immortalfox 2025-10-05 22:27
A great experience! Chill audio, cool graphics, very great submission! But had to find out in what way to eliminate the stones, before it became clear :D Thanks for a submission!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → Gems of Kaine
By mateusboga
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 30 | 3.91 | 31 | |
| Fun | 40 | 3.65 | 31 | |
| Innovation | 26 | 3.93 | 31 | |
| Theme | 109 | 3.53 | 31 | |
| Graphics | 31 | 4.12 | 31 | |
| Audio | 16 | 3.96 | 31 | |
| Humor | 121 | 2.66 | 30 | |
| Mood | 48 | 3.77 | 31 |
A great experience! Chill audio, cool graphics, very great submission! But had to find out in what way to eliminate the stones, before it became clear :D Thanks for a submission!
Hardest simplest game indeed. punishing! I love it
The text at the beginning is a lot to take in. I think conveying it through fewer words, or through visuals, gameplay, or audio would have made the experience feel more organic. But I do know these things can be hard to pull off in a compo. The gameplay works well, but it takes some time to figure out the rules of each gem. I wish it were a bit more intuitive, though it works fine as it is. The adrenaline from picking each gem is quite fun, and it’s quite rare for this kind of game, making it feel unique. The graphics and sounds are really good and help build the atmosphere well. I wish the sound of picking up the gems were a bit louder, it would really add to the satisfaction of choosing the right gem. All in all, this is a solid entry. Well done!
@immortalfox @dhim @she-wrote Thank you so much for playing and for the feedback!
@she-wrote Maybe this didn't come across, but I was trying to be comedic with the wall of text in the beginning, because in the end it doesn't matter at all for the game xD
Good lord, the "AH HA!" moment hits like a truck. It took me a while to crack the code, but the moment I understood what the numbers meant, the game truly began.
Here is my entire recording as I learn in realtime how to play the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZlKvUjeU6A
@100th-coin Thank you so much for the video, that was really interesting to watch ^^
I was soooo confused at first, but when I GOT IT, I felt like a genius haha really clever! and really polished and well made! WELL DONE!
So, I did record a video, but that one is not going to be posted for a variety of reasons I'm going to talk about here. I'll just do a proper written comment instead, because I do still have a lot of feelings about it. I do think the concept is interesting, and now understanding the rule I do think it's a cool rule to build a puzzle game around. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really play puzzle games because I'm bad at them, and as such never really got better at understanding their language. Even if I understood the rule from the start, I probably would not have finished the game, just because of the kinds of games I play. None of this is your fault at all, I am just not the target audience of something like this. That being said, the primary mechanic of this game is not the actual puzzles. It seems to be the meta-puzzle of figuring out the rule governing these puzzles. This is a really cool concept in theory, it sort of stems from something like The Witness where the rules are an additional layer of puzzles in and of themselves. I don't think anyone would argue that a game like that is necessarily unfair, and neither would I, but that's also a game I bounced off of extremely hard despite its objective good design.
However, I feel like the language of the puzzles makes it very difficult to determine what the rules are. The constantly running timer, the intense music, and everything else aesthetically about this game is great, but it makes it feel very tense which made me try to rush through guessing at puzzles instead of actually trying to figure it out. By the time I slowed down and tried to solve the meta-puzzle, I was already decently frustrated and could no longer actually reason through the information with the logic required. If I had stuck with it for a little longer, I think I maybe could have gotten it, but then we get back to the root issue of me probably not being able to solve the actual puzzles even after this realization.
I honestly don't know how you solve something like this, obviously there are people that this worked for, and making it easier would probably ruin their "aha" moments, or at least dull them. But then there's always the risk of it being overly frustrating for those who can't figure it out and by proxy can't experience the whole game. I wonder if some sort of hint system would help, like once per level it could show you a correct next step and then you could reason through why that's the correct option. It's not an easy solution, it's the kind of game that I think inherently risks alienating people, and maybe that's what the game needs to be to reach its target audience.
All this being said, I'd just like to reiterate that this is pretty much exclusively a me problem. I'm impatient and bad at parsing the language of puzzle games, and this was going to require that from me no matter what. I do think the mechanics are very clever, and the whole aesthetic and narrative design is delightful. It's objectively a very interesting and intricately created game, it just didn't work for my abilities in its current state, and maybe that's okay.
@yoav-kagan Thank you for the feedback :)
@mathstr0fficial Indeed we're taking about somewhat subjective things, and I think you put it well. It's not for everybody. I do agree with you also that I think ultimately the design of the environment and music could have been better thought out, and fit the kind of game that it is better. But also it's essentially 3 different games on top of each-other: it's the puzzle of figuring out the rules (like The Witness like you said), it's the actual puzzle, and then it's the speedrunning part of the game (that I think no-one is going to attempt tbh xD) so I think that maybe I still managed to bite a little more than I could chew. Regardless, thank you so much for your feedback! ^^
I love it! It took me a while to figure out the rules, the hints on the itch.io page were critical - I was thinking global rules, not local, and kept getting stuck - and the ruby being a 0 was a useful clue, but even after the hints I had to work for it a bit to figure it out, and that felt good.
Once I understood the rules, it still took me a few tries, until around level 10 I zeroed in on a greedy strategy that seemed to work to remove most of the gems without any change of a mistake, and it was pretty route/simple for the last couple levels (though still kept me interested). It felt like maybe 1 more level and I'd be getting bored, so, good job on choosing a cut-off point =).
The only thing I didn't like was re-doing those first few levels (I was at the point where my theoretical rules worked for roughly 100% of 2x2 and 3x3 levels, so I had to click through 3-4 levels again to test a new rule theory for a while). Maybe if it just sent you back 1 level (or 1 level size) on a mistake, instead of all the way to the beginning, that would have felt better, and let me more quickly test my theories.
Music was great, I didn't feel the urge to mute it, which is high praise for a LD game :laughing:.
I didn't try a speed-run, but here was my final time:
Screenshot 2025-10-08 155246.png
This game was really clever. I'll admit I had to watch the video someone else posted to fully get the rules. I should've focused on hint #1, because I kept assuming the rules were global. I did enjoy trying to figure it out though. I like the scrolling intro and the art and music are good. I wish there was a retry button, because I mis-clicked on one level and had to restart from level 1. Fun game!
I am very impressed by either the random level generation or the number of levels created. I can see the outline of how it would be done by building the level in reverse, but making the levels consistently non-trivial sounds like it might be trickier.
By the end it did get a little repetitive - one more kind of gem which twists the rules a bit (shifting the meaning of adjacent gems, for instance?) might have been interesting, but of course that would probably make the game a _lot_ harder both to play and to create levels for.
Allowing moves to be reversed (not sure if it is unlimited? seems to be quite a few), but any mistake sends you back to round 1, is an interesting choice. It does mean that any "immediately safe" move can be made without looking deeper, since if you end up in a dead end moves-wise you can always back up. I think the way you have set it up works well in the "learning the rules of the game" phase but perhaps less well in the "I understand the game and am just executing a depth-first search algorithm" phase. Given that this is a jam game and most people are likely to spend most of their time in the first phase, I do not think you made a bad choice here.
Anyway, this is a fun and well polished experience. Well done :)
Very good "aha" moment, beat it with a time of 6:49 in the end, great meta-puzzle! Extremely amusing to discover the rules are faaar simpler than me and my friends were trying to come up with. Still unsure about what hint 2 on the itch page is talking about, but hints 1 and 4 were very important.
I kind of hate puzzle games :grin: , I don't think I have the patience for it. Played for a little while but couldn't figure out the rules, not reading the itch page doesn't help. Once I cheated and watched the other video on here and understood the rules it became more fun and less frustrating. Maybe its just me, but I find trying to solve a puzzle when I understand the rules more fun than trying to figure out the rules, especially here where it feels like there was a lot of possible ways the rules could have been arranged based on colours, positions, order etc. Presentation was nice, little bug in that if you turn off the music (I liked it, but it gets stressful after a while) it resets every game over. I appreciated the little story setting stuff, its kind of silly, but some how that stuff adds to the fun. Certainly a solid entry.
@automatonvx @willops @aquanim @nomelu @jimbly Thanks so much for playing and for your feedback :)
I enjoyed playing it. Nice graphics, fitting music, original game play (to me - I do not recall ever playing something with this kind of rules) and it feels like being sufficiently polished.💗
This felt frustrating at first but once I got it, it felt so satisfying. I love the game over sound and music.
Great and unique idea!
gg.png
Oh... I thought the graphics were beautiful and caught my attention. I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out the logic, but it didn't make any sense to me. I couldn't get past stage 3. Unfortunately, I gave up. :(
Ah, such a nice puzzler! You can get into quite a flow after you figure out the rules. I gave up after a mis-click sent me back from level 11 (harsh, especially when you have infinite undo otherwise) - how many levels are there?
It's great to see a simple idea delivered with great polish, very nice entry!
It's a good puzzle, trying to figure out the rules is agony. What are you doing to me, author
Clever and unique! Once it clicks, it’s super satisfying. Great visuals, chill audio, and an awesome overall vibe – well done!
Oh this is so polished for a compo game, super impressed. I think the return to level 1 at every failure was harsh, but trying to figure out the rules through trial and error was fun. Honestly I don't know if I was right about the order I was going or if I just got lucky, but either way, impressive.
It's an interesting game, though as someone who doesn't play puzzle games too much, I had trouble understanding the cause-and-effect relationships in the game. Some ideas to help new players without detracting from the puzzle experience:
- Make sure the game is self-contained, i.e. include the hints inside the game (I didn't realize I should scroll to read the hints on the itch page until I read the comments here) - Have hand-crafted levels that introduce rules one-at-a-time (something like the witness) to help players identify the rules rather than have to guess & fail as many times - Or if not hand-crafted, consider re-generating the level until it is more incremental from the previous level, so that the leaps in logic don't have to be as large
In any case, a very impressive compo game with excellent execution overall! I'll have to revisit it to try to take another swing at understanding the rules. Thanks for a great game :-)
#### 20.10.2025
Understanding the rules wasn't all that easy for me, but once I figured them out, I was hooked. I had to do a second run right away :slight_smile:
I just had to mute the music because it was getting a bit too tense. But otherwise, everything's fine, both graphically and sound-wise. Awesome game!
#### 23.10.2025
Screenshot 2025-10-23 072400.png
May seem hard at first sight, but very entertaining and even funny if you figure it out and continue playing! Good job, guys!
Imma be honest, I loved the artwork and the sounds, but I did not get the logic behind it. I managed to get a few levels in, but at some point, it gets so muddy I can't get through it. However, the game is great, and I really enjoyed playing it!
I really liked this one! I did have to go into the description for hints for how to play (once I read "they only see adjacent gems" I figured it out pretty quickly), but once I got the hang of it, it was a really fun puzzle and felt a bit like minesweeper.
Are the levels procedurally generated? They definitely look different every time, and this seems like a game that would not be too impossible to implement that in Compo timelines!
Loved the overall vibe of the music and sinister laughter when you lose. I made it to level 10 a few times but didn't end up getting farther because I kept making small mistakes - restarting from the beginning is maybe a little bit too punishing, although it is probably necessary early on to make sure the player actually learns the rules correctly.
What a diabolical logic game, with such a great atmosphere! You did a great job making this game feel intense despite being a genre more commonly associated with chill, laid-back vibes. It took me awhile to figure out the rules, and it would have taken me MUCH longer without the hints, so thank you for providing those. Having to restart completely on making a mistake is very brutal, but it fits the game's mood perfectly.
I liked that the music resumed at a different point every restart, it kept things fresh and made long runs feel more impactful. The graphics are nice, and I like the spooky red highlights that appear when you make a mistake, with the spooky laughing. I could never get past level 7, but I appreciate the difficulty and what you're going for.
PS: Thanks for having an undo button, too! Would have been much more painful/frustrating without it.