itch.io

Having tried out your game, compliment on the atmosphere from you guys means a lot ! thanks !

Gorgeous pixel art, perfectly on theme. I really like the possibility to (SPOILER) ring more than once. Unprompted decisions are very satisfying to take. I sort of wish there was something more to the game than slowly getting to know each client's pattern by heart, but well, that didn't deter me from playing till the end :)

Thanks ! We'll definitely make time for movement polishing if we update the game.

Perfectly on theme, great artistic direction, and a really really nice ending !

I got lost in the ocean, it wasn't very clear where the invisible walls were the edges of the map and where they weren't, as some algae/rocks can be moved through whereas some cannot.

I won each game at my first attempt, perhaps I was lucky, but I suspect the computer's moves weren't great.

Thanks for the kind words !

Very cool game, I wish I had taken the time to polish level design like you ! Well, I guess you may wish you had some time for the art... You did a good job turning the theme into gameplay, where many entries would just do their thing and make the environmental visuals strange.

Anyway, I tend to enjoy the actual puzzles a bit more than the guesswork to figure out the rules, and you delivered that too, with many levels requiring a bit of thought even once the rule is figured out, and of course the last 8 levels, which introduce challenge in the right way : by mixing rules, rather than leaning  towards the "let's make the level bigger so there's more steps" approach, which is often unsatisfying as a player.

Nitpicking : 7.2 was frustrating : it was its own rule discovery, and perhaps the rule's a bit too out of the box to not introduce it in a minimal setting ? I encountered a bug in 13.2 where the laser would often (but not reliably) kill me through walls.

I get I'm hangover, but I don't think picking a glass up and drinking it should be this hard. I think if I pick the glass up from too far away, it can't be drunk from, but also it remains at the same distance from me as it was when I picked it up while I move around ? So I have to drop it at a more reachable place, then get closer, then pick it up again, and then finally I can drink from it ?

That little mishap aside, yeah, great audio, nice visuals, original concept. I really like the idea of messing with the fov as the character is about to pass out, I wish it didn't happen so fast though.

Thanks for playing and for the kind words  !
Sorry you got stuck with the seesaw (we coded it in the last day and ended up including it despite that remaining possibility, which is rather unlikely). It's a shame, it's the last challenge before our ending scene ! For what it's worth, It's possible to pass the seesaw without using the umbrella, and I'm pretty sure without using the umbrella you can't get stuck.

Finally got it ! your hint didn't help, I had already found that exit, I just... didn't know how/when to use my items.

I still only have 11 of the 13 announced endings, although I suspect doing what I did with missing items might get me a 12th one.

I just clicked on every mage bonus I could. my mages would deal around 400 damage in a huge area I think ? A single mage building was enough to clear waves (well it housed 5 mages). It was definitely laggy at wave spawn, but not for long

Thanks !
I already had tried your game, but you guys fixed a few things, since then ; now it seems that I can beat wave after wave after wave forever

(well the limit is how many enemy units my computer can handle at once)

It gets repetitive after wave 20

Wow, a single person did this!

Now I have to go back to most games I rated and bring their visuals note down because I can't give this game 6.

Very reminiscent of Limbo, although it's pixel art and much more challenging in terms of timing/dexterity. Which, tragically, I lack, I'm stuck at level 5 :'(

Maybe I don't need this chest after all.

I'm intrigued : is collecting items useful ?

OMG I totally forgot about the gun ! I used it in the very beginning but then I got carried away in the jumping and its existence slipped my mind. Probably not a design flaw, just me an ADHD ^^.

There seems to be consensus about the need for a little bit more clarity. You said it, we need you to feel a bit lost in order to be satisfied when you get it, so we'll be careful to add clues carefully, the risk being to make it too clear.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback !

I'm not a fan of the genre, but I'll admit I had fun, I think the difficulty of the obstacles is very well paced for casual runners like me ; unlike other die and retry entries, going back to the start wasn't so frustrating (perhaps because the music you picked is groovy ! likely also because I could enjoy seeing that I passed the beginning more and more easily). For now I'll be satisfied with my highscore of 8300 ^^"

It is however a bit hard to enjoy the nice landscape while running ; I would advise putting more artistic effort into the foreground, where we actually need to focus our attention. I would also recommend picking significantly distinct colors for the background, it wasn't really an issue (well, not at all in the world with the black foreground), but it's a generally good rule for clarity. A difference in value/luminance is a wise choice since the colorblind will perceive it.

Thanks for playing !
Yeah, we had this nice idea of sleeping/waking up, and then we ran short on time to really explore how to make the actual gameplay around it interesting... SPOILERS AHEAD : The choice of symmetry (you wake up by doing the same thing that put you to sleep last) let us have reasonable control over the nested dream possibilities, but it also proved a bit limiting.

Thanks for playing !

Really lovely aesthetics. I particularly loved the blip effect when you move, very satisfying. Gameplay was starting to get repetitive near the end, you may want to add a few mechanics in order to extend it !

Love the music, the art is also very nice.

I like jumping midair over long distances, but the enemies were more frustrating than challenging to me. On some trajectories there's little to no room for evasive maneuver, so I just have to start jumping at the right point in time for no enemies to await me there, which isn't a very fun gameplay to me...

I'd appreciate more static enemies (or maybe just environmental dangers ?)

Really enjoyed the Tic Tac Toe (took me some time to figure out); monopoly didn't feel as clever, but I guess this is how I always wanted to play monopoly ^^

Very interesting idea ! I'm struggling with the camera/controls though :( perhaps it's smoother with controller ?

I love how there's a way to get to an ending without beating the dreaded unshaded 3d platforms (well, you could skip another painting but it was the only challenging one to me), but the final text is bullying you for not having cleared it ^^

Pretty cool ! I can see you're Obra Dinn fans because you not only made a similar deduction game, but also used a similar dithering shader ;) -- careful though, it got in the way of readability of small words e.g. on the diner's menu.

Unless there was some easter egg I missed, I'd say it'd be fine to just copy words on the clipboard rather than removing/exchanging them since modifying the documents doesn't seem to have any effect. (That said, I would also absolutely love if the core mechanic was to modify documents by swapping words until some conditions are met. It sounds like a hard mechanic to design around though, you may want to put some limits on which words can be moved).

Honestly, although you claim what's strange is the character's job vs. what they'd want to do, I found the diner to be pretty strange itself ! 

Anyway, it was fun !

Disclaimer : pedantic Little Prince fan rant ahead

I'd say the the Little Prince's world isn't really that weird : it's just our world, with a magnifying glass on things adults do that, from a child's perspective, make little to no sense. Or I guess I could say our world is strange, and the Little Prince reminds us how strange it is, because we've grown used to it and stopped questioning it years ago.

The lamplighter is pretty much any adult with a boring, repetitive, meaningless job, which doesn't seem so uncanny to me (though the Little Prince remarks at least, it adds a star in the sky, which is useful because it's pretty).

All this to say, IMO (which I'm aware nobody asked xD), your interpretation of the theme and why the little prince matches it is a bit clumsy, and yet, by making the Little Prince litterally super tiny, you somehow achieve something similar to the original tale : you put us in a house (a rather ordinary place), yet, from the point of view of such a tiny character, it is strange. Well, also there's the rubber duck in the vent. I didn't get, on the story side, why being seen by the Lamplighter would be a bad thing, but I get how it created an interesting gameplay.

Ok, my essay is over.
On the game side, even though I made it tot he door, I'm not sure I really understand exactly where it is safe and where it is not (sometimes I felt like I was hidden but still got caught). This aside, it was fun !

Ooh, I really liked the way you implemented the "look at the sky" feature in this art style !

Here are some other puzzle submissions I found (most in need of rating first) :
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4297847
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4310010
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4299203
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4313461
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4295586

Nice idea and well-executed, as pointed by Brobot f and r are not idea keys, q and e would feel better :)

You started showing the potential for puzzle with stages 6-8, I'm intrigued to so what else you can come up with 

Cute artistic direction.

If you like programming such grid-based puzzles, I recommend trying out puzzlescript over godot, it's a dedicated engine !

Yes, it was on PC, using Firefox browser. having completed the game, I've had many duplicate/lingering dialog boxes all along.
They didn't impact the gameplay though, it's fine.

So you got to the end and saw our little easter egg ! awesome !
I think you were luck with the seesaw, in the game's final state it seems to be still possible (unlikely but possible) to get softlocked there. Anyway, it's not our proudest design, we believe for a puzzle puzzle to be good the solution should be hard to find, not to implement...

Oh, and please do let me know if you get to the end ! we spent quite some time on the final sequence. It's right after the very first (and only) "challenging" puzzle (I hope the challenge comes from the level design and not from our poor implementation of a seesaw)

It's somewhat like I wanna lockpick but without the annoying platformer interface ! nice !

I ran into a bug where both success and failure/try again messages would display at the same time.
I wish the animations/movement were a tad faster.

Nice, I can both give a link to our game hoping for some reviews and explore the list of submissions here as well ! I love puzzle games (and also am starting to build a grudge against 3D platformers as I explore submissions).

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-15/rate/4308516

We lacked time to make more intricate/interesting puzzles, but perhaps that's for the better, we don't want to spend 4h rating each game ^^"

Hopefully it's enjoyable !

Oh, I think I just got it... Well, I find it counter-intuitive now, the numbers suggest a different order than the one you'd go for if they weren't here...

Very nice, would love to play more !

I found looking for the right placement more fun than getting the furniture there (well, much like in real life) : that part was more tedious than interesting imo. Well, nothing unbearable in these few tiny levels.

I got out but didn't find 10k dollars :(

Very cool music, simple enough to not disrupt thinking, yet catchy, good job !

Was there another way to get the symbol order than bruteforce or plain reading it in the book ? the book felt like it was a desperate measure for stuck player since it basically gave up the whole solution...My first guess was to try 123 or 321

Yep, pretty sure that's what's going on in my computer most of the time (not quite joking : I still can't figure out why I can't switch to a qwerty keyboard layout, but it probably involves a dead cat somewhere in the abyss -- by the way folks PLEASE use physical key mappings for WASD movement T_T)

I was reassured to read the game is virus free, just like I prefer my salads guaranteed gasoline-free (makes you wonder about other salads that are not guaranteed so, right ?)

A suggestion if I may : deletion task timers in windows have consistently been erratic across eras (https://xkcd.com/612/), I think there was a nice opportunity for a joke (but also a perhaps a grace period/ray of hope for the slow like me who struggle with the 283 seconds time limit)

That's high praise !

I'm guessing you got to the credits then, nice !