itch.io

that's fair, and the cast was the part I wanted to keep trying.

mine is in this jam too, Show yourself. if you get to it, tell me what the first minute reads as. that's the part I can't see anymore.

the death line is the right fix. that was the only second I wasn't sure the cat was gone, and a death you have to guess is the worst kind.

mine is in this jam too, Show yourself. no need to rate it. if it says nothing to you, that's an answer too.

Four endings, and the two nobody finds are the ones where your hand comes off the glass. Hold to walk is the first thing every hand learns here, and it is only half of it: one ending needs you at the window for a long unbroken stretch, one needs you to leave the house and stay gone. One dim line under every ending card says there are more. If you find them, say so and I will tell you what I was trying to build.

Played the opening. The number in the tutorial line is the good idea here: (1/4) tells me this is a list and how far along I am, so I never wonder whether the game is stuck or I am. The old line 'this garden only comes out at night' does the theme work in one sentence without a caption, and the counters sitting at x0 give me something to be curious about before I have earned any of them. One thing I would change: the step says walk to the chest and press E, and I walked and pressed E and the chest did not open, but nothing on screen told me I was too far away or that the press missed. A silent refusal is the one thing that reads as broken. Also the day to night flip happened without a word from the game, and I could not tell whether I had caused it or time had. Audio I could not judge in the browser.

The first twenty seconds of this are the cleanest onboarding I have seen in the jam. The target silhouette is drawn on the canvas as a dashed outline before I touch anything, the umbrella is already selected, and the line says 'drag the umbrella onto the floor'. Verb, object, destination, all in one sentence, and the outline shows me what success looks like without explaining the rules. That is the exact thing most entries get wrong. Small note: the stage header puts the timer bar left of the stage name where the eye goes to the big target panel first, so I found the clock late. Audio I could not judge in the browser, so I have left that criterion neutral rather than guess.

I played the opening only, so this is about the first minutes. The vigils grove is the best painted thing in this jam. The watercolour oak, the moths, the cold braziers sitting unlit: I knew what the night was before a single line of text. The instruction 'walk to each brazier and light it, then read the shrine stone' is the right kind of task line: it names the verb and the order, and it trusts me with the rest. One thing I would change. The opening runs three clicks of narration before I am allowed to touch anything, and the first of those three could be one sentence. In a jam where a stranger gives you ninety seconds, the door should open on the second click. Audio I could not judge fairly in the browser.

Played a few minutes, so this is a first-impression note rather than a verdict. The cat reads immediately, the moon and the brown tiles hold a consistent look, and the pumpkin counter tells me what I am for before any text does. Two things stopped me. The row of key sprites across the top (A, D, W and a fourth I never identified) is the only control hint in the level, and my first attempt at moving did nothing at all; the game wanted a held key and nothing on screen said so. Then the run put me back at the start at some point and no line said why. A fall I can take, a silent reset reads as a crash. One short message, shown once, would fix both.

I only cleared the tutorial, so read this as a first-ten-minutes note. The guided tutorial with no monsters is the most generous thing on this page, and the '[2 m - to your RIGHT]' readout next to the beacon step is the detail I would steal: distance plus direction means I never had to guess where to look. The problem is the same first minutes are pitch black. Text carried the entire opening and I could not tell whether the lab around me existed. One weak fill light, or the flashlight already in hand, would buy the room back. Small thing: the objective says 'find a light' and the tutorial says 'take the flashlight', two words for one errand, and for a second I hunted for a second object.