itch.io

This is a very interesting game. I really liked the overall atmosphere, and the concept of controlling both characters felt very unique. I think it has a lot of potential.

However, the game felt really slow and sometimes somewhat confusing. The character movement seemed very slow, almost sluggish. The dialogues also seemed drawn-out and often felt like they were there mainly to slow down the gameplay rather than introduce anything substantial. It didn’t help that I didn’t really feel attached to the characters until very late in the game, when they finally started to become more interesting and I began to care about what they were actually saying. The lighthouse was where the story really started to become intriguing, and I’d really like to see some continuation of it in the future.

Like I said earlier, the concept of controlling two characters has a lot of potential, but unfortunately it isn’t used to its fullest here. Instead of being a defining gameplay feature, it mostly became another thing that slowed the game down. Gameplay-wise, it often just meant slowly going to every object with one character and then doing the same with the other, especially because there was no clear indication of which objects each character could interact with.

At first, I also didn’t really understand what was going on. When the alarm rang, I thought we were supposed to run away. I didn’t realize the characters were actually trapped in this place, so I was confused about why they wanted to find the source of the sound. For a large part of the beginning, I felt lost. I know that sometimes, for example in horror-themed games, the feeling of being lost can be intentional, but I don’t think that was entirely the case here. I often felt more lost than the characters themselves. They would say things like “Oh, let’s do that” or “Let’s go there”, but I didn’t know why they wanted to do it, and I just blindly followed what they said. This got better later in the game, once I started to understand what was actually happening.

There were also moments where the characters would say things like “There’s no reason to stop here, there’s nothing interesting here”, only for me to pick up some item elsewhere and then return to the exact same place, and now I could suddenly stop there normally. Also, sometimes I didn’t know if they said that there’s nothing interesting because I wasn’t supposed to stop there or because I was supposed to stop there but hadn’t hit the trigger that would allow me to get out of the car. This made me repeatedly try to stop in spots where I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe adding different dialogue lines when you’re trying to get out in the middle of nowhere and different dialogue lines when you’re trying to get out around a landmark that’s only there for navigation would help.

I also ran into several technical issues and bugs. The area with the long pipe, guitar, and trumpet seemed especially problematic. I had to restart the game a few times there. The first time, I picked up the trumpet and played it, walked around a bit, and played it again - but then Binko got stuck playing it forever and I couldn’t go anywhere. The second time, Binko didn’t bug out, but when I played the trumpet and made Kumira rest, Kumira got stuck in the rest animation and I couldn’t move.

Once, in the area with the painting, I interacted with things (maybe too quickly), and the “[F] Drive” popup stopped appearing near the car, so I couldn’t enter it anymore.

Dialogue speed was also hard for me to adjust properly. Lower settings made the animation extremely slow and dragged everything out. Higher settings made the dialogue animation faster, but caused the text to disappear too quickly once all the letters were shown. After testing it a bit, it seemed like the dialogue speed might be framerate-dependent, which would explain why it felt so slow for me.

I think that some work could also be put into the car controller because it feels a bit off, and maybe touch up some of the interaction areas as well because some of them feel too small requiring you to stand in a very specific spot.

I was also stuck for about 10 minutes in the lighthouse, not knowing what to do. I thought I had searched every corner and ended up loading a save because I thought something broke. After searching again more carefully, I finally found the bag. I think it should be more visible or better highlighted.

On a more positive note, I really liked the idea of the notebook map. It’s also placed in a very good spot. In many games, the map is in a corner, which makes you focus more on the map than the game itself. Here, it’s almost in the center, right below the main view, so I could always see both where I was driving and what was shown on the map.

The world feels interesting to explore and all the spots have nice bits of environmental storytelling, I only think that it would be nice if there was more terrain variation, some hills, some rocks, etc.

Because I was wondering whether I had missed anything or if there were other endings, I did a second playthrough where I explored everything more thoroughly and tried to interact with everything. One place I hadn’t found before was the area with the TVs, water, and the table with animal toys. I really liked all the interactions and dialogue in this place. That was also where Binko asked Kumira whether they played any instruments. I really liked the scene this unlocked later, in the area with the music box and the piano, where Kumira played the piece properly after Binko tried to do it.

I also really liked some of the small touches, like the fact how seamless it feels to go from the main menu to the gameplay and how fast everything loads. It’s also nice how some dialogue lines change depending on what you interact with first.

Overall, the game feels very complete, with a big and interesting world to explore. Given some minor improvements, I would gladly play a continuation of this story.

It was a really fun game. I generally tend to like party-based RPGs with turn-based combat, so right away it was something I was eager to play.

I also really enjoyed the idea that you play as a slime - a creature that in many games is usually the most basic enemy. Turning slimes into the protagonists while fighting human enemies like warriors and archers, who are typically player characters, is an interesting role reversal.

I think the way the characters move themselves from battle to battle on their own, with the player only controlling them during combat, feels more suited for a mobile game than a desktop one. I also think that any break from this scheme would instantly make the game a lot more interesting. For example having special designated places for campfires sometimes between battles where the player could take a break, use healing items, or interact with the party in some other ways. Similarly, instead of automatically doing things for the player in towns, it would be nice to be able to choose whether to go to the inn, visit some kind of a shop, or immediately leave the town.

In some places, I felt there was a bit of information overload, especially at the beginning when you’re still learning the game. Even the pause menu partially has this problem. Although, knowing all the controls is nice, when I first opened the pause menu I didn’t know what I was looking at or what I was supposed to do or what I could even do in it, there was just too much information at once. Also, I’d like to be able to change settings directly from the pause menu instead of having to exit the game to the main menu to do that.

Another thing that might slightly suffer from the information overload is the tutorial. Overall, I didn’t think it was that bad, and I liked the idea of having a trainer explain the mechanics, but it could use a small refinement. Also, even though affinities are mentioned in the tutorial, the information about them didn’t stick in my mind and I almost forgot about them the moment I started playing. I ended up finishing the game without paying much attention to both the affinities and the kind of items I gave to each party member. I just threw all the items I got after a fight to the inventory of the slime that had the least amount of them. Maybe showing the effect of the affinities in some way actually during battle, through some animations or visual feedback, would be helpful.

Similarly, even though I knew the way Tanko’s Guardian ability was supposed to work, I didn’t really use it after the tutorial, because I wasn’t sure which party member Tanko would be guarding. Since the tutorial only had two characters, there it was pretty straight forward, but I didn’t know how it was going to scale to four characters. The Guardian ability is most useful in situations of danger when you might lose a character, and since I didn’t know how it worked, I just didn’t want to risk it and simply used defending and healing. That’s a shame, because I think it’s a really cool ability.

The most important thing - combat - was quite intuitive and fun. Although, the screen you’re on after winning could be made a bit less dense. Labeling the big boxes/containers on this screen would also help a lot. The first time I saw this screen, I was a bit lost and didn’t know what each thing was. I clicked the question mark button, but again there was just too much information, and I didn’t want to read all of that (even though I’m usually the type of player that doesn’t skip anything and reads everything), so I decided I will figure it out on my own. I think many of these systems could be taught more diegetically, rather than through large blocks of text (you might want to look up “diegetic tutorials” and watch “Half-Life 2’s Invisible Tutorial” by GMTK).

I really liked being able to see what enemies are going to do, since it adds another strategic layer to the combat, and unlike in other games, it actually gives some utility to the defend option. However, later in the game it might be interesting to introduce some mechanic that would increase the difficulty and counterweight this system. Maybe some additional abilities for the enemies?

I also really enjoyed the first boss battle. It was the first (and only) time I died, and it forced me to actually start paying attention to what I was doing.

As a small side note: the description of the blue berries (“A berry that enhances your spit”) made me think that using it would enhance the spit attack on the next turn. It also took me a bit of time to get that the slimes don’t actually “use” items, but eat them in order to attack.

Overall, it was a fun game with a lot of potential. I’m looking forward to playing it again when you release future updates.

Wow, thanks a ton for playing and taking the time to write such detailed feedback!

This game was originally made for a different game jam (Major Jam 7: Wild) in a little over a week, and I really overscoped the it. That’s why some of the mechanics might seem half-baked. Also, that was the second time ever I made 3D models for a game and the first time I did texture painting. In hindsight, a lot of the time that went into that could have gone into developing the game, but I always have the urge to have all the assets be made by me.

I originally planned to make a separate game specifically for this jam, but life got in the way and I didn’t have time. However, I still wanted to submit something here, so I decided to submit the two games I made for smaller game jams during 2025.

Thanks for telling me about the UI issue, because I wasn’t aware of it. I tried to test the game at different resolutions, but I have a 1080p display, and I could only test it at resolutions lower than that. It was working properly, so I assumed the same would be true at higher resolutions. I’ll have to test it in some way and fix it. Having the info displayed over items in the inventory was something I planned but forgot to add (or maybe it worked before and I somehow broke it later, I don’t really remember).

The idea for the potions was to have different effects when combining different ingredients, but there wasn’t enough time during the original game jam for me to add that, so I just ended up making it so that the effects simply stack. If you combine the purple ingredient (jump) with the yellow ingredient (speed), you just get a single potion that gives you both jump and speed. I’m not happy about it, but it is what it is. I just didn’t want the time it took me to implement the mixing system to go to waste, so I went with stacking effects. The potions don’t stack in the inventory when you mix ingredients in a different order due to an error on my part. That should be easy to fix, though, and will most likely be fixed in the next patch.

The general idea for the game was to have one intended solution, but also not prevent the player from coming up with their own solutions. So, for example, even though the intended way is for the player to first solve the blue temple without any potions and grab the bow so that they can kill the enemies and get ingredients for the potions to solve the rest of the temples, instead they can just sneak past enemies, quickly pick up the ingredients, and skip all the puzzles in the blue temple with potions (especially if they don’t know how to solve them the regular way).

Before I submitted this game to this jam, I wanted to fix a few minor bugs and annoyances, but in the process I broke the behavior of the arrows and the alchemy table. I did this on the last day before the deadline, and it was New Year’s Eve, so I didn’t test the game properly before submitting. That’s on me.

In the original version, crafting was just unintuitive, but in the latest version it was straight-up broken. Crafting potions alone worked fine, but it had problems when mixing them with different things. Sometimes it wouldn’t give you arrows, sometimes it wouldn’t apply proper effects, and worst of all, the arrows didn’t work half the time and didn’t apply the effect they had to the object they hit.

Yesterday, I discovered these bugs, and I was most likely working on the patched version while you were actually playing the game, because I saw your comment when I was uploading the updated version. Had I started working on it a little earlier, maybe you wouldn’t have had to experience half of the frustration.

Another thing that adds to the confusion is that the idea in my head for the crafting of the arrows was to have the player spill the potion onto the arrow. I didn’t have time for that. Then I came up with the idea that after adding the ingredients to the alchemy table, the player would dip the arrow into the fluid. I implemented that, but didn’t have time to add an animation showing it, so it ended up being really confusing. I will also definitely fix the places where you can get soft-locked.

Thanks again for playing the game and giving so much valuable feedback! Also, thanks for completing it even though some parts were frustrating, it means a lot to me!

Yes, clicking anywhere on the screen always ended up attacking upward

The artstyle is quite unique, I like it! It's a really nice concept. I don't know why, though, but I wasn't able to aim and attack in any direction different than up. Also the timer didn't decrease when I was playing, but when the game was supposed to be paused. Is that intented?

The plan was that once walking gets easy, the player would unlock an attack ability that also consumed energy, and further regions would have enemies, but I didn't have time to add that that

Thanks!

It gave me a good laugh. Sometimes I spawned in the walls, though

The art looks awesome, everything feels polished and I love the overall atmosphere. I think it's a bit confusing at first, with the amount of information and UI elements available right from the start. Maybe in the future it would benefit from introducing things more gradually and letting players get accustomed to all the mechanics, but I get that this probably would have been too much for a game jam. That said, it's something I'll definitely keep an eye on after the jam.

That big green attack animation looked awesome! I think some more feedback when hitting enemies and being hit would haven been nice. There also seems to be a bug when restarting the game, where the game places the first level in the scene but doesn't get rid of the level I died in. Good job tho

Very interesting concept, I really liked the mind-bending nature of the controls. Everything feels realy polished. Great job!

Levels are well designed, mechanics are simple and easy to understand but fun, the art and music are cute. The star mechanic gives the game replayability. Everything's great!

Gobs have almost no self-preservation instinct, though, and sometimes walk into traps even though I instructed them not to 🤣

Rizzing Over It with Brainnrott Foddy

I really like lore in games, but I have to agree with one of the previous comments that more work could have gone into the gameplay instead of the lore.

The art overall looks very polished, however the logo looks like an almost straight up copy of Papers, Please, which left a bad impression on me. I understand drawing inspiration from other games (I do it myself, as do many others), but there are just too many similarities for me. Because the logo is such a key part of a game's identity, it doesn't come across as just a small nod to other Papers, Please fans, rather it could make it feel like a kind of a rip off. Additionally it makes me really unsure how to rate the presentation of the game, because on one hand it looks awesome, but on the other if the logo is a direct copy, how can I be sure that other elements aren't? I would much rather see a game with a lot worse art, but be sure the art is entirely original. After all game jams are about coming up with original ideas with the limitations and themes that are given to us. I think a clarification on the intention here would help a lot.

I also had a feeling that the game wasn't playtested much, since like others, I kept constantly running into that empty blue screen. I know that the time is really limited during a game jam, but that doesn't seem like something that would be very hard to catch during testing, especially with a team of three where the time limit isn't as restrictive as in case of a two-person or a solo project.

I will keep an eye on it though, and would be happy to try it again if you release some updates (that would at least get rid of this bug), since the concept looked really interesting.

The atmosphere was awesome. Screenshots alone made me want to play the game. The main mechanic is also a really good use of the limitation. The revolver mechanic reminds me of Endoparasitic. There's not much I can complain about. If I had to nitpick, the death screen is a bit too abrupt.

Just out of curiosity - because you only listed Unity as the software you used - did you make the art and music yourself?

Really fun game, it's awesome that you managed to add procedural generation to a game jam project. Honestly the difficulty could have been pushed even further, since reaching the victory screen was almost easier than reaching the death screen. I really like both ending screens, but maybe some of that time might have been spent making one or two additional enemy types to spice up the gameplay itself. Solid entry!

Also as a side note, the game window seems to be cut off on screens smaller than 1080p, and on my 1080p monitor I had to go into fullscreen (F11) to see the HP bar.

Thanks! I'm aware of the roof bug, I just put it on the wrong layer in the rush to finish the game. Same goes for those machines/statues. I felt the grass area was a bit empty, so about an hour before the deadline I made two sprites. One that glows and one that doesn't and just made the game pick a random one at the start for some visual variety. I can totally see how it might come across as something you should be able to interact with though.

I beat it and I really enjoyed it! The various enemies were a nice addition, and the spear mechanic blended with everything perfectly. I managed to discover some ways to beat the levels with fewer orbs than normally required. Maybe a feature that's unlocked after you beat the game and shows the number of orbs you used for each level would even increase replayability.

I was stuck at level 6 because when I first tried the proper solution, I was standing too close to the levers. The spear didn't return on time to me, and I just thought that it didn't work and it's not the proper solution, so I started looking for different things I could do.

As for replicating the screen bug, I think you can do it with Ctrl+Plus (+) and Ctrl+Minus (-) if you don't have a mouse. Also, you can make changes during rating period in this particular game jam, especially if it's a bug like this one, as long as you provide the original build for download and list the changes you made in the description.

Cool game! I liked it so far. I'm not quite sure what to do in level 6, I will return to it tomorrow and try to beat it. Also jumping sometimes feels hard because as far as I can tell there's no coyote time.

The game window seems to bug out on certain resolutions and on my computer a bit of the screen gets cut off. For example in the cutscene I didn't see text and was wondering why there were some random images with no sound and no explanation. You may be able to replicate this bug with Ctrl+Mouse Wheel on the game page (you need to click somewhere outside the game window first). You might want to experiment with Mode and Aspect in Display->Window->Stretch in your project settings.

That's also what I said for a different submission here, but to keep the art cohesive you could try to avoid having mixels and have all the art use same pixel sizes. I found it helpful to design various sprites in a single file first to ensure right sizes, detail levels and overall style consistecy. Then you can split them up into separate files. For example when you're designing a door sprite, you can copy the player sprite into the canvas, so you know how tall the door needs to be. That way you won't have to scale the door sprite later in the engine and will avoid mixels.

Sorry for the wall of text, sometimes I'm little too verbose lmao

A very enjoyable dungeon crawler. I really liked the variety in attack patterns, it made the combat incredibly fun. The art, music, everything was great. Good job!

Really solid concept, and the intro was great.

The combat feels a bit stiff though, and some feedback when attacking enemies and when the player is being attacked would help a lot. Even something like a simple sound and flashing enemies red should be enough.

The dodge is a great addition, but it would feel better if enemies telegraphed their attacks more clearly, maybe with some short wind-up animation that is played before they actually attack, so the player has time to react.

I also didn't fully get why, instead of dying, I turn pink and lose control. Especially since in some cases it's a lot easier to actually just purposely drain the health bar and make the character complete the stage for you.

That said, it's amazing how much story you put into the game, and the endless mode is a nice addition. I think a high score system would add even more replayability.

Overall great job, I enjoyed it!

I really enjoyed it. It has a really nice, cozy vibe and I like this approach to a minesweeper-like game. There's only one thing I can point out. Maybe instead of or additinally to the easy mode you should add some kind of a tutorial for people who haven't played minesweeper. I think even a single picture explaining basic rules of minesweeper would be enough. Other than that really good job!

The obstacles are quite hard to avoid, it's either because the screen is too small or the obstacles are too fast. Nevermind, I didn't set the proper resolution and framerate. But there's another problem, the birds seem to sometimes spawn really close to the player character almost insta-killing you. I also don't get how this game fits the limitation. Many games have obstacles and there seems to be no special twist that would make the game stand out and/or fit the limitation.
It's really interesting that you wrote the game as a J2ME application though. However I think you should make a web build next time because not many people will download a game in a game jam yet alone install an emulator to run it

It's a really great concept for a Zach-like game. I know that the intention is to let the player figure out the instructions themselves, but even having this in mind there should still be some kind of even vague explanation to just get the player started and interested in experimenting with the instructions. Also figuring out the instructions would be a lot easier if the game had an option to manually step through instructions. I really enjoy games like that, so even though I didn't get far, I'll probably save this game for later and try to figure it out and beat it, but for now I'll leave it as I don't have enough time to sit and think through this and there are other games to check out

As a side note, shouldn't the AZ instruction be named ZA? There's the AB instruction that seems to move B to A, so going with that logic AZ would move the value from register Z to A and not A to Z as it's supposed to to get the output, or maybe I'm understanding something wrong, but again it would be easier to get it if I was able to step through the instructions

Cool game, I liked how instead of just plainly shooting the enemies you try to move the gravity of the orbs to make them hit the enemies. It'd be nice to have some things that would keep the game interesting in the later stages, maybe some new enemy types, maybe an ability to improve the speed and damage of the orbs. Good job tho

It looks awesome and the concept is really good, but some things aren't very intuitive, especially since the tutorial seems to kind of end abruptly after the message "Having four or more wounds kills you". It wasn't clear if the tutorial ended and I was already on my own or if I still had to do something to advance it. I think the baggage needs some work because sometimes it seems to bug out, sometimes it isn't clear if an item is inside or not and it's difficult to see both the items and the space left in the baggage bacause all the items are stacked in the same place. Also for quite a while I didn't know what to do when I gave the idol to the hermit, not being able to go into the secret passage, but I finally managed to beat the game and it was great. If you fixed those small problems and made some things more intuitive, I think it has potential to be really good and I'd even play a full Steam release of it

Ah yes the freedom motif, I forgot what it was called. I just realized why you used it and how perfectly it fits into the theme of the jam lmao

Thanks, gald you enjoyed it! Yeah I get it, that makes sense. I made the music pretty early on when I was still planning to include combat, but I didn't have time to implement that, nor did I have time to compose new music, so I just left it there as I decided it would be better than dead silence

Nice little sokoban game. Some quality of life changes would make it even better, like a quick restart button (e.g. the R key) so that you don't have to go to the pause menu each time and also an undo button would be nice. It'd also be great to have some sort of per-level "high score", so you can see how many moves it took you to clear a level and try to lower this number and beat the level more efficiently. I think that would add a lot of replayability

Nice concept, was fun to play. I think I even discovered a good strat/exploit to keep most of the weapons. You throw a granade so that it just barely touches the border of the level and then you can trick the rats to go into the void lmao. There's a subtle melody in the music that sounds a bit like a leitmotif from Jevil's theme "The World Revolving" from Deltarune :). Art-wise I would suggest avoiding mixels (different sizes of pixels in your pixel art). This usually happens when you scale your artwork in the engine. Additionally you could keep most of your artwork (at least when you're designing/sketching it) in a single file so that you can see the scale of all the sprites. Also adding more shading to the characters would be nice. In a top-down perspective like that you can do it as if the light source was at the top of the screen.

Thanks! Yeah, that feeling of being lost at the start was kinda intended. I'm glad you liked the spritework because that was the second time ever I made pixel art, so I was afraid it wouldn't look good. It took me like almost the first 3 days of the jam to design and animate the player character so I didn't have much time to do the rest of the game (and skipped a lot of the ideas I had for it). As for the drop shadow and z-sorting, I just didn't have time. I added drop shadows to a few objects as a last minute change, but forgot to do it for the player and z-sorting in Godot sometimes works how it wants (especially when you're rushing to finish the project 🤣), so instead of fighting it I just left it on objects that worked and disabled it on others and just focused on more important things

Thanks! i could've probably explained stuff a bit more, but the feeling of being lost at the start was kinda intended, so that the player feels confused and helpless just as the main character in the game would be in such situation. For example one thing I actually wanted to add was a popup that would show up after picking up the wrench and would tell you that you can use it to upgrade the machine, but I thought that the player will have to quickly return to the machine and will notice the upgrade button anyway, so I scrapped that. I had some other ideas for a kind of "tutorial", but I didn't add them because I either didn't have time to implement them, or thought that they would break the immersion and atmosphere, or both

Thanks! I did consider adding some lore and even some NPCs you could talk to, but there were some problems with that. The first was that I planned the game to be a kind of roguelike with permadeath, so adding NPCs wouldn't make much sense, they'd forget you after each death (unless death was something connected with the story like in Hades). Another issue is that I don't think the gameplay fits telling lore that way, as you have very little time you can spend detached from the machine. I could've put some lore without dialogue, using environmental storytelling, however there was another, probably the most important problem: I really wanted to, but just didn't have time for it lol
So probably the only things that could be considered to have any "lore" are the endings

Cool game. I love all the squishy animations it has. Also the character controlls really well and I appreciate the frequent checkpoints

Chicken-simulator-survival-horror game wasn't on my bingo card. Great job!

lmao

Awesome game! Pretty hard tho. I managed to get to 00:30. It's late now, but tomorrow I'll try to beat this game

The gameplay loop is so addictive and extinguishing the fire is so satisfying! I don't know how much time I spent playing this game, but probably more than I'd like to admit

Thanks! I actually had a lot more ideas for it, but I had to constantly cut stuff out in order to be able to make the game on time. It could have been more polished if I didn't force myself to make all the assets on my own. It was the first time I was making such a game and it took me longer than I expected to make all the systems (like the inventory system and potion crafting), and I don't make 3D models that often, so I had to get back into the "modeling flow". It was also the first time I did texture painting in Blender and the first time I made my own textures, so that also took a lot of my time that could have been spent elsewhere. The thing I regret the most is that I didn't add any sounds or music, especially since music is my main thing and I usually compose music for my games

You can actually see the effect of the potion if you press Tab and hover your mouse cursor over its icon. But I agree that different potions could have more distinct look. I'm glad you liked it!

That's a really fun gameplay loop. The game seems pretty polished and Cobb chasing me was actually a really scary thing, especially when you remember that you'll loose all your progress for that level if he catches you. Also I liked the incorporation of the limitation. Great job!