Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD42 → Exhaustlands
By zephyrraine, sam-machell and sand-gardeners
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 236 | 3.73 | 43 | |
| Fun | 491 | 3.32 | 43 | |
| Innovation | 271 | 3.52 | 43 | |
| Theme | 1165 | 2.51 | 43 | |
| Graphics | 539 | 3.52 | 43 | |
| Audio | 79 | 3.92 | 43 | |
| Mood | 41 | 4.11 | 43 |
Nice game! Although I did not really see the relation to the theme. The atmosphere you achieved to set up here with few things is really impressing me. A little bug: when you click on the radio to cycle between stations, the click still drives the car around :stuck_out_tongue:
I really liked the gameplay, art and the mood - and it was so chill to play lying in bed since you only need mouse input. I think it has a lot of potential and I would love to see a full game made with this idea. :smile:
Interesting game! It had an overall consistent feel in visuals audio and narrative which I was really impressed by. It's also a rather large game with quite a bit of content! Great job guys!
I'm not a big fan of text-based rpgs but this one really caught me for a while. In the end I gave up on day 12 (it really isn't my thing), but I can fully understand people that enjoy this genre. As other people said, the artstyle, audio and mood in general really fit together, and that makes for a very enjoyable experience.
I like how the characters feel real in their own way, you can understand their mindset quite well. What about a small-radius minimap while the cartographer is on your team? I felt a bit lost navigating around the world, but maybe that's kind of the point anyway...
Raindrop FM forever! I didn't give it full score on theme since for me the connection isn't there imo, but every other aspect rates quite high for me. The mood it gets you into is really nice, great job! I don't know if you are considering keep working on it, but I think you should :)
Loved it!
Atmosphere of this game is great and unique (In first minutes while playing this game I thought I get jumpscared in a moment :DD) Sounds and art style are matched really well. I really love this atmosphere. Keep it up!
Wow, amazing, it seemed like a horror game. Your atmosphere is prety well worked. However, I got lost and I couldn't finish, hehe
Good job and good luck if you continue developing this game!
Great game! Played it for 1 hour straight and finished with eleven points of faith. I loved the world atmosphere, and would love to see this grow into a bigger game
Awesome game, the mood is amazing, I spent almost 2 hours exploring the land. Loved it =)
WOW. Like, Holy Hell. I love this game. I would buy this game. Brilliant Job, Really!
This game has so much depth. Honestly. It was amazing to see how well it pulled of the aesthetic it was going for. Simple graphics, simple controls, simple UI. So simple! But there is so much around it that made the simplicity of the game have so much context and awesomeness to it. Great job!
Here's my playthrough: https://youtu.be/OJAgySGGTBI
Excellent game! I really enjoyed the mood and the story keept me wanting to discover more. The graphics and audio fit the general mood very well. Unfortunately with only 7 faith it was not enough to fight the darkness ;) I don't really know what the cartographer serves for (maybe you could have acces to a map when he is in your team?)
Crazy enigmatic game. The use of MS paint style art and ascii is sooo much better than it has any right to be. I love the control of the car and especially how you discourage going off road, but still allow it. The world is cool to discover, but once you get a handle on it, it definitely starts to feel more tedious/time-wasty. That's what sets apart the really nice metroid-style games, when backtracking stays interesting. The different genres of music are great but they still have the same creepy tone to then. I stopped after finishing the campfire person's quest (damn you for that btw).
Also I just played your Between Stations and it's so damn cool, wish I saw it before making my game.
Interesting idea!
Wow this was really a fascinating experience to play on stream, I really enjoyed it. Played it for a very large amount of time and got thoroughly lost. The gameplay is super interesting and unique, and the art style works surprisingly well. The audio really ties it all together, with the radio making it extra atmospheric. Loved it, even if I couldn't really tell exactly what I was meant to be doing, I just enjoyed travelling and seeing what there was to see! Love to see that there's a post-jam version in the works!
@foolmoron you got me curious, I checked Between Stations and it was amazing
Very eerie experience, definitely like the open world gameplay and simple controls.
Raindrops keep falling on my head... Once again, my favorite game of the jam so far. Some technical critique: navigating the menus at the various locations was a bit clunky since I had to click on the building again if I wanted to e.g. fill and switch characters. I never needed the mould character to drive without fuel, I didn't see a map to make the cartographer useful. I wasn't sure how much faith was needed, but I got 8 faith, went to the HQ and "lost".
The world-building and story-telling was just wonderful. Your inspirations are so clear to me and it's awesome to see such a fantastic world built from them. This is a great addition to the Brownie Cove series.
P.S. The whole time playing, I kept thinking back to Gregory Weir's 'Looming' or 'Ossuary'. https://twitter.com/GregoryWeir
@shinyogre thanks as always for your support and feedback. these things are definitely things we need to fix in the post jam version. it's so hard to think about gameplay after ignoring it for so long... needs balancing for sure. we are gonna add a proper map in.
played up to day 40. I unlocked the warrior and wizard, but couldn't find the 4th character(?). I returned the letter to the home and got stuff from the mine but didn't know if there was anything I could do with it. I was able to win the game though. I think I had 9 faith...maybe more (cove, two temples, burning bush, another thing maybe?). Sometimes the car would get stuck only driving in one direction, and moving the mouse wouldn't change the direction. Overall I'm a sucker for exploration games like this - good job!
reminded me of Looming too! How can we grow in such conditions?
This is ... very good. So far this is the best game I played this jam I think. I liked how you used a minimalist approach to the overall design of the game, while being very consistent on the signs and what they meant (how you represented coast, forest, different type of roads..!). The sound design is very good, but I just kept on playing the Raindrops song because that felt like a nostalgic Fallout.
What really hooked me up is how you designed the narrative in the game. Mecanics are simple, but launching the player in this vast open space with so little clues about where to go, and actually what to do, is a great way to design a game that proposes something quite philosophical ("learning comes with journeying" or smthing like that), and also a risky bet that asks the player to just play by himself and try to understand the game. Each character is unique and defined by few words, but enough for us to actually link him to something in our mind (the druid just grows weed, don't lie :P). Few things I could be critique about would be that your game isn't really focused on the theme (Felt like I had enough space to be lost !), and that you could probably add a sort of map by pressing a button. I know this is a risky feature, because a map could totally remove the fact that your game is about discovery and journey and not "just go there", but it can get quite frustrating or confusing to just be lost.
Thanks you for making a game that resolves around deep narrative and texts, and thanks you for this very unique game ! Cheers.
@demn hey thanks so much! this is lovely feedback
our initial plan was to enter an endgame sequence after a certain amount of time where the world started shrinking, which would play into the theme. but yes you're right atm we are totally separate from the theme haha, just the way ideas develop sometimes. and yes! we will be adding a minimalistic map that will help show you the location of discovered named roads... hopefully still be mysterious enough to allow for discovery but also help people stop getting so lost. thanks for leaving such a detailed response <3
@foolmoron thanks very much for such kind words! and thanks for checking out Between Stations as well! very glad you liked! us TV addicts gotta stick together
@sam-machell We all always lack time :D followed you back on Itch.io, I'll be glad to play more ;) Cheers !
Wow. Great idea and realistaion, very addictive gameplay. Loved FM stations also
Nailed the mood with this one. I found this incredibly fun to play and will be revisiting it soon! Here is a link to your segment from my stream: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/299088812?t=00h25m17s
That game was quite something.
Even though I wasn't able to figure out how to open up the map that Cartographer supposed to have, or how to use teleportation that Wizard provides, investigating this world was very interesting and engaging. I'm quite amazed by the size of the world you've created. And the audio work sets up game's atmosphere just perfectly. Really helps to emerge into the game. I wish there were more stations like RAINDROPS or HAUNTED, because I don't think INDUSTRIAL and DARK CLUB were very fitting for this driving through desolate world experience, but that's really subjective.
As final words, I would just say that you've done great work on the story and world-building, and I really admire you for that.
Awesome mood on this game !
The different radio stations really nail it and I had to turn off Industrial because is was so stressful xD
The graphics are really simple but you did a great job with it !
I drove aimlessly for like 10 days without finding anything forth interest so you kinda lost me here, haha.
But it's a very unique and interesting game even though I didn't see where you used the theme...
Anyway, keep up the good work guys !
Pretty unique game, I think. The distances between places are a bit too long to my taste, but that's just me, trying to rate too many games. This games requires more time to explore. Great work! I liked the style and the atmosphere of it.
Pretty cool! You guys really pulled off the minimalistic style, it worked well with everything combining together into a pretty cohesive package. Explored a bunch of places, some interesting, some not, but in the end couldn't spend enough time on it to really made significant progress.
Whaaa, awesome mood on this game ! especialy the soundscape is great. No bug found ... Great job guyzzz
The mood and music was great. I feel the game needed more action, I see a lot of people enjoyed exploring the world but mainly just seeing gas stations did not get me excited. There is an army and darkness, fighting them as I explored would have added a nice element.
So right away I noticed that this game seems to borrow a lot from Kentucky Route Zero, with its desolate / chill mood, dialogues that let you choose but don't really matter, driving, exploration of places that often doesn't lead to a goal, etc. Similar games: Oxenfree, or even (LD30) Hempuli's [Badland Quest](http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=491). I quite enjoyed KR0, but while this game is similar in many aspects, it suffers from the same problems: the world is a little bit too big and too ambitious to feel interesting after being explored for a little bit. There is no reason to return to places, and fetch quests with lots of backtracking and random wandering really don't help, since I won't find anything else.
I haven't managed to finish the game, I got three faith increases (burning bush, mould, blacksmith), but I guess that wasn't enough, I assume I was missing something with the static mountains … But at that point after checking in the HQ that my faith wasn't enough (which doesn't actually end the game), I wasn't interested enough to keep playing anymore. I feel this game would be much much better if you limited your world size and instead of making it so expansive focus on making it "deeper", i.e. tell a more interesting story at the existing locations, add new ones, incentivise re-visiting the same locations, etc. More complex puzzles! (I visited the Mine before I got to the Miner's house, and there was no way to leave until I got the correct path by trial and error!)
The character selection in motels is a little bit annoying, it takes too long for the next character to show up when you click the arrow, and there is no indication of how many there are until you have all 4 of them. Also, some of the "abilities" in the character descriptions seemed untrue? Maybe I needed to place the characters in the driver's seat, but e.g. the Druid says no fuel is used and yet my fuel was going down as usual. Same for the Wizard's Service Station warping. It made me think that the game is incomplete in many ways – same goes for the "darkness" which never seemed to actually approach and time progression did not matter.
I did not see a very clear connection between the theme and the game. I understand that the story vaguely references the theme, but this is not really reflected in the game. If anything, as long as you are driving with the cartographer you are exploring more and more of the map, thereby gaining space rather than running out of it. There should be a more concrete connection with the theme in the actual mechanics of the game as well.
The graphical style is simple and minimalistic, but perhaps fitting. The ASCII stuff is not bad, but I wonder why mix ASCII characters with hand-drawn art? As for the music, I spent most of the game listening to Raindrop FM, and I feel that this kind of "music" is the most fitting for the game. The other radio stations perhaps not so much? But I suppose it is good to give the player a choice.
But overall this is a very decent entry.
I liked the Graphics, and the Gameplay was fun, Nice Game. :thumbsup: