itch.io

This is a neat game structure, and was really fun! I was a bit confused on the puzzle design, though: I finished the game relatively quickly, without engaging with seemingly most of the mechanics in the map. I used the device to get the security code, but never used it. I never even got a keycard, let alone upgraded it. I wasn’t able to find a fire extinguisher, but luckily rushing to the captain’s office the long way quickly enough was enough to catch a glimpse of the override code. I then rewound holding the battery to duplicate it, powered the machine, and entered the code. I expected there to be some other layer that would make use of the rest of the map, but there doesn’t appear to me. Still, I had a good time with this!

I really like this concept! I agree with others that the pause ability was the only useful one for the most part, though. Except for the level that more or less forces use of fast-forward, all the levels seem easiest to complete with pause; slow motion is just a less effective version of it, and I can’t see any real use case for rewind. If considered as a game about the pause mechanic, though, this was pretty fun, and had levels that used it in a bunch of different ways. Nice work overall :)

This was great! The number of levels surprised me - I particularly liked the one where you had to return to the start while possessing the fireball-shooting soul to complete it. The difficulty balance is a bit off, though… the two levels directly after that one, for instance, were so easy as to hardly be levels at all. I also never used the close-range possession, as it didn’t seem to work for me the first couple times I tried it; though, luckily, that didn’t seem to slow me down enough to matter. The game looks great, though I might turn the gamma up a little, as I had trouble seeing the ground sometimes. Great work overall!

Curious, what input device were you playing on (keyboard or gamepad)? If on gamepad, what gamepad were you using? If there’s an issue preventing diagonal movement for some people, I’d like to fix it!

Oh wait, you’re right, there is a screenshake! Not sure how I forgot about that when commenting. Disregard what I said about that, then :)

This is ridiculously polished and content-rich for 96 hours. I’ve played all the A chapter levels and several of the B chapter ones, and that alone was more content than most puzzle games I’ve seen submitted to jams. The levels feel fairly designed while still posing a challenge, and the art and music are great too. Honestly, this feels like it could be a solid commercial title with just a bit of extra content (and maybe a basic story of kind). Fantastic work.

This is a lot of fun! My best was 314, though I’ve only given it a few attempts. Generally it wasn’t too difficult to stay alive, but if I got caught on some moss or something and got hit, I found it could be hard to recover. I never really used the dash - the double-space binding for it felt uncomfortable to me, and it didn’t seem to be all too necessary for the most part anyway. Perhaps the game used arrow keys / Z / X or similar as bindings I’d find it easier, since I generally dislike playing platformers with WASD (that’s up to preference, though, so I don’t fault the game for it). My only other piece of feedback is that the game feel could probably stand to be improved somewhat; adding more sound effects, and maybe some screenshake when getting hit, could help add feedback to the player’s actions. Nice work on this!

I like the pixelated aesthetic here! Gameplay-wise, though, I feel like the game never really found its footing. You’re technically on the clock, but the time given is so excessive the only way you could reasonably run out of time is by leaving the game running in the background (provided it doesn’t pause when you do that). The rooms are randomly selected, but there are only maybe 10 or so of them, so you notice repeated rooms quickly. There’s seemingly no fail state, so the gameplay ends up as just running forward and occasionally jumping or crouching. I’m not sure what the countdown at the top of the screen did at all. There’s a solid start to a game here, but I think it needs to try to find more of an identity than it has right now.

Neat game! The color of the map changing on each attempt is a nice effect, and the random events add some much-appreciated variety to each run. I wasn’t able to complete the game, unfortunately, but I gave it a few tries and had a good time doing so. The furthest I made it was a section with a bunch of platforms leading upward: I made it there twice, but kept falling off and losing too much time. Nice work on this :)

This is a great concept! The art style is also very striking. I think the game doesn’t quite meet its potential, though - the first level does an alright job at it (though I ended up killing the mark with electricity by accident when trying to hit them with a bullet), but the second level is just a linear series of events you need to get the mark through to kill them at the very end, which I found less interesting. There’s a solid game in here, though. A polished-up version of this with more involved puzzles could be really fun!

I wish there was more of this, because this is a really neat structure for a game! The art style and perspective are interesting; they make it feel like I’m playing with miniatures or something. A more involved version of this, maybe with light puzzles of some kind, could be really fun, though as-is this game feels more like a proof-of-concept than a full experience.

Had a good time with this, though I’ll admit I was hoping for a more puzzle-focused experience rather than the platforming-focused one I got. The levels were well-designed for the most part, though the last level (particularly the second half) was a bit too tedious for my liking; doors the earlier levels would usually be open by the time you naturally got to them, but in the last level you sometimes have to just wait in place for them for 20+ seconds, which isn’t especially engaging. Both halves of the last level also use a structure where, each time you hit a new button, you repeat everything you just did again with an extra step, which gets repetitive quickly. Otherwise, though, I quite enjoyed this! I like how some levels became effectively mazes you had to find the right sequence of button presses to get through. Nice work :)

This is really impressive! The mechanics here are simple at first glance, but give way to a lot of depth. None of the levels felt superfluous, which isn’t often the case in puzzle games made for jams (at least in my experience). The game is extremely polished, too: the controls feel great, and the graphics are clean. The only issue I had was that occasionally some countdown lengths felt like they needed to be fine-tuned somewhat, with me having to wait a second longer than what felt natural or whatnot. That kind of thing isn’t objective anyway, though. Great work on this.

Really enjoyed this! The levels were well-designed (though you can skip most of level 5 by jumping around the corner after the first yellow collectible), and the controls felt nice and responsive. The level previews/fly-throughs were a fun addition, and the music was great too.

A couple notes:

• The ability info cards probably don’t need to show up every time you play the levels they’re contained within. Otherwise you have to keep dismissing them on each attempt.
• Completing level 5 still gave me the option to proceed to the next level, despite there not being another level. Clicking the button led me back to level 1.

Nice work on this!

Thanks for playing! You can dash with left shift / right trigger, which should help.

This is really fun! There aren’t many mechanics, but they all work well together. Sometimes it felt like it wasn’t possible to defeat all enemies in the early levels, before getting any bomb upgrades, though I’m not confident on that (either way, money isn’t difficult to get, so I could just heal after those levels). I made it to level 13 on my best run. I will admit, though, that the game started to feel repetitive after a while. I think that if my run had gone much further, it might have stopped being quite as enjoyable. Still, nice work on this!

This feels really polished, and seems to have a lot of content judging by other people’s screenshots! The art and music are really charming, too. Try as I might, though, I haven’t been able to complete level 5; I just can’t figure out how to start the level with enough time left to allow me to complete it, even if I complete all the previous levels near-perfectly (to my knowledge, anyway). It seems almost frame-perfect, though logically I know it probably isn’t, given that multiple people have done it. I enjoyed what I played up to that point, though! My one criticism is that the heavy screenshake when the timer is running low makes it really hard for me to concentrate on the platforming and get my bearing after level transitions - perhaps that’s part of the intended challenge, but I thought I’d mention it.

There are some neat mechanics here! Unfortunately I didn’t get to see much of the time mechanic, since I couldn’t figure out the “Ashes and Regrets” room for the life of me (I’m wondering if there’s just some means of interaction I’m missing, but E doesn’t appear to do anything in that room…). I enjoyed what I played up to that point, though. There were some minor graphical glitches, but otherwise everything seemed to be working fine. Nice work :)

Unfortunately the build uploaded here doesn’t work - the tutorial is almost completable, but for whatever reason you can’t pick the stick back up after using it to cross the last gap. The “play” button on the title screen plays the intro cutscene correctly, and appears to load me into the game proper, but returns me to the menu shortly after. The mechanics here are neat, though, and I enjoyed the tutorial! The voice acting is a fun addition. I wish I could play the rest of it.

Neat little game, especially for 24 hours! It’s kind of like a micro version of Yahtzee. I liked the rotating selection of music during play. I do think it was perhaps a little too easy, though: I played it twice, and won both times without much of a sweat. The game seems to be almost entirely up to chance, so there’s not really any strategy to employ. It also seems to be biased in the player’s favor, given that the opponent doesn’t appear to ever use abilities. Maybe a hard mode of some kind might help keep things interesting?

This was really well designed! It had just the right amount of levels, I think, and the difficulty curve felt good. Some of the later levels took some planning to complete, which was fun. The pixel art is charming, too.

The only major issue was the lack of an undo button; in the earlier levels, it was no big deal, but by the last few (much longer) levels it started to become a nuisance when a single misinput meant I had to restart the level from the beginning. It wasn’t enough to keep me from finishing the game, and it’s an understandable omission for a jam submission, but if you do a post-jam update at some point I’d recommend adding one in.

One of my favorites I’ve played this jam! I have to echo others by saying this is very reminiscent of OneShot, to the point I’m surprised you haven’t played it - though you definitely should! I see the Yume Nikki inspiration, too, but the puzzles and writing (particularly the ending) are very OneShot-esque.

The puzzles here were fun; the final one was tight, but I really liked how it required knowledge of the map layout to complete. My least favorite puzzles were probably the seven-segment ones, if only because I didn’t immediately intuit how they worked and so got stuck on them for a while.

A couple bugs I noticed:

• On my first loop, I completed the left seven-segment puzzle right as the timer ran out, triggering a restart and the hint cutscene at the same time. This resulted in the player being invisible and (seemingly? It was hard to tell, though) being able to walk through walls. Returning to the starting room fixed it.
• Time appears not to progress in the rightmost room with the second seven-segment puzzle. I’m not complaining, though, since it let me figure out the puzzle without rushing!

This was fun! I liked figuring out what all the abilities were as I went (though, what was the point of the flowerpot…? I never quite understood that one). The key switching, though, I wasn’t sure about. It added some extra challenge, I suppose, but more the frustrating kind of challenge, rather than the fun kind. I think the game would’ve still worked fine without it. The level design was solid overall, though some of the later levels devolved into waiting around for the right transformation - they seemed to be on level-determined cycles rather than being randomly selected, luckily. Nice work overall!

I love the aesthetic of this! I don’t see adventure games often in jams, which I think is a shame. I had a good time with this game, but my main criticism is that it seemed a little unfocused. It felt like there were two games here: the watch-fixing puzzle game (which was fun on its own - it seemed almost too simple at first, but the additional mechanics added later resulted in some decently tricky puzzles!), and the murder mystery adventure game. Those two sub-games were both well-made and enjoyable, but they were never combined together in a way that justified them being in the same overarching game. This was still a great time overall, though!

(Side note: is there a way to verify whether we’ve solved the mystery or not? I was expecting some kind of test to prove my knowledge at the end of the game, but unless I missed something that didn’t happen.)

Whew, this got pretty difficult toward the end! I’ll admit I was a little confused at first, when there wasn’t any active threat - if I were to offer one piece of criticism, it would be that the tutorial section went on for maybe a little too long. That’s a minor issue, though. I had a good time with this, and enjoyed the challenge of the last few levels (they started to feel a little repetitive by the end, but were still fun to play). Nice work!

This was really fun! Though the platforming was occasionally a bit tricky, the game ended up being almost a kind of puzzler, which I hadn’t expected. I liked how some levels had multiple routes through them, so that different combinations of upgrades could be used. The art and music were quite charming, too. I do think, though, that the game ended a bit abruptly; the dash had just been introduced, and I found it more difficult to beat the final level with than the speed boosts, so I didn’t even really get a chance to use it. Even just one more level serving as a final challenge (maybe a longer, scrolling one?) would’ve done wonders, I think. Still, this was a great time! Nice work.

This is a really neat mechanic, and the game uses it in a lot of interesting ways! A couple of the later levels became a bit too precision-based, I think, but luckily it never got too bad. The rewinding can be a bit stuttery and slow at times, though I can forgive that for a jam game, and it works well enough to complete all the levels. Nice work!

This was great! The handling was solid, and I loved all the different mechanics. It was fun to see everything come together at the end. The alternate routes through the levels were also appreciated, and add some replay value. I just wish there was some music, though that’s an understandable omission for a jam game. Nice work on this.

Short, but fun! Level 4 gave me a lot of trouble for some reason (it seemed extremely tight), but otherwise it was easy enough. I agree with others about the timer, but otherwise this was well-polished - the controls felt good, and I like how each level’s layout is built around its corresponding 7-segment digit. Nice work :)

You say in the game you can’t design puzzles very well, but I think this was actually quite well-designed! The difficulty curve is a little uneven, and there’s still a lot of room to explore these mechanics beyond what the game does, but the puzzles all felt fair, and almost all of them introduced some new mechanic or way to use an existing one. Nice work :)

This is a really solid start, especially for a first game! I do wish there were more levels, though… the last level was both unusually easy compared to the one just before it and didn’t use the flipping mechanic at all, and then the game ended unexpectedly. Nothing wrong with a short game, of course, but I think one final level to test the player’s skills might help the ending feel less abrupt. Additionally, though this is a small complaint, the “FLIP” prompts are probably unnecessary past the first level, since the player probably understands the mechanic by that point.

A small piece of advice, though this is somewhat up to preference: I found it a little awkward how all the game’s bindings were on my left hand. Shift to dash especially was a bit uncomfortable for me - it’s common to bind actions to Shift in 3D games, but for 2D games I think having actions controlled with the opposite hand as movement is more ergonomic. Perhaps J/K could be used for jumping and dashing? The common arrow keys + Z/X scheme could work as well. Just a thought.

This is quite a well-designed puzzle game for only a few days! The difficulty progression felt fair, it didn’t overstay its welcome, and it didn’t introduce so many mechanics that it became overwhelming. My main criticism, though, is that the countdown mechanic felt somewhat ancillary. The game was mainly focused around the two characters and switching between them, which I have seen elsewhere (Heroes of Sokoban has a similar conceit, for instance). This game is at its best in the few levels where the countdown mechanic is used in an interesting way, like combining keys. Boxes with countdowns weren’t really used for puzzles at all, which I think was a missed opportunity. This is a good game overall, but there’s definitely potential to go further with it.

Great game feel on this! I only made it to floor 2 before dying, though I was playing on touchpad so that’s kind of on me. I didn’t go for another attempt, though, since I admittedly was starting to find the gameplay a bit repetitive with only two enemy types and seemingly no different room layouts. I enjoyed what I played, though!

(Also: this might just be my display, but the game is really dark for me. I can hardly see the walls. It didn’t cause issues for me during gameplay, but did occasionally make it hard to spot exits.)

Love the 1-bit aesthetic! The controls feel great too. I did find the progression a little confusing at first, though that was probably because I neglected to read the itch page before playing; I found all the buttons really quickly, and was unsure when I’d completed the game. Is the “thank you” message the end? I’m assuming so, since I can’t find anything else.

There’s a solid core of a game fighting to break through here, but the execution is frustrating enough that I unfortunately wasn’t able to make much progress. I think I understand how you’re supposed to play - bring upgrade cubes back to increase your max life, then use that life to explore further and repeat - but the amount of mashing and waiting required took the fun out of it for me. Exploring is the fun part of the game, but taking risks to do it is heavily disincentivized, since running out of life causes you to lose all your progress, and starting again requires a large time commitment. I had one decent attempt where I got up to 30 life, then just barely ran out of life running back to the button after unlocking a door. It had taken several minutes of standing on the life button spamming E while waiting for the upgrade button to recharge to get that far, and I just didn’t have it in me to do all that again for another attempt. I get what the game is going for, I think, and I imagine it could be fun without the waiting, but as it is it feels like the game is preventing me from actually experiencing its intended game loop.

Of course, you should design your own game in the way you prefer, so take this with a grain of salt, but if I were to suggest how to make this a little nicer to the player: instead of a life button, there could just be a tile you stand on that automatically refills your life. Then, the upgrade button could consume an entire cube at once, rather than just a single segment of one. Just those two changes would make this game a far less frustrating experience, I think.

(Also, side note, but it’s impressive you didn’t use a game engine for this! I don’t see games written in Java often, either, so seeing this was is neat.)

Short, but really interesting! I liked how the level was recontextualized during the escape - bits of the design that had seemed confusing to me on the way there made much more sense once I realized the level was meant to be traversed both ways. One criticism, though: having both a wall of static chasing you and a countdown felt a bit redundant. I assume the countdown was there to make the theme more obvious, but since the wall of static was more visually interesting I thought it was a shame it stopped being a threat pretty early on (I outpaced it very quickly). Overall, though, this was a neat experience!

I really like the concept of this, and I did have some fun playing it, but I was unfortunately unable to finish. Most of that wasn’t because of the exploration, which I quite enjoyed, or even the time limits by themselves, but rather because of the platforming: the handling is fairly slippery, some jumps are more precise than they need to be (the room to the left of the green key was particularly challenging, and killed a lot of my runs, which sucked since passing through that room seemed mandatory to finish the game), and the wall climbing mechanic works inconsistently enough that whether I could complete rooms using it within the time limit often seemed up to chance. If the controls were polished up, then this could be a really enjoyable game, even without changing the map, but as it is I found the platforming too frustrating to continue.

Really love the art style on this! The only improvement on that front I can think of is that the font felt slightly out of place; a more hand-drawn-feeling typeface might help make things more cohesive. Some sound effects would also go a long way.

The game was a lot of fun too, though I think levels lasted maybe a little too long, to the point where they started to feel tedious. I made it through the first level, but didn’t quite finish the second, and since each level took so long I didn’t want to go through all those turns again. I had a good time with what I played, though!

Really like the concept here! The randomly selected rooms add some nice variation, and I enjoyed trying to learn the layout of each room to try and rush through them before the light went out (and, sometimes, after the light went out based on memory, though I was never quite successful at that - maybe it kills you when that happens and I just didn’t realize?). I didn’t make it especially far, though, which I think is largely because the game lacks meaningful feedback. There are no sound effects, it’s not especially clear when you’re damaging or killing enemies, and even the amount of light you have left didn’t seem to be communicated… there was a number in the top-left corner that looked like it should be a timer, but it didn’t seem to tick down in real time in any case. There’s a solid core of a game here, though!