julia-nistel 2026-04-21 04:21
I love the weird vibes! I wasn't really good at identifying the sound but I had fun
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD59 → Last Writes
By seong, Luumi and orangeoceans
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 65 | 4.12 | 48 | |
| Fun | 290 | 3.58 | 48 | |
| Innovation | 20 | 4.32 | 48 | |
| Theme | 10 | 4.63 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 185 | 4.20 | 48 | |
| Audio | 101 | 4.05 | 48 | |
| Mood | 105 | 4.19 | 48 |
I love the weird vibes! I wasn't really good at identifying the sound but I had fun
This is definitely innovative gameplay, but unfortunately I realized I was stuck in the middle of the game. As I understand, the concept is to listen to the signal and find the right place.
WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK 10/10
I cannot get past the Cardinality level, but i'll try again tomorrow !
Thanks for the feedback! We've added a walkthrough to the game description if you need it!
nice game and godot shaders are top)
This is realy goooooood, i like vibes and style. Voice... omg WOW interesting gameplay, unique and fun. Gooooood job!
eeeeerie!
God this is the most visually & atmospherically compelling game so far, but man those puzzles are hard! I think without the walkthrough it can be a little hard to sus out what exactly the objective is, which wouldn't be that much of a problem if it weren't for the limited life count. Still, really really great work, loved it overall.
OH my goodness there's so many things I want to say about this. First off, I'm sure the ai is sincere about it saying "I want to be closer to my father" (paraphrasing cause bad memory, lol), but with the context of the music and everything else, it has such a heavy undertone of malice. I'm use to stories about creations hating their creator now, so that's where my mind went to with this one, but I got actual chills when it said that. Also the puzzle is pure genius, the tutorials give you nothing but context in a masterful way. The design is perfection as well, and just everything. I'mma keep trying to complete it without hints, rn I'm stuck on chorus, but still, so so good. Fantastic job my dude. :D
Oh my golly, I love this. The worldbuilding? The confusing sound based puzzles? The presentation? All of it is extremely interesting and inspiring. I will send this game to other friends to see them play through it.
Just beat it, oh my goodness, this NEEDS to have more ratings, If I had my pick, this is probably my absolute favorite game out of any of the 50 some games I've played so far. Holy peak, best game in this entire jam imho.
Thanks for the glowing reviews everyone :)
@drainkid It's a good point. Tuning the difficulty of the puzzles and the number of lives was a real challenge. Since so many of the puzzles can be brute forced, I decided that giving unlimited lives would blunt the pressure of solving the puzzles, and the impact of the game. In my own experience, I've found that I can appreciate a puzzle even when I have to use a walkthrough!
I wonder how we would balance this if we ever elaborated it into a longer game.
Very very cool concept and aesthetic! Really enjoyed this :)
I like the nervous vibe and retro atmosphere! And use mechanics of Acoustics as an element of puzzles is really a good idea. A really nice game for a music composer xwx :sparkles:
that was really cool!! I did have a bit of trouble finding the highest signal point, but I managed :)
Really cool atmosphere and great idea for puzzles! I didn’t finish it yet, but I’ll continue tomorrow!
this game is pretty neat! the story was a bit lost on me, but i like the vibe. the constant nervous drone in the background, the simplistic visuals...i feel like i'm in a nightmare...good atmosphere. the puzzles are pretty cool too, even if some of them confused me a lot at first (especially Cardinality, that level was very difficult for me)
This was way too hard for me to complete, my pitch hearing isn't that great and picking up on all audio cues, but wow. Just wow. This is INSANELY cool and REALLY REALLY creative, for the two cutscenes that I saw, it had really cool worldbuilding, great voice acting and I mean just generally the feel of the game is fantastic. Amazing game 10/10. The only complaint is that the difficulty feels too unforgiving with having to restart all the way back in the beginning. Will try to finish the game later through walkthroughs for full story.
my ears are still ringing 10/10
@zancked @thatfirey Thanks! FYI based on player feedback we've added some minor improvements to the cutscenes/story presentation that might make it clearer, though tbh the narrative is meant to be a bit vague.
Fantastic vibe and cool challenge. I really liked the concepts.
Plus, you guys have a great logo and team name :D
Very nice idea, but my eyes and ears suffered.
Very original idea! I loved the puzzles!
I really liked how you used the theme of signals with audio, or the lights and other stuff that could be interpreted as "signals". Very creative and so polished. Good gob! :3
Really nice, the story beats where nicely done. I sadly had to give up on getting to the finish. The cheat button did not seem to work on me? The cheat sheet is nice addition to the page, though i had already forgotten the name of level. Slightly weird option to go with lifes since you dont randomize the levels and losing is really punishing since you have already solved the levels and need to just repeat the motions and remember the spot you were in, ofc this reduces brute forcing and makes some tension of punishment. Maybe checkpoints between some level to even it out?
@prunus-padis That's curious, if the [\`]/[~] cheat button doesn't work, are you on a non-English language keyboard maybe? Or maybe [\`] vs ['] is confusing? I'll add a different key.
The lives are meant to discourage brute forcing, yes, since all of the levels can be brute forced. When playtesting I found that without lives, players would simply stop paying attention and flail around until they got through the level.
We've talked a lot internally about if we should add checkpoints. I decided against it, for reasons relevant to the ending of the game (spoilers!). Once you know the solutions (or read the walkthrough), the game is actually quite short, so I felt that not including checkpoints was an ok tradeoff to keep the narrative cohesive.
I felt the cheat button was a reasonable compromise to players' naturally shorter attention spans during a game jam, as it's explicitly posed as a cheat and doesn't affect the game structure as such.
@prunus-padis I've added `.` as a cheat button. If you have a second, would you mind seeing if it works?
Crazy entry in all of the best ways! It has so many different ways of how signal could be interpreted and combined with the mood and gameplay it really stands out! Also, the polishing with the interference patterns and everything is just incredible for the time!
This is a really amazing game. Insane that is was made in three days! Congratulations!
I really love the sound wave concept — great use of this jam's theme! How did you guys come up with so many unique mechanics for each level? I got stuck on a few of them and had to check a guide to get through. Awesome game! Also, I noticed one of your team members' profile pic made a cameo in the game!
This was really cool! I just personally don't like having to redo puzzles when I die. Especially because the player does not immediately move to every input, so you can't redo all of it very quickly. With that last level, it was very frustrating. I understand that it can be hard to balance the narrative and gameplay, but I just don't think death in puzzle games works too well. I already know the solution to ones I did already, so it's more of a nuisance if anything to get back to where I was.
I do totally get why you made this choice though. You're right that the puzzles can be brute-forced quite easily, but I think that's a much better problem to have in this case. With how difficult the puzzles are, it just adds further frustration that doesn't need to be there and encourages the player to completely rely on the walkthrough. In both cases, I might end up cheating my way through the puzzles, and not really engaging with it. It's a really tough problem that there's no right answer to, so that's just my opinion. One solution to this could be keeping the system you currently have, but randomizing the solution to each puzzle in some way. This would make it harder, but I think less frustrating because you are not simply redoing past work. This would have been much more difficult to implement within the jam's timeframe though.
Sorry about the long ramble, I did really love your game! The puzzles were truly brilliant, I've never seen anything like them, that's why I care so much!
@tolviere It's a good point. When players get frustrated, they start to tune out, and they're less able to solve puzzles, especially ones like these that require some lateral thinking, so it's a vicious cycle. Personally, I feel like brute forcing causes players to tune out more than letting them give up with a cheat button. One is mind numbing, the other a deliberate decision. But your mileage may vary here.
I was terrible at solving video game puzzles as a child, to the extent that I played most of Zelda Wind Waker with a walkthrough by my side. Maybe my expectations are colored by this experience. Was my appreciation of the game worsened by how easily I gave up and cheated? I'm not sure. I think I enjoyed it just as much, but then again I had no counterfactual.
On a more meta level, I prefer a cheat button or a walkthrough for a short form game like this because it's explicitly portrayed as a cheat, i.e. almost extrinsic to the game experience, whereas the frustration is perhaps an intended, intrinsic part of the game. In other words, maybe it lets players bypass parts of the game they don't like, even though those parts have a reason to be in the game.
We do want to elaborate this game more, into a 2-ish hour experience maybe, which will require rethinking this approach. I don't think it would make sense to include a cheat button in a full Steam release!
Your randomization idea gave me an interesting idea. Maybe some of the more tutorial-like levels could be adjusted to not damage the player at all, allowing for experimentation or brute-forcing, but these are bookended by more challenging boss levels that test if the players truly understood the puzzles. Then we could randomize the tutorial-like levels to encourage even more experimentation if players fail at the boss levels.
@tolviere I agree with you, personally. I simply stop playing a game if I feel that it's poorly designed and thus not respecting my time (e.g. adding punishment to failure by resetting the whole game without saves, for example).
But @orangeoceans had a particular vision regarding sparse player amenities which she felt was integral to the game. While I disagree with this part (we are both very opinionated designers; there were heated arguments over this issue behind the scenes) I think the game couldn't have materialised in the specific way it has without it. I also have to admit it actually worked better than I initially expected, based on the responses here. So I'm both tantalised and delighted by the outcome here (typical of jams), which I'm excited to find has also been the gameplay experience with a lot of the players.
Thank you, everyone, for playing, and giving so much valuable feedback!
@seong Oh I didn't realize this until you said it here but I do prefer austerity in player amenities. That's a very succinct way of putting it. I think it stems from the idea that games (and artworks in general) should abide by their own internal logic, rather than cater to the player. I'd much prefer that a game let you cheat than introduce too many quality of life features, which I feel inevitably warp the inherent structure of the game to fit extrinsic demands. But you and I disagree on the nature of an artwork's internality, if it exists at all.
@seong @orangeoceans This has given me so much to think about. I think I still disagree with the exact implementation, but the game would not have been the same without that kind of punishment. If this is the experience you wanted to make, then I can't really say it's right or wrong. I play games to experience things, and I can definitely say this was a very unique experience, so great work! It's really cool to see how much thought and care was put into this game.
Such a unique and complicated entry - really nicely done. A lot of the really experimental stuff I see in jams is often half-realized, really cool but left a little incomplete. This one feels like the whole concept was fleshed out and brought to a satisfying conclusion.
On one hand, I really appreciated the spoilers so I didn't get stopped halfway through from my failures, and the cheat key so I could see the final scene. If I were five or six levels deep and ate a game over, I would not replay, so the cheating helped me experience. On the other hand, I am a person who is a bit defective in the ear and it was an accomplishment for me to solve Ode One Out without looking it up. So I did try each puzzle before using the guide. Struck a good balance w the out-of-game hidden-spoiler. Hitting Alt-Tab was a confession.
Really well done, with a core idea deeply rooted in the theme, and taken in an interesting novel direction and backed up with art that both looked compelling and was very well suited to the experience.
Great job!
edit: love the discussion above -- cocreator had a strong vision, I disagreed but tried it their way, worked better than I expected. That's cool teamwork. I've always compoed so I can be unilateral, and thought of team operations as hardmode. Cool to see some of the curtain pulled back, thanks.
very fresh gameplay concept and I had fun playing. I like the angular artwork and color scheme that lends itself to an anxiety-inducing atmosphere. cool
Since @orangeocean you asked i gave it other try, the cheat worked with dot. I am using nordic keyboard which might mess things up. I have to say i still gave on the game since I games like this are not my preference (my tone regocnising seems to be bad). It really is good but i am just not a puzzle player :D. If this was a full game i think the hint system could be one used in some games where you give a easier version of the puzzle as a hint.
@prunus-padis Glad to hear that it's working! And yeah it's ok it's not for everyone. Just wanted to make sure the game was functioning as intended haha
This is such a cool game! I just had to play through it. I did have to use the hints a few times, though, because I couldn't stand the shrill sounds after a while :D You guys did a really great job in such a short time and put together a very polished game.
This is such a mind blowing concept, using audio as a puzzle mechanic was really sweet. I had a lot of trouble, and ended up skipping because of it, with Ode One Out. Idk why but I couldn't find the sequence with the correct note, even though I matched the tempo. Being a musician/producer/sound engineer, this entry scratched my brain real good! I think this would be an interesting and roundabout way to teach people music theory on a basic level in a really interesting way. Well done!
Interesting concept
The game softlocks if you use the skip level button on the final level. Not that that's a critical bug.
Wow, this was incredible. The story, mood, and atmosphere are all extremely fine tuned.
Thank you for offering the option to skip around - it was truly impressive to see the sheer amount of puzzles, and all of the thought that went into the creation of each one.
Added it to a collection and will definitely beat it proper. Rating it for now, though. Impressive work!
Absolutely brilliant! I am stuck on Feuertrunken even though I checked the hint, but I'll return to it! I really really love this!!
Edit: made it!!!