I’ve played through a majority of entries. Haven’t rated anything, I need to gather my thoughts a bit first, but here are my notes for each, some relevant, some just me musing:
Clumsy Robot Testing Lab by maelig-moreau
Controls are a bit awkward, both in layout and function, especially left ctrl is a bit too out of the way. Feels like climbing and jumping doesn’t have to be two separate keys.
There should be a bit of a pause before destroying the last robot and starting a new level. Right now it’s a bit abrupt. The graphics reminded me of a game I used to play long years ago. It probably doesn’t exist any more, but it was a nice nostalgic thought for me.
My highscore is 5190. Didn’t have a strategy, really. Just switched to the rocket launcher and went ham.
Award: Most exploded robots
#&/ by ScalemaiL
Love the name! Very creative, though maybe hard to google =P The graphics are neat too - just the right balance between ASCII and more sophisticated isometric graphics, though I would probably liked the ASCII based sprites to be a bit more pixelly.
Not much to the gameplay, and I don’t feel qualified to comment on the net code, as that’s not something I ever even attempted. I would like to see damage represeted as numbers popping up near the action rather than being written out in the corner, and some sounds would liven things up a lot.
The one roguelike I played a ton was DoomRL, which originally only had ASCII graphics, but featured the well-known doom sounds and it did a lot to turn a bunch of letters into something more. Just some slashing and grunting would do this a lot of good, I think.
Award: Most like a rogue
DefoldSharp by Reality.Stop()
Well then. Given that I don’t speak C there isn’t really anything I can say about this. But it’s great you’re making this for those who can and will use this.
Award: Sharpest entry
Mystery Mansion by Ben James
One of the higest dread-to-pixel ratios I’ve seen. The beginning is the scariest part - when you have no idea what you’re up against. Once the phantom starts showing up, that’s also the scariest part. The easiest way to deal with horror games is to figure out the rules and triggers and then just go through the motions. Well, I didn’t manage to do that here. It was horror all the way through. I assumed the phantom follows rules which don’t allow him to box me in a dead end, but I wasn’t willing to risk it.
What I especially liked was how an edge of the screen gets darker a bit sometimes. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I’m not imagining it. I’m still not sure of its significance, if there is one. I think it might be pointing you to the correct path? If it does, it does so in the most sinister way possible. That’s a really cool design if it is so.
I escaped in 22:03. Went back just to see the game over screen and it’s way more forgiving than I feared while playing! Again, good design. The gameplay doesn’t have to hard if the player thinks it’s hard. Great job overall.
The only tiny gripe I have is that it’s sometimes hard to get into the right spot to get the ! prompt, though that just applies to decorations. Never had any issues grabbing keys and whatnot. Other than that it’s incredibly polished and doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything important, the kind of quality we’ve come to expect from your games.
Award: Scariest entry
Palamedes Online by COCO
Never played the original, but the gameplay seems easy enough to grasp, though maybe I missed something about the patters. Played against myself in two windows, switching rapidly to try and keep both sides alive as long as possible. Kept it up for a few minutes maybe. I don’t think there’s and score or time shown anywhere, though.
The movement is kinda choppy, which makes it a bit uncomfortable to play, and some sounds would be nice, but I imagine a lot of work had to go into the net code? That’s still something I haven’t ever touched on and it always scared me, so I see anyone who can do it as a wizard.
Award: Best multitasking
D-Fold by some guy
What an unfinished mess this is! Nice music, though.
Mine Runner by d954mas
The game starts out impressive graphically with very basic gameplay, but at around 300 it turns positively trippy and quite hard to navigate. (EDIT: I should add that this is a good thing. I love the challenge!) What I found interesting is that even though the pickups don’t seem to do anything, I still go out of my way to collect them and they’ve lured me into my doom more times than I’d like to admit. Imagine if they played a satisfying sound effect when picked up! I don’t think I’d get as far as I did if that was the case.
The game needs music. Either something dark and forboding, or something that gets faster and faster. Ideally both. I tried playing it with this unholy abomination in the background - just to lean into the insanity suggested by the spiral motif - and somehow got my top score of 1050 on that attempt. Never again. Never again.
As soon as the tunnel begins flying past at insane speed, the controls start feeling a bit too snappy. I’ve often found it hard to move just a tiny bit to the left or right, which is critical if you need to run in the middle of two rock blocks. Some (short!) period of acceleration would probably help. Oh, and the game looks way better when switched into fullscreen mode. For some reason the graphics pop-up really nicely compared to the default embedded window.
Award: Most trippy
Remember the cards by Pavel Efremov
On the first glance this seemed like the second most scary game of the jam. You see, I have an utterly terrible face memory. I got tested for face-blindness and they told me that that’s not it, I just have incredibly, utterly unbelievably terrible memory for faces. Not prosopagnosia. Anyway, turns out it wasn’t that much of an issue. I beat the easiest face level with full lives and the hardest one with only one mistake. Moved onto the bags and funnily enough remembered them by nicknamess I made up for them depending on what face I saw in them. I really like the graphics! The variety is just enough, there’s a lot of them. It does get confusing after when you play multiple rounds with the same pictures and given the system for unlocking them, you are forced to do that. More on that later.
After beating two rounds of bags, I quit back to the main menu to check out the interface as a whole. Switch language back and forth and then I got stuck, the game didn’t let me back into the game (though I could still switch languages). I took it as a sign to stop playing, since I still need some change to unlock the next picture set and I don’t really want to grind out the bags that much. Which brings me to the unlocks - I’ll be honest, this freemium-like model is a major turn-off for me. I’m not judging it, but it just really really makes me not want to play whichever game uses it. Coupled with the balloon buttons and animations, it just feels like I’m always a click away from being asked to buy something or being served an ad. That said, the interface is smooth, functional, felt a bit cumbersome to me at first, but that was before I realised it’s meant to be played on a phone and it works perfectly there. Though on my phone I was stuck with faces again so… yeah.
In short, I love the polish, I enjoy the gameplay, I hate the aesthetics. But that’s a me issue, not the game’s.
Award: Most memory-intensive
Defold Light and Shadows asset by dragosha
Cute, technically impressive and an asset we can use? This is amazing. And there’s even the coin-finding gameplay as a bonus! I couldn’t find more than 7/9 coins on the night map, not even after devising the clever strategy of clicking literally everywhere from every point of view. I guess that makes this the hardest game in the jam. I hope to find the time to have a look how it works under the hood. Maybe I’ll even use it some day, though I find it notoriously difficult to use any outside code for my games.
Award: Best lighting
Cyberpunk Stories: Kaitlin by paweljarosz
So, graphics - amazing. Love the vibe, love the style, love the lighting effects and I absolutely adore those puffs of smoke when you land from a jump. The only issue is the choppy scrolling. I would love to enjoy the beautiful paralax background, but the foreground moving makes my eyes twitch. Maybe it’s just because I’m playing on a crappy work computer?
The controls could use a bit more work, though. I fell through the floor a couple of times, ending my game, got stuck in places, it’s kinda jarring, given that the gameplay doesn’t really need platforming, it feels bad to lose the story through such bugs. I’m not sure if running/walking or jumping serves any function.
The writing is solid. The dialogue paints a vibrant picture of the game’s world while giving each person a distinct character. That said, I’m not a big fan of character actions being described withing the dialogue text so much. Right at the start, when a character disappears having said his goodbyes, I don’t think we need to be told he left in the next text that shows up. Show don’t tell applies here, I think. *Klear saved his review notes and turned the game back on to see what more there is to it*.
*Klear returned having seen his first ending.* How does it go? “They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation point to everything that had lead to thins point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over.” I like it when a game just lets me go an a rampage for revenge, though the ending I got felt a bit too easy, the bad guys lining up for me to say their last words. Left me kinda empty, but revenge does that. *Klear started a new game to see how different choices affect things*
Alright. Not much of a difference based on choices, but that’s ok. The illusion of choice is what matters, on the first playthrough anyway. But I did realise something that would in my opinion improve this game somewhat and I have to go on a bit of a tangent here. I’ve seen this in two games, I think, one being the 1997 Blade Runner adventure game. It’s mostly a classic adventure game. But you have a gun. As far as I remember, you can just choose to fire the gun, killing characters. It’s not a dialogue option, it’s just an action you can do. It gives a bit more gravity to the decision to “retire” someone you suspect is a replicant. The other example is the VR game Saints and Sinners from the Walking Dead universe. Without spoiling much, there is a point in the game where you get into a standoff, emotions are runnning high, characters you might care about are threatening actions that cannot be taken back and as the scene plays out in front of you, you can just aim your gun a resolve it one way or another. Or not. Or place it to your own temple and just shoot your brains out, which I feel is a valid choice in a zombie-infested future, but the game treats it as a standard game over, obviously.
Anyway, I’m a big fan of a story and dialoge driven game where you just happen to have the power to shoot people at any point. And I feel like it would be a great fit here, given how many situations here do end up with someone in a pool of their own blood. It increases the tention a bit, since you never know how long you can keep the dialogue going until you lose your shot (or life), it makes the decision to end someone’s life a tiny bit less abstract and it also gives you a simple “baseline” outcome for a completely passive player instead of eventually placing them before a binary choice of shoot or don’t.
Award: Best graphics
I’ll post my thoughts on The Unnamed Game and PapR when I get access to my steam account and a USB cable respectively.
There was also a fighting finale, where you actually could shoot, but again it was not finished and AI was utterly stupid (I can’t code AI yet :D) and I decided to just do it in controllable environment in dialogues, which is totally not a very exciting option 
Soo, a lot of stuff was removed in fact, but I am very thankful on your insights on my writing 
