Thanks for pointing this out! We've fixed the issue in the latest update.
Jaco van Hemert
Creator of
Recent community posts
Glad you enjoyed the new update!
We're actively considering different solutions for the clicking problem (our clicking hands are also exhausted), so there is hope on the horizon.
And good points otherwise. We're working our way through the bugs and will think about these things going forward. Thanks for your continued Clown Hole enthusiasm!
Thanks for all the feedback! Balancing is going to be a big focus going forward, since we want the escalating power feeling of an incremental, but don't want things to get too trivialised later on.
And I'm glad you like the "no explanation" approach! We decided early on that we want the clowns being in the hole to just be a normal state of affairs, with no additional explanation needed, so it's nice to see this feels good to others as well!
I tried a few times, but everyone drowned each time. There was some degree of not really understanding what by moving around did to the ship, since sometimes it felt like it did nothing, or the opposite of what I thought it did, and sometimes it worked perfectly. Part of it could also be that the camera angle made it a bit difficult to just the angle of the ship? Not sure.
I did feel like there was no coming back from a mistake once you get further into the song, as any one tilt goes crazy in one direction, and then even correcting it just sends everyone flying. (But that might be me overcorrecting?)
The art is really charming, and the little things floating by were fun. Nice work!
It was quite hard for me to figure out how to do the wave surfing properly. I think a big part of it is that it's quite difficult to see when the slope starts going up, especially since the slopes are constantly changing. I eventually managed to fly long enough, mostly by judging based on camera angle. But I would still randomly misinterpret a wave's slope and slow down to a crawl (i.e. it was hard to consistently fly). Maybe if I had more clarity on when I was speeding up and when I was slowing down, it would have helped?
Then, I wasn't entirely sure how to destroy towers. I think you just sort of bash into them, but that doesn't always work, so who knows. I eventually got one of them, and it told me to go save a friend, but I spent a couple of minutes looking and couldn't find them. The towers had those green beams of light, but I couldn't find (or missed) the equivalent for the friends. So eventually had to quit it there.
I'll say that when the mechanics worked, it feels really nice. I'm wondering if being way more lenient on speed reduction would make this better; i.e. making it easier to do the thing that's fun. At least initially. But there's also something to be said for feeling like you're mastering the skill, so maybe not.
Anyway, nice job.
First off, the art style is really nice! (Evokes Sable, like Dee noted.)
Speeding around the map, especially with the smaller, faster objects, is so satisfying. I spent some time just going around the place for fun in between doing tasks.
I liked the setup, with the three objects you needed to collect to bring to the obelisks (?). Some notes on each of the three main puzzle bits:
1) The red one (Barracks, I think?) was cool. I liked having to get up with the floating cube, and it teaching me that mechanic very elegantly. Though I got to a point where I think I cheesed my way to the end rather than doing the proper solution (maybe?). I could only come up with three objects (the two red balls and the purple cube), but I needed four. I searched around and tried all kinds of things, but couldn't manage to figure it out. So I eventually let through one ball into the back area, and then went back for the cube, which will occasionally randomly bounce high enough to get over the fence, and finished the puzzle that way.
One other thing was that the big pillar thing I got from there was basically impossible to turn, so I ended up having to use the triangle relic to manipulate its direction to the right spot. (Don't know if that was the intended solution, but it was pretty frustrating, so I imagine not.)
2) The green one was a nightmare until I managed to get the little cube thing to start moving. It felt like a mercy put in for people who couldn't do the climbing thing, but I'll take it. Also loved how it felt to float around with the triangle relic thing; was very nice.
3) The yellow puzzle was the one I couldn't figure out. After some amount of zooming around, I found a bunch of yellow objects, but I was missing the last one. There was one I knew about that I just couldn't manage to get (the one on top of the pole), no matter how many times I tried. I *think* the intention is to go really fast with a small ball and then go out of that above the object and then go into it, but I couldn't manage it.
And then I got stuck in a fence and had to quit out.
Still, I had a lot of fun with this; good luck with the results!
Once you get through the first ritual stage (i.e. reverse time for the first time and then restart the ritual), it should remember that you've seen the tutorial if you don't close/reload the page. I.e. if you restart by going back to the menu in the lose screen and starting again from there, it should start a new attempt without the tutorial.
If it still shows the tutorial, that's a bug; sorry about that! Someone else mentioned this as well, so it may be something I missed.
The squids, yeah, haha! I bumped their damage a bit very close to the end of the jam, and never got around to really testing them again. So they may be a bit overtuned!
Good idea with the 1x10 card. It could even do only the micro-staggers and no damage, but go fast enough to stunlock enemies, which would help to differentiate it from the other two damage cards as well!
The rewind while you're dying was not intentional, but I did discover it at some point and thought, eh, I can probably just leave it in. It does give a bit of push your luck feeling, and the game isn't too easy, so a bit of rule bending for the player seems fine. Happy it landed well with you!
Thanks so much for the feedback and kind words!
Graphics are really eye-catching, and the impending doom of the shrinking visibility and audio that goes with it really works to get on one's nerves.
I was a little torn on the reduction of visibility, since it eventually gets to a point where the player can't really win anymore, since they can't see anything (unless they happen to already be at the right place). However, when I did finally make it to the end (try 3, I think?), the panic as the light got snuffed out but the continual upward movement really worked well to evoke the feeling I imagine you wanted players to feel. And that feeling when you see the end -- great stuff.
One thing I'd suggest is giving some kind of indication as to whether the player is still moving. When it gets real dark, you might just be swimming up into a ceiling, and there's no way to know.
Also, there were a few places where it was difficult to distinguish where you can and can't go; as in, it looks like there's a wall, but it's actually just a background asset. Having the background objects be darkened or lightened or something to distinguish them would be helpful. On that same note, there are a few places where it looks like there's a gap between two rocks, but then my guy can't manage to pass through; having that look impassable would have been appreciated.
Love the dwarf theme in this! The auctioning itself feels like it could be interesting, but not having any real recourse other than guessing to figure out when to buy hampers it a bit, I think.
I also would have liked to have seen prices change in the market over time, so you're always needing to check to see how things are looking. It feels like this gameplay could pair well with some kind of trading metagame, where you sell your goods to market. I.e. you buy out the stuff at auction when the prices are low, and then manage storage space to sell things when prices are high, etc.
Also, sad that the profit got broken with that bug. I also seemingly randomly lost at some point, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps also related to the bug?
Great point. The idea was to have things you need (e.g. ritual) attached to things you don't want (e.g. bigger monsters), which then requires you to get more damage cards, etc.
But at the moment the pairings are just entirely random, so I imagine the combinations that happen to come up will make a big difference in how necessary particular card pairs feel. So there definitely needs to be more of a drive towards the player needing to pick the things that push them towards engaging with the more interesting mechanics.
Thanks for playing!
This may be my favourite game of the jam so far. Amazing art, great use of the theme, good level design, and a really nice character controller. The SFX also on point.
While the character controller can be a bit frustrating at times, it actually added a lot to the platforming challenges. I was annoyed with it at first, but it kind of grew on me. That said, the bouncing off the walls part of it seemed a bit too punishing. E.g. it makes it really hard just to get up simple little ledges, which is very frustrating.
It took me a while to understand that the orange rooms noted in the "how to play" meant the rooms on the edges, which made me think I was going crazy, being unable to find any other bodies (because I was just carving into the centre, ha). Once I figured that out, it became more viable.
Also, I really liked the minimap being in the middle of the rooms in a sort of diegetic fashion; very cool!
The visuals in this game are incredible. Love the vibe and aesthetic.
I also really enjoyed the mechanic of the timed card playing. I would have liked to have more indication of what counts as a valid place to activate it, as it sometimes felt like I got it, but then it missed somehow. Would also have been cool to have a "partial" hit or something, where you get reduced effects ala rating how close you were to the center or whatever?
From one eye-based title font game to another, this was great!
I liked the mechanics in this! The switching of phases was cool, and the fact that you could store them for later is so nice. The shooting mechanics felt good, though the enemy bullets were perhaps a bit too big?
I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to tell when to head back; i.e. night caught me out because I didn't know it was coming. Not sure if it's indicated somewhere, but I couldn't figure it out.
That's strange; sorry the syncing messed up for you!
The one desynced thing I'm aware of is if you go through your deck really fast, you'll get the "the reversal spell is ready" message before the message telling you that you'll need to gather ritual to get the reversal spell, but it sounds like you didn't get those?
Thanks for playing, and glad you stuck to it so you could experience the intended gameplay!
Thanks for playing and the kind words!
And yeah, the tutorial also feels a bit too rapidly in succession to me too. Ideal would have been to delay the introduction of some mechanics until later so I could spread out the tutorials a bit.
Also, in terms of the discarding, it's the button with the arrows on the right side if you're still trying to find it!
Thanks for playing!
1 & 7 - Yeah, I think controlling the randomness of the shop is something I should have spent a bit more time on. Currently the only thing I'm modifying for the random is that the Lv2 cards only start showing up after the third (or fourth maybe?) time you visit. But yeah, getting a drought of ritual cards basically just dooms your run.
2 & 6 - I straight up just forgot to update the lose screen with different info when you die because of your tower dying, and didn't remember the cancelling of cards when I made the tutorial. Good points!
3 - Having some rare opportunities to get positive cards without the negative ones could be cool, yea!
5 - Currently there's two things that happen when time gets low: there's a ticking that gets faster in the music, and the timer shakes, and then eventually scales dramatically every second. I was a bit worried about it still being too subtle, as I'd also been caught out before. Should probably have some big gong or horror sting sound effect or something when you get to 5ish seconds.
I think the concept for this is really interesting, but the pushing control scheme combined with the incredibly sensitive physics made this very punishing. I wonder if having the player click and drag rather would have given more control over what's going on?
I suppose there's a bit of an almost rage game vibe if it's intentionally hard to control that could certainly play well with particular players.
Also, the art is really clean and nice to look at.
This is so good! Really enjoyed my time with it. I lost to the boss the first time, but in my second run I managed to eke out a win with just a sliver of health left.
Drawing the dice cards (or rather, not drawing them) was sometimes a bit brutal. I wonder if having the dice roll automatically every round, and having only cards the modify (and then obviously also rebalancing) would feel nicer? You could have upgrades then that lets you roll more dice per round, etc.
Loved the shenanigans you could get up to with the x2 and +1 cards, and the restrictions on attacking certain enemies (e.g. only evens) was really fun as well!
Because the cards discard at the end of a turn, and there's no cost to playing a card, there was often not much incentive for me to not just play out everything every round. Might be interesting to see what a card playing cost does to the game (even if some cards are perhaps zero cost or whatever).
I also would have liked to have seen some way to heal a bit. I know that hitting the exact number heals you by 1, but that feels kind of meh (in fact, it does feel a bit bad for putting in the effort to get the exact value for such a paltry reward). Maybe skipping a card could heal you? Or it's a separate thing that only happens every X encounters ala Slay the Spire? Or maybe you can have cards that use dice values to heal rather than do damage?
On that same note, I kind of wished I could defend somehow. I.e. when you get to the boss at the end, you basically just have a countdown of how many turns you got to beat it (which is just HP/10). So on my first run, I had like 9 HP left, so the fight felt very futile, because no matter what I draw, I can't beat it.
Anyway, great game, great art, and nice mechanics. Bravo!
Very cute art and animations; love the little waddle.
The control scheme takes quite a bit of getting used to, and it's quite difficult to control even when you do. This might be intended? (I.e. to make it a bit less precise.) But I did find it a tad frustrating.
Having the feathers float around (with very natural feeling movements, I might add) was great. Running after them in circles was really fun (and the waddle animation really sells this whimsical feeling as well).
I wish the sell values were noted somewhere. I.e. I want to know how the game calculates how much money I make. To me, it seemed completely arbitrary/random, where sometimes I'll get a bunch of money I didn't expect, or make almost nothing when I thought I had a good haul. (Also, the wait for the line-up of ducks to get my money was a bit too long, in my opinion.)
As for the upgrades, I didn't understand some. For example, the denser pillows one seems a bit counter-intuitive. If I get paid per pillow, why would I want denser pillows? Even if the pillow sells for more, I'll make the same amount. Unless there's a premium on top of that? Would be great if that was clarified a bit. Also, the waddling speed seemed kind of useless because I could already go incredibly fast, but that may be because it's played in a tiny window, so I can drag my mouse very far away from the duck.
Speaking of the tiny screen, I would have liked a fullscreen option or something, because the font is really small and also very stylised, making it hard to read in such a tiny window.
Really solid core mechanic that is expanded on with clever level design / puzzles. I had fun figuring out the right order to do things, and liked that the four guys weren't entirely interchangeable (e.g. for a timed switch, only the guy directly after the one pressing it can be the one going past the door).
I initially thought that skipping to the next character saved the time, but I figured out later that it didn't. That might be something that can be indicated more clearly via the things that happen when you press the button (e.g. maybe the time speeds up rather than just instantly skipping?). But it could also just me being a bit dense, ha
Insanely polished, and quite fun! I managed to get to the end with a random deck that got me some good stuff to start out with.
The combo system is pretty interesting; it added a lot of pressure to make decisions quickly, and mapping all the controls onto arrows/WASD (even the menus!) was inspired, since it created a very seamless UX.
I was a bit frustrated with being able to accidentally shoot myself with a fireball, or heal an enemy. I'm not sure there's anything to gain from being able to do that (unless there are some builds I missed?) so it feels like it's just arbitrarily punishing the player. I wonder if having healing always target yourself, and maybe having attacks with up attacking a random side would be a better experience for the player?
The enemy variety was great, though they all had so little HP that it didn't really feel like I needed that big of a combo to deal with them. Perhaps I'm misremembering enemies towards the end, but either way, I never really spent any effort figuring out who is the best enemy to attack at any given moment, except when counting number of enemies per side for AOEs, or the mirror specifically. I.e. it feels like the player should be rewarded for getting a high combo, such that they're able to beat enemies they couldn't otherwise beat?
(Also, art and music was incredible.)
I love the ragdoll Count; very cute.
I enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out what the best path was; initially I'd get stuck on a seemingly impossible path, only to realise that there was an alternative, so that was nice level design.
The game does strike me as a bit of a rage game, and it certainly brought that out in me, ha. I'm not sure if it was deliberate, but the bat is nigh-impossible to control, flying at insane speeds sometimes and barely moving at all at others. Perhaps part of the issue was also the controls? Having to have a hand on the mouse meant that I couldn't really mash the space bar as much as I wanted, which probably led to some of my lacklustre lifting power.
I got a bit too frustrated and quit before finishing level 4 or 5, but I had a good time when I managed to pull off a seemingly impossible task!
Great concept, and good execution.
I enjoyed the puzzle aspect, figuring out how the flow will go. I often found myself putting down random numbers and then adjusting over time, which I assume is the intended flow? In that, I really appreciated that the times on platforms were remembered into the next planning phase so I didn't have to memorise them!
I would have liked to have a bit more control over the number (i.e. finer than 0.5 increments, as I'd sometimes have a really tight jump that I'd want to make just a little bit easier by delaying it another 0.1 or 0.2 seconds.
Also, it would've been nice to know what target to shoot for in order to get the one/two/three stars; at the moment you're just sort of doing your best and hoping it's good enough.
(I also enjoyed that the 0.0 made it look like the platforms had little faces.)
The vibes in this game are great!
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what to do until I looked at the GIFs and remember that you said there were camera controls. Whoops.
Once I found the charger, what I was supposed to do was easy to figure out. I like the "try to keep everything afloat" feeling of keeping different things charged up, though I eventually rebooted with like 60% chance, because there's so many checks per battery that even with a fairly low chance, the odds are in my favour.
I will say that it feels like maybe there's too much time given to the player? I spent a lot of time figuring out what to do before actually starting, and still managed to finish with like 2 mins on the clock. Could probably cut that down a bit to add a bit of pressure?
Very sleek! The tutorial is quite elegant as well.
The gameplay has a very "one more try" energy to it, making me try more times than I'd originally planned (but also, I kept dying by running into things over and over, which made me think I could surely do better than that). My best run was only a couple of seconds over the 1 minute mark, which I imagine is not that great, ha
The controller support is nice, and I appreciated the little health pickups!
I'd have liked some more feedback about what happened when I lost (i.e. did I lose all my health, or did I run out of time?), but it's a minor gripe, really.
Also, the music is great, and the art style, while simple, looks quite polished!
Love the concept, and the art and animation really sell the vibe!
It was a bit confusing initially with the more complex items (like the wizard hat, I think?), but eventually I mostly figured it out. The game is also quite hard, so could probably use a bit of a shallower difficulty curve initially?
The enemies with the "shy" ability felt a bit bad, since it basically disincentivises looking at the enemy, which feels counter-intuitive.
There's also one level (1-3) that's very wide, so when you're at max light expansion, it looks like there's still more below to expand to, but there isn't. (But if you're missing eggs, it's probably the Egg Clowns, as mentioned.)
But as far as light goes, if you got the button that lets you end the level, it means you've reached the max light expansion level, so you're definitely not missing anything.

















































