lezzlebit 2025-04-08 05:48
Loved the atmosphere and art design and everything....... The fish with shoes caught me off-guard it was so good. Also the dialogue and the descriptions of everything were very flavorful! Great job!!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Absolve
By ninjacatz and CircleOfLife
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 26 | 4.32 | 33 | |
| Fun | 67 | 4.06 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 62 | 4.09 | 33 | |
| Theme | 111 | 4.21 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 24 | 4.64 | 34 | |
| Mood | 3 | 4.64 | 33 |
Loved the atmosphere and art design and everything....... The fish with shoes caught me off-guard it was so good. Also the dialogue and the descriptions of everything were very flavorful! Great job!!
I like the concept, I would like to see more main character states,fun meetings, dialogues, equipment, weapons, I hope the game will be fully available!
Amazing art design
I love the main character, the art design is rly great
I enjoyed this game a lot. It took me 3 attempts to beat it, although I must admit -- I won due to a bug (see the notes below).
The best parts: * As mentioned by others, the art style is good and quite consistent. I especially like the cover and the final encounter character * The flavor text for items and interactions is well-written (at least for my taste) * The UI is stylish, while being simple. I would probably borrow this trick * Inventory management is fun enough to contribute to the experience, I do miss item swap function, but it's understandable * It's cool that I understood what I'm supposed to do by the end, even though nobody told me directly (there are a couple of indirect hints in the game!) * I LOVE the unusual interactions: feeding an enemy, killing an enemy with an onion, etc; also, attacking a puzzle/quiz box was funny * Trading is fun - it's a mini game of its own (it also allows the player to re-arrange the inventory while at it) * It apparently has more than 1 ending?
Other stuff: * The game doesn't tell you there are no bullets and you miss a turn. I got a pistol, but no ammo. It makes it a very disappointing item. Even if it's by design, it only serves to frustrate the player. Give it at least 1 shot, so it's not a complete waste of gold bags :D * It wasn't too intuitive how to use weapons in the game as it only gives you prompts to escape; I did figure it out though * If have <20 hunger, boulder doesn't do damage * Could be related to above, after that bug I stopped taking hunger damage, so I was at a constant 0 without any problems (except the slow speed) * I catched 0 turtles out of 7 with 35% chance... It's mathematically possible, but also annoying. A fixed 100% chance after 2-3 misses could be nice. I just want to know what it has xD I guess it's a mushroom?
win2.png win3.png
@quasilyte Thanks again for beating the game! The revolver was added literally in the last hours of the event (like many other things), but I agree, an empty revolver doesn't sound very cool. As for the hunger bug - I'll try to find out what the reason is (although, it may help someone to go a little further😈) And yes, if you catch a turtle, it will give you... _a mushroom_.
The game crashed when I tried to kill the fish in boots, is this my punishment?photo_2025-04-08_12-13-59.jpg
@harvmori **YES** (actually no, I'll try to fix that soon, sorry...) (_p.s. thanks for the screenshot, I think it will help me to catch the bug_)
WOW!! I LOVE THE GAME!! The 666 meters detail is such a nice addition to an already perfect atmosphere! The description and dialogue are really well crafted! I eventually found a bug that makes hunger stop affecting you, which actually let me finish the game, and the ending is amazing as well! The gameplay could use a bit of polish and balancing. The tile placing and rotation mechanic needs more items to really feel useful. Still, it’s a solid experience overall, and my favorite game so far. Great work!!
It's very beautiful, very interesting and sooo atmospheric.
Very interesting and authentic game. Very well polished
This is such a great idea! I loved the inventory tetris stuff and the artstyle is just fantastic! Great work!
I JUST LOVED THIS GAME!!!! You already have pretty useful feedbacks, so I'm just gonna congratulate to the two of you for this pretty polished game, you've found yourself a new follower!
((And if you do enjoy ~~reading a lot~~ narrative fictions please come check our game. It would be my pleasure to return the favor of a good discovery.))
swords broken - 1, rats fed - 1, gold bags lost 3, turtles caught - 0, 5\5 great game
i love the game! the style, the gameplay, the ending, the characters, the description. it was so cool. Played literally a hour or two. haha very cool!
AMAZING!!! I just played this for a solid 2 hours!!
amazing game concept
Fun game, I wasn't able to go further than about 120 meters with a few attempts one of my attempt, a mimic killed me as it died, a bug? (it got one last hit as it was disappearing)
The atmosphere absolutely hits hard
I don't know how I could play for so long! Congrats!! I don't think I've ever seen that inventory-packing mechanic, with the closest being Factorio's modular armor. When it gets a bit complicated, it'd be great to be able to temporarily have invalid inventories for the time you're swapping.
Interesting game with great art and atmosphere.
I am shocked, this is done SO GOOD! The game kept encouraging me to continue, a lot of stuff I have seen and even more I see on screenshots of other players. The killing joke for me was when from the bizzare and mistique darkness emerged my discord avatar (fish in boots), so I encountered LITERALLY ME in the mist! I am stunned with amount of content you added to the jam game. Pure gold
stylish game! art, equipment, UI - very pretty, also i like flavor text for items and atmosphere. but random is killing me, literally xd i just straved to death and found bullets in chest, but didn't have a gun so them were useless. but i still think that game is cool and it would be great if you continue development after the jam ends
The cover art really caught my interest and the game did not dissapoint. It was very fun to play. From how the game is set up gameplay, and art. They really fit together! Great work!
@pandalk Maybe so, I'll check it and fix. Thanks for the feedback!
Looks atmospheric
Walked only 196m, but during this time I was scammed by a fish in boots, guessed 2 riddles of the cube, almost died of hunger, in the end it was the duck that killed me. A lot of different events and they are interesting, great game, and very atmosphericphoto_2025-04-10_20-40-50.jpg
My friend managed to beat this game in ~4 tries. They had a feedback that the boulder appears too often, so every time they managed to get some food, all of it was taken by the boulder. :D It's also hard to have a pickaxe at hand, and it might be too large of an item to keep (you want an armor and other useful stuff inside your backpack). He also noticed that it's up to the random whether the game is beatable or not - if you're not lucky, there is no way you're going to fix that.
Maybe a better rng distribution could help here, and there are different techniques for like, but it's not that useful for a jam game that has hard time constraints. But if you're going to make it into a bigger game, these changes might be worthwhile.
@quasilyte Yo. Thanks for the detailed feedback on the game. I agree that the rng in the game doesn't always feel fair, unfortunately we didn't have time to test everything well enough because we decided to add as many items as possible to make the game more interesting.
However, in several runs I almost always managed to reach 666 meters, I even had two attempts where I reached 1000+ meters. The runs will be easier if you use, perhaps, not entirely obvious mechanics: + if you had several runs of 200+ meters, then you probably noticed that the knight always appears at the same distance and restores you a little health and hunger. He will also appear again later and help you again, but not so generously. In each of my runs, I tried to save as many useful resources as possible for 200 meters. + there is a way to almost always get a large mushroom from a turtle and for this you do not need to catch it at all. + the Rat is probably one of the most useful NPCs. Surely you already understood that for a piece of cheese it returns a previously thrown item. If you use this mechanic correctly, you will always know what the rat will bring you, use it wisely. + the sword is fragile, it is very difficult to kill someone with a stub, so on a long journey even tools can be a good help in the fight for your life, but you do not have to fight with everything you see, sometimes it is easier to try to run away or use something more effective to avoid combat. + In order to go as far as possible, you need to decide what is more important for you now health or food? Bonfire restores a lot of health, but in my runs I often skipped it to save food, because at that moment it was more important. I was also ready to endure hunger for a while to save a piece of cheese or garlic.
Well, if you really don't have enough space, just get rid of what was taking it up to begin with. Doesn't work? _Well, promises are forgotten over time, maybe you can do it too?_
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Very atmosphere and interesting game! Absolutely enticed from the first seconds and kept me in suspense the whole playthrough. But despite its darkness, it has a lot of fun encounters, not only fights, but also conversations and puzzles. Items are used very cleverly, you can't imagine my joy when I got garlic and was trying to get to the bat in time to use it!
Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to the end yet, because the random events didn't always work out in my favor (perhaps it would be easier if at least a little bit of food or life restoration was scripted at the beginning, instead of being random). But that doesn't make the game any less interesting, and I'll definitely try again to keep my promise to the end!
К сожалению, не могу поиграть в игру, т.к. она не подходит к моему разрешению 1366х768.
Я вижу, что эта игра сделана в Game Maker. Там есть очень простая настройка, которая позволяет расширить игроку игру на весь экран, надо просто указать это при экспорте игры.
Если сможете поправить, буду благодарен ^_^
@xpoho Привет, там игра окно 1280x720, по сути влезать должно (но я как понял проблема в рамке). На днях добавлю полноэкранный режим на кнопку, пингану когда будет готово :smirk_cat:
@ninjacatz Спасибо, буду ждать ^_^
@xpoho Снова привет! Обновил сборку, пофиксил некоторые баги, найденные игроками, а также добавил возможность полноэкранного режима на **F10**. Надеюсь, что это поможет :sweat_smile: Ещё добавил русскую локализацию (правда на скорую руку), вдруг кому-то так будет удобнее, язык можно поменять во время игры на **F2**
Поиграл, весьма сложная игра. Сделана здорово, в целом, готовое приключение ^_^
Спасибо большое за отклик! Успехов!
Loved the atmosphere on this. Very tense and foreboding. The graphics and writing were wonderful. I like some of the moral choices the game presents you with as you progress.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it very far at all. My best was 186 meters. I see you've offered some tips above, but... I'm not sure they'd be all too useful. The rat can be given cheese? Well... the game never _gave_ me cheese, so I couldn't do that. The knight couldn't help me because I never made it to 200 meters. I guess the turtle thing could have been useful, but I only saw the turtle once, and I assumed the only way to get something out of the encounter would be to catch it, which I failed to do. The simple fact is that the game did not give me enough food to make it very far at all. I was never able to reach 200 meters, even with spreading my food out as much as I could and enduring 0 hunger for long periods of time. I tried three times, and was not able to improve. I would only get a few pieces of food each run. I only made it as far as I did on my last try because the game took mercy on me and happened to present me with less enemies and more chests (though, two of those chests only had scissors, which I'm not sure what I was supposed to do with...). Inventory space wasn't an issue because I simply wasn't given enough items to _make_ it an issue.
Please let me know if I'm approaching this all wrong, somehow. I really want to enjoy this game to its fullest potential, and I feel like I may be missing something. As-is, I don't think I'll be giving it any more attempts, because each run played roughly the same, and took a lot of time.
(By the way, as a small graphical criticism - I think the font is being rendered wrong. It's clearly a pixel font, but is being rendered with some kind of antialiasing. Perhaps it is simply being used at the wrong size, but if antialiasing was off, as it should be, that wouldn't cause blurring. It's possible this is on Scribble, but that extension is quite configurable so I can't see a reason this problem shouldn't be resolvable with some configuration.)
@python-b5 Hi, thanks for playing! Unfortunately, creating such a game in three days from scratch is quite difficult. There simply wasn't enough time to adjust the balance (I'm sure every participant is familiar with that). And I think changing the balance **after** the submission period is _unfair_ to other participants (because it's a feature that changes the gameplay after all).
Regarding scissors and other things - at the beginning of the journey the **knight asks you to hit him with your sword**. This is **a basic rule** showing that the **player can use items on creatures**. And what effect this will have - can be understood from the thoughts of the heroine after using it, or from the visual effects (for example, the sound of the hit and the shaking of the creature indicates that it has _received damage_). _Finding a use for a particular item_ is also one of the game mechanics that _can_ make the game easier. (_TLDR: scissors can be used as weapon, it has random damage every hit (＃￣ω￣) _)
Yea, I agree that it turned out to be difficult and repetitive in some places. The game has a lack of polishing. But I'm very glad that there were many people who liked it even in this state.
As for the font, it's most likely due to adaptive scaling of the UI. Without bluring, it would likely be heavily distorted (and again, I just have no time to test it ( ╥ω╥ )). I can't say that it's displayed absolutely wrong, or that antialiasing makes it difficult to read the text, even though the font is pixelated.
Thanks for feedback anyway, I will take this into account in future projects (=`ω´=) ~
@ninjacatz Thanks for responding. I was consistently using my sword for damage (even got a second one from the merchant on one of my runs!), which indeed I learned from the initial encounter with the knight, but I somehow didn't think to try the scissors, despite them being sharp. I guess my brain just connected them with "tool", not "weapon". That would undoubtedly have helped me get a bit further, considering I had two pairs of them. Perhaps I will try the game again when I have time, and see if I could improve, since the atmosphere/world of this game really gripped me and I'd be quite interested in seeing how it ends.
I agree balance changes shouldn't be made post-submission. My own game has heavy balance problems, and I've also just had to deal with it. I've made many balance changes to the game as feedback has come in, but it was all saved for a post-ratings update we'll release soon, with a clear label to show it is not the 72h version. Some games do post-jam updates like that, and some don't; it's up to the developer whether they wish to continue working on the game, or whether they consider it finished as-is.
Yeah, font scaling can be weird. As with most GameMaker games this does seem to be fixed resolution, so you do have the advantage of not having to target different displays. Once antialiasing is turned off, you just need to find the size your pixel font was designed to display at. For fonts added as GameMaker assets and drawn with the built-in functions, this is often just the default value of 12, but I haven't used Scribble much so I can't say what it might be in your case. It should be possible, though. It's certainly not a major issue, and if you have no interest in fixing it I doubt most people would even notice - I only did because I'm a huge perfectionist with my own stuff, to sometimes a detrimental extent. It's just UI polish.