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Reclamation
Reclamation
By justinmullin and Blake Mullin
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 482 | 3.50 | 37 | |
| Fun | 553 | 3.20 | 37 | |
| Innovation | 251 | 3.65 | 37 | |
| Theme | 185 | 4.12 | 37 | |
| Graphics | 465 | 3.68 | 37 | |
| Audio | 369 | 3.41 | 38 | |
| Humor | 435 | 2.74 | 33 | |
| Mood | 297 | 3.84 | 38 | |
Comments
This is a pretty cool game. I like the idea of managing signals by raising flags depending on what’s happening, while also observing other houses and their flags — like fires and other events. It creates an interesting system of communication and awareness.
The concept itself is really appealing and feels quite original. You can tell there was a lot of thought put into the world and its logic.
The main difficulty for me was understanding how everything interacts. It’s not always clear what each flag represents or how they should be used in different situations. Some kind of in-game guide or quick reference explaining the meaning of each flag and how to use them effectively would make the experience much smoother.
Overall though, very interesting idea — I enjoyed it!
xotraz
2026-04-21 16:30
Great work, but there is a lot to memorize.
I really loved how the visuals, though simple at first glance, work so well with the great music to immerse you in the game
Interesting ideas, but I had trouble getting into the game. The systems feel complex and there’s a lot of text upfront, which made it hard to quickly understand what to do (especially in a jam setting).
I tried interacting with the flags, but without a clear goal I felt a bit lost. A short tutorial or simple objective could help a lot.
That said, it feels like there’s something deeper here, and I liked the binoculars and the view!
2026-04-21 18:13
peacefull and not ordinar theme view
It's a good concept
kenoshka
2026-04-21 23:30
a little bit too much of text and context to handle for jam, as mentioned above, but still like the idea and game loop
I loved the concept! The world and lore felt really well thought out, and it's always cool to play a game that encourages me to pull out a pad of paper and a pencil to take some notes. Hoisting that golden flag at the end felt well earned. Only criticism would be maybe be able to scrap letters you've written I clicked on the wrong button and wrote the wrong letter, but luckily that didn't seem to affect the outcome.
Anyway, a fun playthrough!
pkenney
2026-04-23 03:09
Hey - great to see the Flag of Mullin flying again!
mullin-flag.png
Real chill vibe with the music and art, and the pacing. I spent quite a while with this, and was consulting the manual many, many times. I think the game was supposed to be much shorter than my experience, but I was so focused on reading the flags from the other towers and comparing them to my rules book that I overlooked two important details at first: that I had received a letter with instruction to SEND a flag message, and that once I did I should light a signal fire.
So that first day was long, and a lot of spyglass-looking and book-checking. I didn't mind because the game had a good vibe. I will say I wished badly for fullscreen. I have a harder time immersing myself when I can't fullscreen. I ended up changing the display options on my computer so that at least I could get it to take MOST of the screen, instead of the about 30% it initially was taking.
Once I got over the hump of that first day, things went smoothly for the resistance. It was pretty cool that first time when I did spot a pattern. I had gotten familiar enough that I was like WAIT THAT'S NOT NORMAL, OH BOY.
Loved the smoke in the distance. It looks visually nice, adds to the vibe and feeling of progress/change, but most of all it makes you stop and think, hrm, are those signal fires or are they war casualties from the violence I am facilitating so indirectly? At first I thought that maybe I'd made a mistake and gotten the other towers outed and burned down.
Nice entry!
daliamha
2026-04-23 14:15
Cool game but i can't open it fullscreen
Wow, the lore and the art really got me hooked on, also the music fit the mood very well. The flags waving was a cherry on top. I had a really good time consulting the manuals and deciphering the flag codes. There was a lot of reading but I liked that, made me more immersed. Overall a very chill experience and I'd play a full game of that. Keep up the great work!
anszwa
2026-04-23 15:19
Cool and quite original concept. A short intro or clearer guidance would make it easier to get into for me.
Still, theres definitely something interesting here. I had a good time with it!
Thanks for the feedback all!
We struggled quite a bit with tuning how many puzzles should be in the game before the end, as we wanted at least some players to make it to the ending, but didn't want it to feel too thin for players who took the time to read through the books and understand the puzzle. This was probably the most rushed I've felt during a Ludum Dare - probably we were too ambitious with how much we tried to accomplish, as we had to make some really hard cuts towards the end.
@alex-de-la-cour funny you mention it, as scrapping a letter was _right_ near the top of my TODO list to implement at the deadline, and it just barely didn't make the cut. Glad you enjoyed the ending!
@daliamha thanks for playing, and sorry about the lack of fullscreen. With lots of scrolling and parallax effects, we struggled more than we should have with getting things to scale and lay out correctly at many screen resolutions, and ended up with a fixed resolution (though it's _supposed_ to be scaling up 2x, 3x etc. if you have a large enough screen). Given more time and familiarity with the engine (Godot) I wish we'd have been able to fix that.
@pkenney thanks for the detailed feedback and for sitting with it 'til the end! It's really nice to be back to Ludum Dare. It's been a busy handful of years, but I really hope to make it back into a regular thing.
That ending gave me literal goosebumps. There's something really surreal about only communicating with other people through complex codes. I always felt sort of sure about what they were saying but never 100% confident. The storytelling also did a good job of making me feel like my job was integral to the success of the resistance and one little mistake would cost people's lives. There was a lot of reading up front, however, it did a really good job of immersing me once I got into it. My round only lasted 3 days or so. From reading other comments, I'm not sure if that's typical or not. I was pretty sure that I messed up a message but then I won on the next turn so that was unexpected. I did like the feeling of being abstracted from the war where the news of victory or defeat could come at any moment. Overall, really awesome game, you guys did a fantastic job!
Screenshot 2026-04-24 130640.png
@borealteuthidia Wow, thank you so much for the kind words and the feedback! It's really nice to hear the ending worked well for you, and that you were able to get caught up in the game world. We put a lot of time and energy into trying to figure out just the right way to tell the story in the time available, so it means a lot to see it's landed properly for some folks. It was a bit terrifying to launch the game knowing it's effectively unplayable unless you're willing to sit down and digest both of the books properly, so it's also a big relief to see that not everyone TL;DRs their way out of the game once they see all that text. :upside_down:
jelliott
2026-04-26 05:01
Fantastic writing, you have a great way with words!
Personally I found the actual gameplay quite easy to learn, but it does take time to read all the necessary text. I had no issue with this since the writing is so enjoyable.
The parallax effect on the camera pan is very cool.
My frustrations were the "realism" of the wind. I think a spent a minute waiting for flags to present themselves.
Also was nice to have a happy ending. I'm so used to feeling defeated at the end of these types of narratives.
wallted
2026-04-26 23:56
The visuals are so stunning! And yeah okay, these books were kinda scary - but I went with it step by step and it was a really satisfying brain-teaser in the end. It is so cool that the lore is incorporated into mechanics so much - this winds up the whole game for me and really sparked my imagination. Obviously this fits theme perfectly. I really respect you for the ending, which was not just a final puzzle, but a told story :)
My one nitpick - ending of the first day confirms if I want to end with no posted letters, which is not the case for the first day. It kinda made me go back and reread some parts of the book. While valid, this could be skipped imo for the first day to ease the loop a little bit.
Fantastic entry!
Could you create a companion PDF so I can have it open on another screen?
Really cool game ! Maybe a bit too complex for a jam game, but it's really interesting, deep and well made.
Good job :slight_smile:
@skiddings thanks for the suggestion! I've uploaded PDF versions of the two books to the Itch.io page here: https://justinmullin.itch.io/reclamation - hope that helps a bit!
Very solid idea with a lot of work behind it. Needs some time to understand how everything ticks. But overall very nice feel to the game.
7uc4s
2026-05-01 10:19
I have to be honest, at first I got scared by the documentation, two pdfs o 20ish pages each :cold_sweat: Anyway, read through it, and then decided to proceed with game playing, assumed things would start to make sense once I get to see them, and this was clearly a good idea (also, a great help to have the doc on a second monitor).
Anyway, I started the game feeling a bit lost, like "what am I supposed so start with?" then explored a bit the interactions, and finally noticed the mail, the other towers, then things started to make sense, and then I understood the game flow : check for messages, setup flags for message, then light up fire (though this became clear on day 2).
I think day 3 started to feel weird, like now I'm getting two orders? Alright, so proceeded to send "NEUTRALIZE" and "ABORT" in the mail, being very happy that I won't have to deal with those contradicting messages lol Then it's probably that day that I realized that I might have been sending ambiguous messages, me having read the doc a bit too fast probably, anyway with the resistance update I got, things seem to be fine, guess I got lucky :shrug:
Finally, receiving the last letter from the resistance was quite a relief, I was getting mentally prepared for what was about to come next, like sending 4 messages and reading 3, but no, the resistance made it, game's over. Got the last flag, I kinda knew what I had to do with it, but still checked the other signals, all three fires burning, and this confirmed I was right. Then the goosebump.
It's fascinating how this game got me involved, like feeling this psychological pressure, I need to send the right message and not upset the first realm people.
Ambiance and atmosphere are well tuned, you do feel the loneliness, graphics are simple yet effective, no bugs, and perfect balance of difficulty increase and overall length. A freaking cool experience overall, enjoyed it a lot, well done!
Wow! This game looks and sounds AMAZING! It was hard for me to understand the whole process, two large documents are a little overwhelming, i think, so I had hard times getting things done. But it is without a doubt a great amount of work. You did a great job!