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A member registered Jun 10, 2020

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Well hello, Geometry Dash.

The good:

  • You made a game that works! Congratulations!
  • I like that you made a menu including sound options.
  • The visuals are ok, I like that there's some movement going on in the background.
  • You've got a backing track/sound! Nice.

The bad:

  • Said backing track is a bit repetitive.
  • What's up with the amongus cube / police officer as a design choice? Bit weird.
  • There are spikes falling from the ceiling that you cannot dodge and that don't really add much.
  • You could have leaned further into the theme. Have chess pieces instead of spikes, have stacks of poker chips instead of nondescript white cubes etc. Currently, we have white with pink, an amongus cube and a police officer. The design is a bit bland and chaotic.
  • I'm virtually certain that there are instances where I cannot make the series of jumps necessary to continue the game, because the end of one obstacle overlaps unhappily with the beginning of the next.

Ideas for improvement:

  • Add my current high score in a corner somewhere so I know how well I'm doing.
  • Don't move the camera up and down, keep the floor at the same level. You could move the camera vertically if you actually have obstacles that require me to climb/jump out of the current view, but since everything is close to the floor, a fixed camera would make things calmer.
  • You could add "zones" so that the entire world design or the background colour changes after a certain score. So 0-500 would be black or "poker themed", 500-1000 would be green or "chess themed" etc. These are obviously just example numbers and themes, you get the idea. The point is that that would strengthen the sense of progress made by the player, far more so than a number counting up.

All in all, it's a solid game, and a tighter grasp on graphics/design decisions in the future would bring great dividends to the technical expertise you already possess.

Thanks so much for participating. I hope we'll see you again next year!

I think it's really weird how the special ability is on E. That means that when I want to dash right, I need to press E after pressing D with my index finger. Better would have been putting jump and special on buttons for the right hand so the left hand can focus on movement.

I'll be honest, I'm very confused.

The first time I tried to play the game, I was unexpectedly ejected from the playing area and had to restart. 

The second time I tried pushing against the die, and died instantly. I should have read the short description I guess, but that information could have been communicated by the game. Anyway, both buttons to retry or go home did not work.

The third time I was able to stabilise myself against the seemingly random external forces acting upon the player. Thus stabilised, I nevertheless did not know what I was supposed to be doing.

The soundtrack is droning and repetitive.

Maybe something of a smaller scope, like a 2D game, would have been better suited for a first project? 

Have a beautiful day.

(2 edits)

Well, do you really need more comments singing your praises? ;-P

The good:

  • It looks and sounds great. I like how the music speeds up as the timer runs low.
  • I like how you get to unlock the rules two pages at a time, and work your way forward.
  • It's a fun parody that stands on its own legs.

The bad:

  • I'd really like to know what the correct choice would have been in the last form of each run before I lose.
  • Maybe a table of contents for the rule book would be nice.
  • I think a red cross or circle around the offending entry would be nicer than having a yellow background for the entry.
  • I think the "roll the dice" theme wasn't very relevant to the game. Yes, TTRPGS often let you generate stats via dice, but they could just as well have been generated via point-buy or drawn from a hat or any other way. The way the numbers are generated is irrelevant to the gameplay, and in fact, if you choose to generate stats in DnD, for instance, those stats stand and are not affected by further rules. You cannot roll illegal stats afaik.

Edit: I would have liked a special sound effect if we get +10 vs +5 added to the clock.

Edit 2: I think I beat the game, I got to rule 8, "the last one", but then my game started to freeze and I had to stop. I don't know whether the game actually ends or if it continues infinitely, but I hope there's a victory condition for the "story mode".

You already know you made a great game from all the other comments. But yes. You made a great game. Full marks!

Thanks for participating and I hope we'll see you again next year!

Funny but unforgiving.

The good:

  • You made a game that works. Congratulations!
  • You've got a consistent art style that's simple yet readable and fits the arcady flair of the game.
  • You've got sound.
  • It's clear what I'm supposed to be doing, and while there is randomness involved, I can influence the odds with skill.

The bad:

  • A single hit means death. Give us a few lives, and grant more lives every few levels so that we can atone for mistakes made in earlier levels.
  • Sometimes you spawn so close to enemies that escape is nearly unavoidable. Spawn locations mean difficulty can spike unexpectedly even with few enemies.
  • Every level is the same save for the number of enemies. Powerups, different weapons, or obstacles in the level would have been a nice addition.

It's a fun little game, exactly what you'd expect from a game jam.

Thanks for participating, and I hope we'll see you again next year!

Well, that was fun.

The good:

  • You made a game that works! Congratulations!
  • It looks pretty. Considering that you made the art yourself, that's an achievement. The die looked beat-up and realistic, and it was nice seeing this world of book covers and toys in close-up.
  • There's this visceral joy at pushing around a die in a playground. Just trying to get over the book stacks that are the boundaries of the playing fields was nice.

The bad:

  • I didn't have any sound for some reason.
  • The game asked for firewall privileges, it's not supposed to do that.
  • It was unclear what I was supposed to do.
  • The camera was a bit difficult to control, but that wasn't that bad, controlling the pencil was worse. But both were manageable with a bit of practice.
  • The randomness factor was not communicated well to the player and didn't seem to have too much of an effect.

A really solid effort for a game jam. With a bit of explanation, maybe a tutorial level, and a bit of polish, this is a nice relaxing time burner. There's this childish joy at pushing around a die. Weeeee!

Thanks for participating, and I hope we'll see you again next year!

Wow. Full marks!

The good

  • You made a game that works, and works well! Congratulations!
  • You've got good graphics! The soft, computer-animated art style works really well. Everyone had the option of using pre-existing art, but you still have to use it well, and I'd rather have a pretty game with pre-used assets than an ugly hand-drawn game, especially for a jam.
  • You've got music and sound! For some reason, many others couldn't be bothered.
  • The theme is implemented excellently. I'm literally rolling a die, and both the physics as well as the randomness of the rolling are integral to the game. Also, it's not entirely random, I can use skill to skew the odds in my favour.

The bad

  • Only two levels?? I would have thought creating new maps would be more simple. Then again, you really need to make six maps per level, and they have to work and be play-tested, so I probably underestimate the difficulty. Also, it's a jam game, you want devs to make their case short and to the point. Quality over Quantity, and boy do you have quality.

I've rated 22 games as of yet, played a few more, and this is without exaggeration the best one. And there are some good ones in that list! I'd honestly pay money for a version with a few more levels.

This is genuinely creative, innovative and polished and I hope you win.

Thanks for participating, I hope we'll see you next year, and good luck with the jam!

Well. Is it a game? Maybe I didn't understand it correctly, but afaik, the only input I can give is space to roll the die.

The Good

  • You made a game that works! Congratulations!
  • The dice theme is front-and-centre.
  • It's obvious what the goal of the game is.

The Bad

  • It's really hard to tell what's happening. There are no animations about dealing damage, or being dealt damage, and the next level happens instantly instead of all the spiders dying first.
  • No sound.
  • Simplistic graphics.

The central issue is whether this is a game at all. The only thing you can do is throw the die, there is no way to influence the game in any way.

In normal games using dice, there's an element of bluffing or of influencing others so you can win their money. Many dice games that have no player agency exist simply to facilitate social exchange and drinking. That doesn't make sense for a single-player video game.

The question of what constitutes a video game is too big for this comment. Suffice it to say that only one input that always does the same thing does not an engaging game make. It's not even like a cookie clicker, where you have to click faster to improve your clicks per second, or where you can make strategic decisions about upgrades and whether to opt for short-term gains or long-term gains.

If this game were a graphics demo or an engine demo, it would make sense, but this does not do any of that. Walking simulators are often called the most boring kind of game, but they allow for us to explore, to spend time in beautiful virtual worlds, or to follow a story. 

I know you probably put a lot of time and effort into this. And that is to be lauded. But any way to influence the game beyond rolling the die could have been implemented in the over ten hours you had left before the deadline.

I'm not saying these things to discourage you. In fact, I'm happy you tried making a game at all, and I sincerely hope you do so again. But it's important not to lose the thread during development. And that thread is that video games are an interactive medium. So let me interact with it.

Thanks for participating and I hope we'll see you next year.

You made a snake with some jam-specific upgrades.

The good

  • It works! Congratulations!
  • You implemented the randomness factor in a way that makes sense intuitively.
  • The game restarts immediately when you die.

The bad:

  • It's not very clear what the upgrades are and how things work when playing. You kind of have to experiment.
  • The controls are not as responsive as I'd like. Input buffering would be nice, so that if I tell the snake to go up and to the right in quick succession, the snake remembers to go right after it has gone up instead of me having to issue the command in the short time after it has moved up and before it moves again.
  • The graphics are disappointing considering the simplicity of the game itself.
  • I would have liked an actual die to be involved somehow. Maybe there are six upgrades a fruit can give and a visible die is rolled in a corner somewhere to show which of the six is chosen next.

This feels like a way to get used to the framework and IDE, and to build skills and get used to game development. In which case, great, that's what this jam is for! Thanks for participating, and I hope we'll see you next year!

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Thanks for the submission! Reminds me a lot of Helltaker.

The good:

  • You made a game that works! Congratulations!
  • The graphics of the gameplay section look nice.
  • The two puzzle levels are interesting.
  • I like how if you push the cube in a corner it will jump back instead of forcing you to restart the level.

The bad:

  • Don't let text slowly crawl into view. And if I press space to make it go faster, don't simply skip to the next text block, display the first text block completely and then jump to the next when I press space a second time.
  • The dice story doesn't seem to have any connection to the gameplay.
  • There needs to be a limit to how many moves you get to make in the level before you fail so that it's actually challenging.
  • A few more levels would have been nice. The story is optional, the levels are the meat of the game and a few more really wouldn't hurt. And I imagine they're not that difficult to code. 

Assuming you knew Helltaker going into this, you also knew how your game would look like next to it. The fact that the dice theme is not part of the gameplay is a bit sad. I think the game is fine. It's certainly above average.

Thanks for participating. I hope we'll see you again next year and good luck!

Thanks for your submission!

The good:

  • You made a game that works! Congratulations!
  • An FPS is always a nice sight, you don't get them that often in jams.
  • The dice theme is well-established.

The bad:

  • Why am I fighting cacti and why are they moving?
  • I'm not forced to engage with the randomiser cubes if I don't want to.
  • The projectiles don't originate from the centre of the screen as we're used to from other standard FPS.
  • The labyrinth I'm in makes it a bit difficult to tell where I'm going and where I'm supposed to be going.

I'd say it's a solid effort that could use some sort of context or backstory. If you display the difference between weapons more clearly to the player, the randomness will feel more impactful. 

An idea would be to have the cacti just stand around and go full on the speed-angle. Like The Gauntlet from Titanfall 2. It makes sense for cacti not to move and this way it's more speed-runnable. Randomise the weapon once at the start of the gauntlet and then let the player play for the thirty seconds it would take them to complete the game. Do the same thing as TF2 and have the map loop back on itself, so reruns can be done quickly.

All in all it's a workable game that's engaging and has potential. Thanks for participating, I hope we'll see you next year as well, and good luck!

Good on you for taking it like a champ!

I know it's hard to pour time and effort and part of your soul into a project only for a guy who spent a few minutes playing through it to disparage all that. I try to temper my criticism with constructive advice, but I know it's hard. It's great you can take this in the spirit it's intended.

Don't worry about your voice quality. Maybe you can borrow a mic from somewhere so the sound is ok, and everyone knows it's for a game jam. Alternatively, just have someone with a few minutes to spare voice act the few lines you have, shouldn't take more than 20 min. I'm sure reddit would help you in a heartbeat.

Thank you for replying, and thanks for participating in the jam. You tried something bold, something with a message perhaps, and that ambition is to be lauded. I hope we'll see you next year, and good luck!

"Press p to play." I accidentally clicked. The game closed. Damn, you must really want me to press P!

What a strange game. It feels like the video game equivalent of modern art. 

The good:

  • It works!
  • I had fun! It felt a bit like DOOM, with strafing and moving back and forth. 
  • You made an FPS in 50 hours! That's impressive!

The bad:

  • I didn't have any audio. 
  • You can literally just sprint past enemies.
  • It's a bit short considering the simplicity of the rooms.

The weird:

  • Enemies spawn when I enter the room, not before. So I would walk in, enemies would spawn, I would be surprised, I would walk out.
  • You could have gotten stock explosions or something. But parts of the game are hand-drawn, some are placeholder art. It feels very modern-art, very Jackson Pollock.

It's a neat little game. Thanks for participating. I hope we'll see you at the next game jam!

Thanks for the game! Chess + Dice is a cool combination!

The good:

  • It works!
  • It's a creative take on how to integrate dice into chess.

The bad:

  • Very little is explained.
    • I didn't know I was supposed to move the king onto my own queen, that's a bit counter-intuitive.
    • I didn't know what the controls were at first and had to experiment instead of getting them explained.
    • I didn't know I had to click on the dice at the end of every turn. Which was also kind of annoying.
  • The pixel art style is both technologically obsolete, not very pretty, and hard to read. I had trouble recognising the figure I just rolled, and was surprised at times to be able to move like a queen when I thought I had rolled a bishop. The standard 2D chess set used in literature (in high definition, not pixel art) would have been an improvement, a free 3D chess set on a wooden board should have been doable.
  • The game is not challenging. The challenge is in figuring out how to play it, after that it's trivial.
  • It's too short. After all the heavy lifting of building this game, would adding one or two more levels (which should just be a file each with the location of the enemies) really be such an issue?

An idea for an improvement:

  1. Improve readability of the chess figures.
  2. Change the controllable token to the piece it moves as each move.
  3. Don't let us see our or the enemy's movement possibilities, let us visualise them. Maybe make that into a challenge mode so people can choose.
  4. Remove the need to roll the dice manually and roll them instantly. I know you wanted to push the theme of the jam, but if I want to play this I want to click-click-click my piece over the board quickly without having to click on the dice or wait for a result that is calculated instantly anyway.
  5. Generate levels randomly. Should be easy, infinite replayability.

This isn't meant to be as harsh as it sounds. I think with not that much work there can be a great casual game in this, with only minor, cosmetic changes. The core of the game is sound.

Thanks for participating and I hope we'll see you in the next jam! Good luck.

(1 edit)

Ok, so neat concept, execution could take some work.

The good:

  • It works! It's fun! It's like a cookie clicker - click the cookie, buy a cookie machine, a cookie factory, etc.
  • Your score counter goes into E-notation! Your game didn't break because of success!

The bad:

  • No clear success state. No change in gameplay after a certain point - the gameplay is exactly the same as at the beginning. The game just goes into e-notation and that's it.
  • The shop doesn't react to my success. If I have a +250 bonus to that face of the die, I'm not going to care about upgrading my upgrade die so it does an additional +2 to the selected face. I'm just gonna keep rolling my main die. If I could buy +20, +50... etc upgrade die faces in the shop, that would be neat.
  • You have lots of unused screen space everywhere. Put the tutorial on the side of the screen so that I don't have to remember the tutorial I read once at the beginning. Put a legend next to the shop so I know what all the things I can buy do. Put the explanation how to do the upgrade process next to the workshop.
  • This may be personal taste, but all growth is linear. There never will be exponential growth to infinity because every cycle only adds. It would be cool if you could buy an upgrade that let you add a percentage of the last die roll to that face instead of a fixed amount every roll as is currently the case.
  • I didn't have any sound whatsoever.

The Bug:

  • Press A to go to the workshop, wait for the die blueprint/schema at the top to extend/fold out fully, go back to the game table. The game will pretend the die has been thrown to the same side you left it on. Just upgrade this one side ad infinitum and reap the rewards.

This is a cool game. It's a tad boring at the moment, and the absence of a success state is sad, but it works, it looks neat and it wouldn't take a lot to make it a great game.

EDIT: I had the idea that you could choose to pay more to roll the upgrade dice, with the result being multiplied. If you pay 1k instead of 20, the result is multiplied by 50 etc.

Thanks for participating and I hope we'll see you in the next jam as well!

Tbh, I have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing.

According to the tutorial (which cannot spell ingredients correctly for some reason) I'm supposed to build a deck of both meal and ingredient cards and then do battle against the meal cards of my opponent. It's unclear which cards are my deck and which are the talon. I don't know how to start the battle phase.

Maybe I'm just dumb, but also, the tutorial could have really helped here, by using examples and by letting us play a tutorial level where I get walked through the game.

The gameplay screen should have labels and hints, and cards should not be partially hidden behind each other or in a scroll-down window.

The graphics are ok, I like that you created your own pixel art for the cards, but I would have liked the main menu to feature the same art style instead of a stock photo.

Sound would be appreciated.

This game feels like a lot of effort went into it and someone probably spent a lot of time trying to invent a new card game and balancing it, but in the current iteration it's really hard to learn and that effort goes to waste. 

Thanks for participating. I hope you'll improve the onboarding experience of this game, and I hope that we'll see you again next year with the skills you've learned this weekend.

I realise the roll of the die somehow influences how it behaves, but it's not explained how or why or what we are supposed to do with that information. I just ignored the change in properties and was able to complete the game without much difficulty.

Maybe the game could have been improved with some art or sound. Brown on blue is not really pretty.

One property, "charge" is just useless. I never found a situation where not using full charge would have been useful, or where hitting a specific charge would be necessary. Waiting for the jump to charge is boring and adding to that wait time just slows the game down without any benefit.

It's a working game, and for someone's first game it's not a bad effort.

(1 edit)

Great game!

I won't say what so many others have said. I, too, expected arrows to pass through enemies and hit multiple in a row.

Different enemy types would have been nice.

I feel like punishing the player that hard for an additional roll isn't great. It's an instant death sentence. Maybe deduct the last rolled die and disallow further rolls instead? With a 6+4+6=16, it would be tempting to roll once more. If I do and I pass 20, deduct the last rolled die (6) and let me play with the 6+4 instead of with no dice at all.

Some sort of improvement system would be nice. The enemy hordes always improve, but we never do? Also, it might be fun to encourage unbalanced stats. Right now, evenly distributing stats seems good, but playing with lots of ammo and health in one game but little speed and being a speedy boy with just one arrow in the next seems fun, but it isn't ideal. Players will optimise the fun out of games.

Thanks for participating. Hopefully we'll see you at the next jam!

(2 edits)

What an innovation on a classic! TicTacToe is finally playable!

What I like: 

  • It takes a classic and adds a lot of complexity, replayability and strategy. 
  • It uses dice other than a d6, which makes my dice goblin heart happy.
  • It has quite good graphics compared to other entries.

What I did not like:

  • There's uncertainty about whether I click the die or the field first.
  • There's no highlight / marking on the selected die.

Ideas for improvement:

  • Put the actual die face-up on the board instead of a number.
  • Have the camera closer to the board.
  • Have the dice be in an unordered little pile from which to choose. More verisimilitude and the player learns to recognise the shape of different dice.
  • Animations would have been nice.

This game definitely gets full marks simply for its innovation. Unless you stole the idea... ? Well, hopefully not!

Unluckily for you, I'll probably never play this game again and just use my own math rocks instead!

Thanks for participating. I hope we'll see you next jam!

This is the kind of game that, had it had more time or more devs, people would rave about.

Generally, shoot-em'-ups are not my favourite, so this doesn't tickle me where others would be much happier.

It's a solid game. It works, it's clear what I'm supposed to be doing.

Graphics could be better, but then again, when can't they? They're reminiscent of Pong and the old arcade games.  I feel like if you have the health bars be integrated into the enemy somehow instead of being on the side, that will look cleaner. Maybe have a hole in the centre of an enemy block that grows the more damage that enemy takes until the enemy is just a shell that's then quickly destroyed. 

More different weapons would have been nice. Rockets / Grenades / Seeker missiles. Six weapons in total would have been nice, and artificially forcing the die to always generate a new weapon instead of rolling the same weapon would be good. Do it like Tetris and have the player know which weapon is next a few seconds before the switch.

Personal idea: Make every bullet/pellet deal the same damage, and buff the rifle firing speed slightly. Right now it feels like getting all pellets of the shotgun on target does less damage than four rifle rounds. Not very nice when you used skill to manoeuvre close to the enemy.

Thanks for participating and good luck next jam!

It's not clear how I'm supposed to avoid the monsters when there's only one path and it's one square wide and the monsters move randomly. 

It feels like more could have been done in the allotted time. You probably spent your time making levels. I think improving the controls and tweaking the core gameplay loop would have been better.

But then again, your game works, and has content, and is creative. Maybe I'm just a bit bored because I don't like mazes, and judge your game more harshly than it deserves.

It's nice. I like the general concept.

The art could be improved upon, especially the background. It's not very pretty, and at some points I had trouble telling floor from background and ended up falling where I thought a wall/floor was.

Keep going, I feel like you have a future here. One of the better games I played today.

(1 edit)

What a good game! 

The artstyle works.

I feel like things are a bit too random, so that it's difficult to solve the game and skill doesn't really factor into it.

This game feels like the predecessor of a great game made outside a game jam.

Edit: Two suggestions for improvement:
Obviously audio would be great. Also, show us all hexes we can move to instead of moving one hex after the other. So that you have a circle of hexes in range and can pick any one to move to.

Reminds me of these old mobile games in the Doodle Jump era. 

The dice theme does not push through to the player. If there are modifiers, have them pop up so I know what to do. 

For me, at some point, the platforms just become very small and then I die. The game isn't very forgiving of near misses. The last time I died a bug took away the blue landing zone bar.

I noticed the Tron inspiration.

One idea for improvement would be to place the landing zone bar a bit in front of the current landing spot so I don't have to wait as long for the thing to go where I want it, and also let us move the bar ahead while the ball is in the air.

Nice, mindless game, would play waiting for the bus.

Neat idea. But honestly, just copy Hollow Knight when it comes to scaling the hero to the environment and the hero's movement (Jump too high, left-right movement not very simple). You put effort into the character and monster art, but the environment is boring. Also, I don't really know what to do / where to go / why I do it.

Also, please use WASD as the basic control scheme.

What a game! Nice concept, somewhat trippy. Presentation could use some improvement.

Having Schrödinger's Cat try to escape the box is a fun idea, and taking "roll the dice" to mean quantum superposition is funny. Some criticism follows nevertheless.

  • I feel like a true 2D art style would have been better than this semi-3D one. I know you want to tell the player he's in a box, but we can imagine. The 3D effect doesn't look great.
  • I know this would require a rebuilding of the game, but I would change how observations happen. Instead of a lever, have the superposition collapse when one of the cats hits the exit or a spike. In the simplest instance in the first level: You have a platform and a spike in blue, and on the blue platform are red spikes and under the blue spikes is the red platform. Make the observation when the red cat lands on the red spikes and the blue cat on the blue platform (This is the orange cat). Instead of pulling the lever and knowing beforehand, the decision if blue or red are correct happens when the red cat hits the spikes. The blue survives because the likelihood of the blue cat is currently greater. Much more fun than with a lever.

Sorry if that last part is obtuse, but that's what you get building a game with quantum effects.

Excited to see what you come up with next!

Reminds me of Bloxorz.

  • You delivered a sound game that works! Congratulations! 
  • I would have preferred a more contemporary art style. Monument Valley comes to mind, or The Witness.
  • Niggle: Your levels in the main menu are not numbered, instead they are all the same symbol.
  • Niggle: I have to click to advance to the next level. Even though my left hand sits on the keyboard and could press space or F or anything easily.

I feel like this is a neat little game that doesn't push boundaries but delivers what it wants. Having read about your time situation, I can empathise, and I'm sure if you're a bit faster with deciding next time, the game won't just be solid but really good.

  • I don't see how the die factors into the game concept - it's literally just aesthetics.
  • The game is rather short.
  • Small issue: The controls should have been explained not as an ingame object but as something that covers the screen, like your end card.
  • Small issue: The walls and the floor are impossible to tell apart because they're both brown.

This feels like you've been learning Unity as you go, starting with no previous experience. In that case, welcome to the club. But please consider getting acquainted with the engine before the game jam starts. Best of luck next time!

I feel like we have technological progress for a reason. The reason for Atari games looking like your game was that they didn't have the tech to do better. You do. Use it. 

This resembles bloxorz, a flash game. The heyday of flash games was ten years ago, yet this game shows a regression in quality compared to that time.

The pips don't move accurately. The fact that you can't see the rotation of the cube because of art style and tech makes things harder than they need to be. There's colour involved for some reason (the pips on the ground are yellow while those on the die are black, and that difference is remarked upon by the game.)

What I think you should have done: 

  • Choose a crisp 3D setting. Something with the visuals of Monument Valley might have worked nicely. Make it somewhat pretty.
  • Show the rotation of the cube happening.
  • Whatever you do, have the cube rotate properly. This cube did not do that.

Good luck next time!

(1 edit)

Halfway through the game claims "Two more ones and you'll be free." That made me chuckle since even the game seemed to realise that this was a boring purgatory I was trapped in.

And there we have it: The game is boring. Yes, there's a twist at the end and the attempt at a creative framing story, but that part is too short and badly set up.
For the backstory to work:

  • You need to start in the zoomed-out state, to make sure people contextualise themselves as players in a  game rather than the little witch.
  • You need to create a minigame that feels like it would be used for the purpose that it is used for
  • You definitely need voiceacting.

If you think of games like Getting over it with Ben Foddy, or The Stanley Parable, both games have the narrator right from the start, and tell a story from beginning to finish. The narrator's tone and voice and in the latter case humour are essential to these games.

This game would have worked better with multiple endings, with the dice actually being random and the narration reacting to that. I feel like the dice react too well to the lines and vice-versa for that to already be the case, and I'm not tempted to play the game again and check if I'm wrong.