itch.io

No matter how well one plays, in the end, the Aunns will always be defeated.

This pleases me. 

There may not be a huge amount going on, but it's certainly a vibe. 

I like what the game's going for, but I had difficulty finding opportunity for much in the way of strategy or tactics.  Either I make a vertical wall and camp, or rush the enemies down and rely on my army's superior numbers to win despite taking inefficient trades.

Best set so far:

22:46

20:35

20:00

Before discovering bounce tech it seemed like a straightforward racing game with a drift mechanic to take sharp turns. Decent but unremarkable. 

Then I discovered bounce tech, and spent a bad amount of time optimizing my runs trying to unlock the secrets of this mechanic. 

Anywho, 0/5 for making me repeatedly ram a tortoise into the wall. This review was written completely under my free will, otterly free of any external compulsion. 

Oh I see. Yeah that seems fine.

Jam host here - do you have permission to use that song (Illusion)? 

Cool idea.

Not much challenge, which is thematic because Yuuma is unstoppable.

Never ends, which is thematic because Yuuma's hunger is unsatiable.

Very Yuuma, would Yuuma again. 

The sequel to Megumu's Space Gallery I didn't know I needed. 

I can appreciate what the game's going for, but yeah, RTS in 3 days is a wee bit ambitious.

On the plus side, I did manage to defeat all the enemies. 

Feels like something off one of those 100 or 1000 games in one cd from the 90s. Really like the overall feel of it. 

Got stuck for a while at the part where I was supposed to find the fruit, but got there in the end.

E

Claiming my cookie:

Tried it again after figuring out the element I was missing. I couldn't bear the thought of leaving everyone in that form.

Really nice entry. Music and art both fit very well, and the puzzles make sense. A lot of roughness in the mechanics, but I'm all for jank in a jam entry.

The 5 minute limit feels somewhat punishing, as you end up having to do the loop of walking to the same places and performing the same interactions many times before you can figure out the solution. I also came close to running out of time even when I had everything mapped out. I also managed to bug out the chimken a few times and softlocked a run.

"Can you help Cirno save everyone from being trapped in bear-form?"

No,  no I can't. After 10 or so attempts I found two ways to get into the cave, but I can't find the key to the lock, a way to break open the rock, or something to explore the hole. 

Thus everyone shall remain a bear forever.

Edit: Wait a minute, the CHIMKEN

Enjoyed this a lot. Liked the way the interactive elements were integrated into the narrative, and the characterization - got a strong sense of Megumu and Momoyo being good friends from how they interact. Overall story flowed well. My only criticism is that the music felt a bit jarring at times, doesn't feel like it fits the game well.  

The choice to constrain movement to a 5x4 grid is clever, especially in what otherwise resembles a vertical shmup. Simplifies the mechanics without losing anything important for this game. 

Really good gameplay - my only complaint is that the difficulty gets a bit rough in the end given how long it takes to get there. Aesthetics are also on point - the plain white orbs feel slightly out of place, but this would be a trivial thing to improve.

I fed the birds. They did not seem grateful.

As someone contractually obligated not to attack Tokiko, I find this game difficult to beat. 

Note: since my jam submission was incomplete, I've uploaded a post-jam version (for Windows/MacOS) which completes the original vision for the entry. It involves substantial work done after submission, so you should play and rate the original embedded web build.

The lack of challenge ended up making this a nice, relaxing experience. Fall of Fall is oddly fitting for Kutaka.

The game's aesthetic is very... pronounced, for lack of a better term. Cohesive and stands out. Combined with the gameplay and sounds, this entry has quite a unique feel to it. 

On flock 6 or so I can't seem to find/catch an eagle and get stuck. 

Too difficult for me, got close but couldn't quite get through it, even if I pretended Alice is Yachie. Enjoyed the game, really liked the writing. Collisions could use a lot of tightening up - maybe it's just the hitboxes being too small, but I feel like I got through a lot of squeezes that should have squoze me but didn't. Good amount of variation in the "pipes" as an obstacle while fighting Reimu - doing a lot with a little. 

Do you attribute the music anywhere? The Eternal Shrine Maiden sounds an awful lot like the actual song.

hmm the game crashed when I put the first chicken back into the nest.

Things I like about the game: shooting Aya

Things I don't like about the game: shooting Mystia and Kutaka

For those trying to get this working, I've managed to get the game running properly, with English translations active:

1) Extracting. The problem is with the non-unicode encoding of the filenames. You need to specify the encoding when extracting. 

Option a) With 7zip: 

7z x "Eternal dream of marisa.zip" -mcp=936 

Option b) With the "unzip" utility on Linux or MacOS (can also use it in linux subsystem for windows): 

unzip -O GB18030 "Eternal dream of marisa.zip" 

To check if it worked, look inside the "js" folder inside the extracted game folder. One of the files should be called "新建文本文档.js". If instead you have a filename with nonsense characters, then it didn't work.

2) Translating. The game is in Chinese by default, but it can be switched to English in the options. In the main menu, the "Options" button is the third button, labelled "选项".

Haven't heard of picross before, but I had a lot of fun with it. There's a bug after being World 3, Stage 1 where the screen goes black. Furthermore, some of the puzzles are impossible to solve "normally" (without looking several steps ahead, or trying something and backtracking if it doesn't work several steps later) and may have multiple solutions (only one of which is recognized as valid). I found one in stage 2, and two more in stage 4.

Only got to see 3/4ths of the story (since world 3 is unbeatable), but I really liked the art and writing as well. Would be interested in seeing the end to world 3.

Some other nitpicks:

- When completing a level, it transitions instantly, so I have no idea what image I completed.

- Having mouse centric controls would be nice: LMB for filling, RMB for X-ing, so it can be played with just the mouse. 

I noticed the game uses 54 cards, so I tried to re-interpret it with a standard deck of 54 playing cards (including jokers) to make it playable if you have a deck lying around:

• Each player gets 6 cards, not revealed to other players.
• The rest go in the pile in the middle.
• Players take turns. Each player, in each turn:
  • Discard a card of your choice to the bottom of the pile.
  • Draw a card from the top.
  • If you draw an ace or joker:
    • Pick a player. Look at their hand, and steal a card of your choice.
      • They draw a card from the top to replace the stolen card.
  • If you have at least one of each card from the groups 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-J, Q-K, they form a pichun: you have the option of pichun-ing someone. Discard those 6 cards and remove a player from the game for 10 rounds. After 10 rounds, they re-enter: both players discard their hands and redraw 6 cards.
  • If you have a pichun with all the same suit, you can perform a "max pichun" and win the game outright.
• If there's only one player active (not pichun-ed) they win.

Explanation: Each suit corresponds to the four fairies (Cirno three fairies of light). You're supposed to have 8x of each letter in "pichun", 2 of each with the same character on it, which I represented by groups of playing cards: p: 2-3, i: 4-5, c: 6-7, etc.  Having a pichun with all the same suit corresponds to having a pichun with all the same character. The deck is also supposed to have 6 "steal" cards, which I interpreted as aces or jokers. 

Rule clarification: I make the assumption that when you steal, you get to choose the card to steal, and can look at their hand when doing so. Otherwise, stealing isn't advantageous.

I played a round by myself with two players, and it seemed like a decent enough card game. Would probably be much better with 3-4 to make the max pichun a relevant element (with two players a regular pichun is equivalent to a max pichun).

Huh, interesting skill for crafting a coherent narrative out of seemingly absurd and nonsensical dialogue. 

wario

This is a game that exists.

Despite its extreme simplicity (8x8, 1 color), the art was highly effective at supporting the narrative with how it was used. It was also funny how recognizable the characters were (Yep, that's definitely Miko). 

Surprisingly fun. Took 3 or 4 tries to beat, was neat experimenting with the various skill options. 

Couldn't get very far due to the bugs (softlocked by the cauldron) but I feel like there's a lot of soul in what I did see. 

Strong puzzle entry - coming up with a lot of good puzzle levels on a short time frame is tricky, and this one did that well. Compact was the hardest one for me - over 20 minutes on that one, less than 5 minutes on all the others. The art for the level sprites all felt strongly cohesive and effective. 

I don't know how I feel about helping Hisami achieve her lifelong goal of, uh, getting bonked by Zanmu, but that's just something I'll have to live with.

Needs moar content, but what's there is excellent. 

P.S. Aunn Sweep!

Good balance between story and gameplay. The story was compelling enough to make me play it multiple times (before the crash was fixed) to see it through to the end. I liked the various changes that occurred as time passed - that was a neat touch, and helped sell the narrative impact of time passing despite not much time passing for the player. Overall 3D aesthetic/gameplay works well, and is a nice change from the usual 2D shmups. 

Two small bits of feedback regarding the gameplay:

- Getting hit near the end of a level and being sent back to the start felt punishing. Having even just one spare life would have helped a lot with this. 

- When hugging the bottom of the screen, I'd occasionally get hit from behind from an enemy that already passed me. Eventually learned to not hug the edge of the screen, but it felt pretty bad.

Best use of theme I've seen so far, with how it integrates into the mechanics - neat idea to design mechanics around dying. The platforming is a bit rough in some places, but I got there in a few... millennia?!

Appreciate the comments. 

What was happening with the dialogues? If it was a text scaling issue (text way too big/small, going off screen) then the bugfix I posted (which includes the embedded player) should hopefully fix that.

Greetings, fellow Animal Realm enthusiast. Gameplay feels really good once you grok the mechanics, there's a lot of 'juice' in the implementation. Also digging the character art, fits well and packs a lot of personality. A shame there isn't more, would be interesting to see where you're going with this. 

Edit: Went back and finished the game. Took 6 hours to beat it. Also did the optional boss (Reimu). 

While there are some tuning issues as noted by other comments, I think the game's compelling. In some ways it feels more like a puzzle game than an RPG, albeit with more RNG than your typical puzzle game. Art, music and writing are all strong points as well. 

The mid-late game actually felt way more forgiving and balanced than the early game. I beat all the Moriya bosses, as well as Reimu, on the first attempt. Final boss took 2 tries. The funny thing is that I forgot to heal Hina and she dropped dead on the first turn, so I beat him with just Nitori. Sidenote: Hina-spin absolutely wrecks multi-attackers. I enjoy this. 

The only major pain point is having to scale the tower multiple times to open enough equipment chests to get sufficiently strong items to beat bosses. This involves forced encounters with the same enemies, which gets repetitive and makes the game take too long for a jam entry. 

Bombs also didn't feel useful for the most part, but I suspect specific status ailments are particularly strong against specific bosses - I didn't end up experimenting with that. 

Final note: How the heck do you catch that damn golden fish? Even with Miko's ribbon and the strongest armor, at 37 speed, I still can't get the first attack before it runs away. Maybe it comes down to luck. 

I enjoyed this quite a bit. I ended up re-implementing the game in Unity to automate all the marker management and scoring. The various interactions seem well thought out, and I like the personality implications: Momoyo's working hard and just cares about her company, Chimata cares about the fairness of the market, and Tsukasa is a manipulative hooligan who isn't annoyed by anything. 

Got a score on normal of 2004

Love the character art, as well as all the little animations that help sell what's going on. Also neat premise to plausibly connect two characters who are otherwise unlikely to even know of each others' existence.