of irrelevant when the strategy is to take it so slowly. Like the temporary shield that is in right now maybe encourages you to go in and shoot a lot while it lasts, but then the ricochets are still around afterwards. But a ricochet shield could maybe last a number of hits instead of a number of seconds. And a weapon could last a number of shots.

If it's puzzle-like, you don't strictly need enemies. The goal could simply be something like shooting a tunnel through to a destination, while surviving your own ricochets that last indefinitely, or something. Not saying that is better but something to think about. Kind of a twist on Breakout.

I killed Grining Chad and the game crashed.

I do not see the point in upgrading the courier speed. And merchant speed caps out its utility pretty quickly, as the bottleneck becomes the delivery.

I liked this game.

I liked that the game managed to surprise by suddenly ditching the room formula.

Equipment drops seemed very uninteresting.

It's kind of weird that rubies served almost no purpose.

I found the skill tree oddly difficult to navigate. It could perhaps be laid out more orderly, and make it more clear which upgrades are affordable? I'm not sure.

Doesn't crit chance kind of work against Piercing Tip?

Doors only appear when they open, and then close before you go through. Kind of weird.

I agree with the comments about the skill buttons being in the way when you fight downwards in the werewolf place.

I noticed that it was often kind of easy to survive in the werewolf area, stamina willing, when the warrior died. He really rushes forward and makes everything more difficult. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, since speed is just as important as not dying, but it was funny.

Cute! There are balance issues but that is mostly a matter of data gathering and tweaking. I think some concept of queuing buildings and upgrades would make it feel less finnicky. And maybe increasing the cooldown on the lightning and increasing its power to compensate.

Cute game with potential. I see that you are on Steam now, and this is an old version, but here are my thoughts on this version anyway:

I think the resource management needs a lot of work. Energy reserves go up so quickly, and some days there isn't really even anything to do because of a lack of ingredients. I just end up dumping all my energy into plant XP. And usually just into a few plants, because ingredient values go up so hard that quickly the early game plants are basically irrelevant. I pick whatever expensive plant I have a potion recipe for.

It's kind of weird selling things is so all or nothing. If you simply never sell ingredients that you have a recipe for, it doesn't matter super much, but still. I want to hold things in reserve sometimes.

The shop seemed a little too simple, as well. You simply clear out your shelves, no matter what? I think you could greatly elaborate on that. Maybe a shop that is always open, and everything you have in there has its own chance of selling at the end of the day? And maybe having a greater variety of items means all sale chances go up (because more people visit)?

It would be more appealing if the game were structured such that all potions and ingredients stay relevant.

I wished potion brewing were more of a puzzle, with ingredients hinting at what they add to a potion, and potions hinting at details of how they work. To a degree, this is already in the game, but it's not consistent enough.

At some point I realized that potion prices are just twice ingredient prices, and potion recipe prices, as well as request payments, are twice the potion prices. This allowed me to work backwards from the price to figure out the ingredients of potions. This is not necessarily a bad thing!

Watering is kind of annoying. It's too complex an action to figure out which plants need it, and then to click their watering buttons. Unless I could have just let them dry out, then water. I never tried that.

It was a bummer for the demo to end like that. Let me go a bit longer and figure out the last potions, at least!

It's very cute that every potion and ingredient has its own sprites, the "normal" ones and the ones for being on the store shelves

This could just be a browser thing, but on a technical level I think switching scenes ought to be smoother. There isn't that much going on in each one.

Cute! I feel like the middle part was the hardest, with the braziers, because before that it's easy to keep the ricochets under control, and after that there are many health pick-ups. With how unpredictable the ricochets could be, and how the enemies weren't themselves all that dangerous, it did feel like the only winning strategy is to just not shoot that much.

If you wanted to expand on this, I wonder where you'd take it? I was thinking maybe some permanent upgrades, like a directional shield that also splits the bullets, or blocks you can place to alter the geometry, ideally in your favour. Maybe some enemies that actually put pressure on to shoot more. I suppose that goes against the game jam theme though!

The writing is also clearly generative AI.

Nice job! I got all the parts. It's a pretty small game, obviously, but I like the concept.

The main thing that undermines the concept somewhat, other than the lack of combat variety, is that really you don't care about almost any of the parts you get. Because once you have a decent build, most things are downgrades. And once you have a really good build, almost everything is a downgrade.

My gun: hand cannon, rail, one in the chamber, arc, sawn-off cap, laser pointer, dash loader, last word, vampire valve and overpressure.

I ran into a bug at the end where I tried using the new boomstick ammo instead of arc, and suddenly my gun just rarely hit anything. I could not find a way to kill the last few enemies, and died.

Charming game. I played in Chrome on version v0.4.3.5. Here are my criticisms.

I never like rapid clicking as a game mechanic, and I always try to see if I can play without it. In this case, that means relying on the miners and fighters. The miners do fine, but the fighters are almost completely useless. I ended up just using an auto-clicker, which rendered them completely irrelevant. I think if I had used it on rocks, miners would end up not so relevant either, though not as irrelevant as fighters.

Also, upgrading health of the workers didn't seem to do much, since so many things still kill them in 1 hit.

I saw the option to build a campfire early on, and never took it. Then the option went away and never came back. On finishing the game I went back to my save and then I saw 5 campfires in the menu.

Occasionally, miners will overlook a mining node, until ordered. One time, they wouldn't mine it even when ordered. That happened when all my miners were in the smallest room in the west, and I ordered them to mine the nearby blockage. Ordering them to mine a far-away blockage got them out of the room, and then ordering them to mine the original one worked again.

I never bothered with the buffs, since resources seem non-renewable but time and workers are infinite.

It's confusing that we need to place upgrades as buildings but it almost doesn't matter at all where we place them. The only thing that matters I suppose is putting them as far away from the front lines as possible, since they can be attacked.

I finished with everything explored and 29 lamp posts left.

I find the combat very unclear, even when not that much is happening yet. How much of my energy loss is from getting hit, versus just over time? Did I get hit? Why did I get hit? And then upgrades are very unclear as well. What is my current damage? Do I keep these items? What items do I have? Most of the upgrades just do not say anything about their damage or cooldown or anything.

For most of the game, I was beating 1-3 levels before running out of energy, buying some upgrades and starting again. But at some point, suddenly I could just keep going forever and made it all the way to 25 (the end of the demo). I think it was because of the upgrade that gives energy on kill. It certainly wasn't because of the companions because they just die.

Quite cute and I would like for it to be longer.

The way a building move's cost scales means doing many small moves is cheap but doing one big move (to the same final destination) is very expensive. I didn't really like that. Especially with ore being a non-renewable resource, and danger essentially scaling with how much I have mined out, it made me not want to waste any on a large move.

The check whether a building placement is colliding with a dwarf, at least when moving the building, is only performed once per movement of the placement preview. If a dwarf walks into it afterwards, it still lets me place it. Likewise, if the space becomes clear from dwarves walking out of it, it still doesn't let me place it.

I thought the digits were hard to read in the font.

It went fine in my case, but I wonder what would happen if someone breached an encounter before building a barracks? I also did not notice that I had breached an encounter for a while.

You should add an AI disclosure.

The goal of boxing it in was to maximize time to failure if I had to leave before it was finished. I see just now that someone else doing this turned out valuable, because I came back after a while and everything was overrun except the left edge, which was only clear because someone had cleared the left 1/3 of the map before.

But some hidden mechanic messed it up when I tried to box it in.

I was by myself on Heartland so I just worked on boxing in the center. When I was about 3/4 done, Imaginary Friend joined (could be a coincidence), and random bits of corruption started spawning outside of containment. Like, far outside of containment, usually in the same region repeatedly.

The Battlefront rounds start seconds away from defeat. The corruption used to be kind of splotchy, leaving large gaps, but now it seems every level only has one gap in the top left and everywhere else just has little holes sprinkled throughout that fill out in seconds. I couldn't stop our freefall at all and I was right there. I ended up closing the page for fear that just my presence was causing it to go out of stasis repeatedly.

I suspect the main thing that has made playing without purifiers more viable is that we dropped down a lot. The difference in corruption growth rate is immense. It used to be wall off or nothing, and I noticed it became much easier before these updates just from dropping down. I can't be completely sure but I think that's what happened. We might see if we ever climb back up that high.

I am foreseeing a lot of time spent stuck on Heartland. You need 3 people to be actively playing for several minutes to get past, when everywhere else 2 playing briefly at the same time is enough. And on top of that, you're not very likely to lose it either, with a corruption growth rate of almost zero if people managed to get the anchors down.

Now that we've gone up and down a bit, I would love to see a graph of wave number over time. That would also allow us to clearly see our records and try to beat them. And sort of see the story of our struggle. I don't know if any of that is recorded right now.

I think you literally just gain 10 per day that you play.

Strike seems to give 1 experience point per damage it does. It may do less damage because you already did some or because there isn't that much health left. Strike damage didn't seem to change with my level at all. It only changed with the wave level, to always do half the heart's health.