Through the Decanted Sea

Feels like I'm playing a game lost in the 90s, that came to be rediscovered today. Very simple but engaging gameplay, love the art style, and the visual scale of the character vs the world.

Excellent presentation on this one. Music and visuals come together very well, great sense of style with a fun HUD. The bgm evokes a certain era of late 90s/early 2000s PC gaming that makes my brain smile. I like the general loop of balancing bars, and it's neat how day/night and eat/sleep/walk each provide different interactions, it lends a lot of texture to the game's fairly simple setup. The decision-making generally feels nice, and it's satisfying to make it to a relatively safe area where you can comfortably top everything off after a long trek in a dangerous region. 

Unfortunately, I struggle to connect with this one enough to finish it? Hard to say exactly why, but I think it's mainly just an issue of "how much time do I spend actually problem-solving, and how much time do I spend repeating the same steps to get to the area where I can start problem-solving again." Optimizing the route goes some way to break up this tedium, but after the first 4-5 runs, I had a pretty set-in-stone route for the first 4 minutes that felt clean and lacked any meaningful deviation. Over the next several runs (probably 1.5-2 hours in total?), I would repeat those four minutes, and then after some prodding and exploring for 2-4 more minutes, I would head off in a new direction I was not familiar with, not find a resource I need, and then die. 4 minutes is not a very long time at all, but over several runs it adds up in a way that just doesn't feel great for me, and since there's nothing that really breaks it up it'll always play out almost exactly the same way every time. As such, I find myself drawn to treat the game the same way I might an MMO or other particularly repetitive RPG - by muting the music and throwing on a podcast or other music as I grind out attempts.

I don't really know what the "right answer" to this is, or even if there is one. Difficulty is fairly high: a lot of the routes you can take feel very tight, which means that trial and error is essentially required to make progress. That can sting a little bit, but this game seems like it's meant to feel brutal. Similarly, checkpoints would alleviate the tedium but would come at obvious cost to the game's intended tone. Having some way to peek forward a little bit would help make it easier to make informed risks and reduce the requirement of building a fairly complicated mental map, but perhaps this sort of risk reduction also runs counter to the intended gameplay texture. Maybe I'm just not in the mood to fully engage with this specific flow right now, or maybe there are things I just failed to pick up on which made the game unnecessarily difficult for me.

Regardless, I think this is good work, and it's always a pleasure to try a new exploration game. Cheers to everyone for their effort, and looking forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Fantastic game, I love it when the story blends perfectly with the mechanic.  Immersive music too.

I played it with easyrpg player on 3x because there is no savegame and the speed is quite slow.

Keep making games!

Awesome game.

The mechanics are simple and easy to understand, but they also manage to tie in perfectly with the story, and there's so much variety with the ways all the different terrain types interact with your meters.

That said, by the time I figured out how to make it all the way to the end, I managed to make it without having to worry about the FEAR timer at all (it was only ~halfway filled, and without using any refills), ahahaha.

I could tell the artist of Elbe from a mile away

Lovely minimalist storytelling here, and meditative music. It felt like an alternation of gradually mastering the details of one biome, learning to navigate it at just the right rhythm — then striking off into the unknown, picking a direction at random in the blind hope it’ll have what I need.

So far I’ve made it all the way to the colorful jellyfish before turning into an ice statue. Maybe next time, wizened-but-not-wise turtle fellow

Very pretty