Wow. I really didn't expect a game with this great art. I enjoyed it very much. However, I feel like enemy spawning is little unbalanced. It got hard very fast

I played this more times than I care to admit. :) Nice work guys!

The art of this game. . . wow, congrats with the sort time you had!

Amazing artwork in this game. The theme fits very well. Nice job. I'm impressed.

Really quality stuff, the artist(s) put in some work and the game itself isn't too bad either. I'm none too keen on the survival wave shooters but it's pretty solid.

Outstanding!

Amazing artwork honestly! The game is good, I just feel like there should have been a reward for sacrificing as well, instead of just losing things. Felt great and looked great. Keep up the good work!

First off, amazing art and awesome music! The game is short and sweet! I replayed this a lot just trying to get better high score and trying to figure out what sacrifices works the best.
Also the very first sacrifice i didn't realize that they were bad and choose the loss of color, and it took me like 3 sacrifices to realize that they were bad, its amazing how accustomed we(or I at least) are to level ups being good thing.
Anyway i enjoyed this game quite a bit and it caught me offguard. It's definitely one of those "Just one more try" games. :smile:
My highest score was 109 and I got greedy and died trying to get all the juicy souls in the middle.

WOAH! amzing artwork!! THis is so cool!! I really enjoyed the difficulty as well! :D

Hi everyone! Thanks for the nice comments!

@brownricestudio Sorry we definitely ran out of time for balance.

@vasco-borges Im glad you liked the art. I did all the 2D art and Jesse did the animations. I spent too much time on the room art so I ran out of time to make the UI stuff better. hehe

@negativice Yeah the plan was for the guy to have a word bubble that said "Choose your Sacrifice" A lot of people are proably going to think they are buffs. Hindsight... we probably should have prioritized that higher. 109 is an impressive score! Most of the team cant get past 60. hehe

I'm glad I was here before this game attracted so many people. Because surely it will in few days

this is unbelievable! are you sure you made this in only 72 hours?!

also my high score is 27

Thank you, everyone, for the kind comments! Can you beat a dev's score of 177? :)

Really nice job on the art; it's really hard to get that stuff to look good when animated!

@shieldgenerator7 Yes we did this game in the 72 hrs. We came up with this idea of sacrificing skills as a team after we got the theme at the start of the jam. We just had a really good team... and we overworked our programmer Pat. He carried us through the last day of tech hurdles.

@Incredible-ape We had a great animator, @jessicaWall who made all the things dance.

@Daniel New high score of 181!

Super solid artwork and animations!

Echo everyone else: Art! This is my first ludum dare, but i did play a good amount of game submissions the last two days, and definitely one of the best polishes thus far. Nice job!

Amazing art! Really gorgeous. The music is beautiful too. The gameplay is simple and gets boring pretty quickly though

really cool artstyle

Alright, here's my thoughts:

That was pretty darn fun! It kept me coming back and felt (more or less) balanced, with an appropriate difficulty curve and fitting match times. My rating: 5 stars.

Nothing new. I mean, there's something, but that can mostly be blamed on the theme. My rating: 3.5 stars.

It fit the theme, although it didn't do much inventive or new with it. My rating: 4.5 stars.

This art looks fantastic! Phenomenal work! I did find a minor issue though: The player kinda shakes back and forth by a few pixels each frame in the idle animation. But that's just nitpicks. My rating: 5 stars.

Great job with the audio! It fit well, didn't get repetitive, and sounded great! My rating: 5 stars.

Ugh. Please opt out of humor. I hate having to tell this to like every other game I rate, but I'll say it again: Always opt out of humor unless you think that your game has significant enough humorous elements to prevent the category from hurting your average score.

The mood was almost perfect! It was quite immersive, although it didn't stand out as having a particularly great mood to it. My rating: 4.5 stars.

Overall, it's a really great and polished game! The mood of the game didn't fit perfectly, and the game wasn't particularly innovative, but it's very well done! My rating: 4.5 stars.

I bet nobody has ever told you yet that you did an amazing job on the artwork and animation, did they? But yeah, it really is that great! Apart from that, I'd like to highlight a bit more that twist on leveling "up" - it was really unexpected and really well played, for me, that was really the best part of the game - the most clever toying with our expectations :) Sure, there's some ballancing issues (at least I felt it that way), but that won't take away the positive feeling your game gave me! I'm glad I get to play it, it was a great experience, thanks for that!

God the art is off the charts, especially the title screen! The game itself might be a bit too not original, but I did have fun. Congrats!

really nice visuals and gameplay -- very impressed -- i cant get past 40 souls -- thanks for making this

I don't know why, but the controls were not working now when I tried. I started the game after the menu, but WASD or L/R clicks did nothing... Enemies came and killed me. Tried to open the game several times and download again but didn't work. But it seems that others have played the game without problems, hmm...
Anyway, graphics are very pretty!

Great game. I like the take on sacrifice. I'm not a huge fan of bullet hell games, but this was good as far as I could tell. I don't really have anything negative to say, it all seemed well build.

Damn, you have set the bar too high^^
Really I'm impressed. And everything work perfecly : sound, gameplay, graphic design.

I had a lot of fun with this game. The concept was unique and really fun to play around with, the art was absolutely stunning and the audio worked so well. Everything was really easy to read and even when the screen was cluttered it was pretty easy to understand what was going on. I always felt like I lost because of me, rather than the game. The constant sacrifices was a really cool mechanic and it really tested you, my favourites were lower vision and reverse movement and I would have loved to have more sacrifices like these, that were a bit more gimmicky than lowering stats. Overall this is a really great game, and one I'm honestly going to keep playing, well done.

Amazing entry! It was very fun, played very smooth, and feels and looks quite polished! Some of the sacrifices were quite original, and there were some though trade-offs.

A good looking title that uses the theme well. It would've fit even better if more of the difficulty increase came from the sacrifices, rather than the increasing spawn rate. But there were definitely some very interesting sacrifices to make, with good "builds" emerging ("I already sacrificed vision, so I might as well sacrifice my attack range since I can't see those enemies anyway")

Really nice entry with amazing arts and music. As said above, it would have benn even better if more of the difficulty increase came from sacrifice. Also, adding a best score feature would be cool. You made an amazing job

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! We've taken a lot of it into consideration and updated the game a bit. Check out our Itch page for the most recent version: https://pfarnach.itch.io/lanternal

The idea is simple and common but it is very well carried out. Good work