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I did really like this! There were some confusion with the instructions and everything but the nice atmosphere in the game kept me hooked until the end! Maybe the battery could have had a bit longer charge but it wasn’t too annoying to redo the puzzles a couple of times to have enough time to hear the full voice line.

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I dig the animations you’ve gotten into this game! I did, unfortunately have to choose between dodging or shooting because of how my keyboard works so for most parts I was very slow and died a lot. Great jam-feature though that death didn’t really mean much in the end. Else I would have gotten nowhere!

Though it is a big ask for a jam, I would recommend key-rebinds or controller support for any game that has more complex input schema than just WASD/Arrows because you never know what type of hardware or physical limitations people have.

The narrator / texts were nice to and added a lot to what otherwise was a very linear game.

Since I had kinda given up on playing the game proper before even starting I didn’t look too closely, but one mechanic that could have been good was if you regen life if not hit for a few seconds. But with free respawns I guess that would not have felt like a big difference unless there was a reward for not dying.

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I really enjoyed playing your game! I got really stressful, which I think was the intent. It is sort of funny though that doing right is the most boring option and if you do bad things you get rewarded with funny stuff happening on the camera. So it’s not only fighting bad code but also your own bad impulses.

I did have some issues with how much the text scrolled in the messaging app making it a bit hard to handle. I do think the number of messages and lack of priority to the ones that were new was intentionally bad UX, so I’m not gonna complain about that. But if the scroll step was a bit smaller would have been nice. There’s also a whole lot of work that must have gone into those meme-texts and the UX in the app combined with feeling stressed means I really quickly skimmed them. Which is fine, but also a bit unfair to the work that must have gone into them. =)

I did have a lot of fun playing though, so not really complaining.

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Thanks for the detailed feedback! I do agree a way to progress dialogue would have been very good and I have that ready for the post-jam update.

Yeah you are totally right with regards to the ending. I wanted to make four dedicated endings and dragging out the process a bit after having gotten the room with the four creatures on the doors but with the cat having kidney stones (he’s much better now) and end jam fatigue I had to make it much simpler than planned.

Very happy you liked the game and the visuals and the riddles didn’t fully trip you over! The one you are referring to, the most difficult of the elemental rooms, you need to notice that the snail is rhyming:

IT MIGHT BE
WORTH,
MIGHT BRING
JOLLY MIRTH,
TO HEAD
INTO ????

The second part is realizing there’s only one critter in there so “everyone” is agreeing. =)

Thank you so much for your detailed review and in helping me get past 20 ratings! I’m very glad you liked it that much.

I agree that clicking to progress the multi-part bubbles would have been very nice to have.

Got to all three endings. I liked the pit the best, but something bugged out in the scene transition to the sad ending so i didn’t really get to see that one fully. The part I liked the most was the narration, though it was a bit hard to read the way it was presented. The platforming did feel a bit slippery and stuff moved super fast. After closing down the recording I realized that indeed the game scales incorrectly when in fullscreen so that the bottom gets cropped.

Very nice entry though!

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Cool stuff attempting procedural detective stuff. I must admit, I did mostly use the two same clues in playing on all sizes of manor. The following of their paths through the place was quite hard, and partially aggravated by their testimonies being generated and not always feeling very human. I did focus on shoes and being lucky murderer was always in room with someone else who refused to acknowledge their existence :)

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The game looks really lovely, very good art work and the premise seems nice. The game just seems to really struggle to run properly for me. The texts disappears in chromium and using firefox I get this error message:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in action number 1
of Create Event for object obj_camera:
Invalid surface dimensions
at gml_Object_obj_camera_Create_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_camera_Create_0 (line -1)

I did get to start interacting with one person but the game stuttered and then the game lost its text again. I’m actually not sure which browser it was I ran it in the end.

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So glad you liked it!

Oh no, I was so sure that I had completely patched out the bug that caused the next room to not be properly placed! You don’t happen to know roughly what you were doing when you triggered it? What number the room has that you were leaving?

This was a really great game and I was so close to just give up on it before I understood how it is actually played. I think the level design of the first part of the first level is criminal to the game ;) It taught me that the enemies shoot whenever, that there was no cost of me just shooting away and that I should just tank shots alternatively strafe run back and forth the corners. But that was more or less exactly the opposite of how the game should be played. Also since the enemies only count down when they see you, it totally broke the rhythm aspect of the game for me. I’m still a bit confused about how it is a rhythm based game really.

I think that first room might be the most difficult part of the two levels because it’s tight corners and two enemies in opposing directions. So small margins to play it right. And you might get shot in the back first times playing which totally messes up the understanding of how the game works.

When I did manage to figure out how the game actually worked I could play through both levels and had a lot of fun doing so. The art, the details in the environment and then voice lines it’s all really good.

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Very cool game and twist on the platformer formula!

I didn’t make it to the end unfortunately. I got stuck on a segment that just was a bit too hard for me, or I got lost with too few instructions on where to go next. Or both of them =)

The help text were way way too fast for me to read so I only managed to get half of, if even that, on most of them. I would recommend being able to re-trigger all texts prompts in the game and having them slower. For us players there are other things happening too and we are not always ready to start reading right when the prompt appears.

Really good jam game though!

Even though I still was quite a bit confused after having played it for a while, I still did enjoy myself and I think a big part of that was the charming character art and animations.

I think there were some UI and UX issues that made me struggle some, but it might also be that it is a quite hard guessing game.

Great use of the theme though!

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Such a treat waking up to a recorded play-through of the game!

The start-screen with mouse lock was a bit of a gamble and I was out of energy to make something proper :) but I should probably have also made it release the mouse when jumping and crouching too.

I’m not sure what I did say to make you think I was french, maybe something about keyboard layouts on your game? I’m Swedish with a QUERTY keyboard, it just has a bit of strange placements for some of the buttons =)

I’m very glad I did try hard to make the riddles easier, but it is very plainly so from your recording that at least as a jam-game I should have either tried to make them easier still or I not have kept the 9 required solutions in a row to trigger the ending.

Glad you enjoyed it!

I think you could get away with just adding WASD as secondary movement binding and not updating the arrow hints since that convention is very well understood. Otherwise you’d probably have to track what last input was (arrow or WASD and update accordingly)

Oh thank you so much for the detailed feedback! Glad you liked the bugs. Most of them are based on photos that my wife has taken. I’m glad you got to the end. I really tried to make the riddles not too hard and kept making them easier and easier but I might have a knack for making very hard riddles :)

My musician will surely be thrilled to hear that you compared his music to that in Transistor!

Glad the feedback and recording is useful! That’s the main reason I do record my play-throughs.

Yeah Abe was a really strong opponent and I agree it would be fun if Abe sometimes bugged out and misread the situation and did some outlandish claims. Maybe even that such events would be more likely when Abe is getting closer to win or loose.

I didn’t mind having loosing as the most likely outcome while playing. It was rewarding to get the cut-scene, just if I could have had a little more time to read what Abe said ._.

I unfortunately couldn’t get past what I’m guessing is the first level. The main problem I was having was the forced key-bindings. It really would have been great with WASD and perhaps also controller bindings for it. On my keyboard the arrows are split between two keyboard halves and it felt like playing a game with arms crossed, which made it much too difficult to me.

The art is really lovely and the general tone as well as the concept in the mechanics feels very fun. I do wish that the music would build up a bit more as you progress through the level and that there were some effects for NPC:s talking to me.

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Glad the video helps! That’s the reason I record them.

Really cool game! I did have to restart it though because I got the flashlight before I got the sneaker so got soft-locked there. I also managed to do stuff with the UI, I think was not intentional which might have been part of the problem.

I did have fun playing all the way to the end though so really good jam entry!

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Nice little dice-poker hold’em game. Played one and a half times until the game hung itself. It looked like some sort of rescue code after a roll didn’t settle within allotted time never ended the dice rolls. I must say that Abe is well written, to the point where I get suspicious of Abe actually not playing fair but knowing when I am bluffing ._. One thing that I think the game really needed was some more feedback in the resolution of each round. Maybe some reactions out of Abe when you call their bluff, fold or they call your bluff or fold. Some stuff too when you keep rolling. Both to flesh out their character but also as the game is right now, you are left with a “oh but what happened” after each round trying to figure out who actually one and by what means. I also wish the final scenes gave me a bit more time to read, I don’t know what Abe said.

I did enjoy playing it, so very good entry, especially for only using three of the days.

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I really enjoyed playing this game. It took a little while until I figured out some of its quirks. I think the round to round plays more or less perfectly, with some UX improvements. But I’m lacking some meta-progression and variation to continue for more than the half hour I played. Is there an overarching goal we are striving towards (i.e. paying back a debt, becoming most wanted heist lord) or is it a set number of heists we need to do? Also since the only difference round to round that I saw was increasing the quota, it does become a bit repetitive after a while and I think it would need some sort of variation in how the game plays every 3-4 rounds (aka boss heist) to mix things up and keep it interesting.

Very good jam game though!

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Thank you so much for the detailed comment. I particularly like the delay between choosing a door and having to walk the hall to see if you did the right choice too. Even though it caused me a handful of bugs having to cover all possible player actions ._.

I had fun playing this short game. I did find the pointing mechanic a bit confusing so I did spread the blame around a bit before finally managing to point where I intended.

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The introductory cut-scene was great. I did find the flashlight navigation a bit cumbersome and therefore resorted to map-walking to find my way between places of interest.

I never figured out the murderer / gave up on trying to solve the crime. In part because I never found the bottle and in part because I didn’t learn who (name) was who (profession).

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I enjoyed getting to the end. I didn’t even mind most resets, even though I’m not much of a rage game player. The one thing for me that was a bit awkward was the platforming controller and/or the collisions against spikes and other traps. I felt like the tolerance there was too precise and I had to awkwardly jump then press forward most of the time. So almost never got into a flow there.

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I really dig the style of the game, a bit biased since I also used a flip almost identical sprites technique in my games. It was a funny concept and interpretation of the theme to have the passing false or true info to your friends. It would have been more fun getting to the results of course.

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I got stuck and / or confused. It took me quite a while to figure out I could pick up stuff and it was spooky to have them appear on the table when looking through the mirror. At least that is how I think it worked.

I would really have wanted a full-screen mode and some clear indicator on what could be interacted with (like the cross-hair changing shape). And most of all I would have wanted to explore the house further, because I don’t think I got very far.

I really liked the visuals in this one, and the music fit very well to them and the detective game that it was. I didn’t manage to solve the case, but I at least did manage to process one clue.

The trigger area for interactions in the memories were a bit odd/specific where around the person you could start talking to them / offer food.

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Thanks for the thorough feedback! Glad you enjoyed it. The bug you got is very strange. I don’t do anything fancy at all, just reload the current scene. It does ofc cause a bit of a spike in the strain on the computer but nothing that should cause more than a little stutter. Might have been that the browser tab of yours was having a bad day :) or there’s some slow building memory leak in my code I’m unaware of.

The fight animation and the last part of when the thing is away was my definite favorites!

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I really like how your game is graphically presented. I managed to collect three out of the four shards before giving up. Some of the puzzles were a bit hard to understand and I feel like I got the king’s shard the wrong way.

I did enjoy playing though, but a bit bummed that I couldn’t get the hunter’s shard.

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The art style of this game is amazing. The writing was good too, and music/audio equally so. I did find the interactions - switching between E and space - a bit cumbersome and confusing. And I accidentally selected some dialog options from just trying to have the dialog typing out complete and it triggering choosing conversation option. Strangely the game got totally silent when de-focused and never resumed playing/unmute, so I had to reload the page and restart the game.

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Very personal art style and well drawn game! The music also swings. I like the combination of the childish style, the child telling the story so to say and how the detective aspect is quite casual in combination with those elements.

There were some problems:

• The kitchen table’s size and placement made me involuntary exit the kitchen more than once due to not wanting to walk into the chairs.
• There’s a UI bug in how the exclamation mark gets removed if you have two overlapping or close trigger areas and you walk from one to the other (discussed/shown in video)
• I couldn’t trigger the “who dunnit” part for quite a while and was about to give up until I accidentally said “never mind” to Eugene, I think, and that triggered it.

But over all I’m quite sure this is my favorite game so far. So well done!

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Glad to hear it helped! that’s the main reason I record my play-through and thoughts while playing.

I had quite fun playing this, though I cannot say I learnt much about the strategy of how I should place my stuff. But I also didn’t feel like it was the main focus, that its core rather was have things just go a bit wild and hopefully the ball bounces to where it needs to go. With that in mind it is a pity the UX was a bit cumbersome in needing to select eraser to remove and then bug to place again. Rather than having something like left/right click. Also I would have liked to play more with more of the critters, not just the beetles. I think it was only the last level that you let us place different stuff.

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towards the end I did start to use the notebook a bit and it did help some but still I was a bit confused at times.

This game looks very cool and has some really great audio, including voice acting. But I was very confused about the gameplay and the frequency of “You need some help” voice line got very annoying in the end even though the actual voice line/acting was good. There were a few UX aspects of the interface that left me quite confused about the strategy in the game.

But again, the game looks really cool.

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I really love the art style, and the atmospheric sounds are also great. I did end up confused about the instructions on some levels which cost a whole lot of time trying to find the right exit of the levels, so for me the game got much too long for a jam game and I had to give up after almost an hour’s worth of playing.

I think if there was a way to move faster in the maze it would have helped some but I also think at least some levels are a couple of times larger than they need to be to sell the point that you are not supposed to brute force your way through. Or some other mechanic to force the player to understand the riddles of the instructions. Which I never fully did, but partially did.

So exploring got a bit frustrating in the end. And I hope I wasn’t right on the edge of the actual exit when I gave up.

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thank you! And yeah it seems like our cat is recovering, fingers crossed!