i love you

This is really good! I didn't know you wanted to make this LD, well done :) The jumping curve is a bit annoying but I really like the bow gameplay :) I didn't get the abilities of the rabbit and the vulture, but I will try again later!

Good game! Kinda have a Towerfall feeling, which is impressive in only 3 days :o

Found myself playing this a lot more than I intended to. Impressed by the amount of battles you were able to make, and they were all pretty unique and required different strategies. The abilities were pretty oblique, but I really liked the idea of the animals having one particular type they feared. I also forgot to mention how awesome the art was! Really enjoyed this one.

Super fun, even though I sucked and couldn't beat any of the spirits :P
The graphics and controls/physics are pretty solid

Very good entry! I like how it's kind of an inversion of Mega Man. Everyone keeps referring to Towerfall, but I haven't played that so for me it felt more like a game called Banana Nababa. The enemies are similar to you though, so I can see the Towerfall even though I've never played it I guess.

My only real complaint is that I played through the whole thing and still don't really know what some of the totems do. I pretty much just stuck with the horse 'cause you always need the extra mobility, making it the best one by far. As such, I had to fight the horse *last* and maybe be weak against the last enemy, hah. At first the fact that you can free totems didn't make sense to me, but against the horse I kinda wished I could poison it and play keep away while doing continual damage. But see, I needed the *horse* to beat the *snake,* so yeaaaah... Really well done.

My only real complaint is something about the bow mechanics.

On the one hand, there's no way to holster your bow without firing an arrow once you've drawn your bow to a certain length. On the other, it's possible to pull your bow out without firing when you don't hold the button down long enough.

When I spam the bow button, it's 'cause I want a lot of arrows to come out and I don't care how far they go. Since you can't normally holster arrows, it felt really weird that you couldn't do that. I guess it's intentional to make players think more about how they control the character, though.

Another thing: the game has kind of a missed opportunity when it comes to collecting the arrows. As it stands, you just get new arrows any time you run out, and your only reason for collecting arrows is just to keep a steady supply. I'm thinking that if you keep an arrow "alive" for a long enough time, it should do bonus damage or something.

Also, you should get some sort of reward like healing or bonus damage for pulling an arrow out of your opponent, 'cause that's possible, and awesome, but difficult. Difficult-but-awesome things should carry rewards. Then again, maybe this is something that a totem gets? I really don't know, which shows how important that problem is.

Anyway! Those are really minor when I think about how overall *good* this was. This could be a complete game really easily, and that game would be pretty good.

Maybe throw some more areas with new sets of totems in there, or make a 2D version of the exploration in Shadow of the Colossus, and you've got it.

Neat aesthetic on Pico (as usual). I like gameplay and mood. Bow mechanics are great. Funny. Well done ++

Overall, this is an amazing entry. Wide variety of animals, abilities, and bosses makes it feel like a game that someone could spend a long time trying to master. Great idea, great execution, and great art.

That being said, there is a few flaws to mention that made it harder to enjoy the experience. The biggest was the controls. They felt clunky and a frustrating at times and often it seemed like it was the control scheme causing me to do something I didn't intend to and end up tearing that fight down. After a bit of adjusting, I managed to get used to the controls and found lots of depth hidden behind them.

Really lovely game. Lots of polish for an LD entry. Fun to see more pico-8 games.

This is really cool actually, but I couldn't tell what any of the special abilities were except for the snake form. I enjoyed playing it though and beat all the other bosses (ignoring the locked teepee of course).

In a related note, the snake boss is damn near impossible. At least when you had no special abilities it was.

Man, this game is hard! Graphics are awesome though! ;)

It's very slick and polished for a compo entry, congratulations!!

Wow, very cool game! I love the bow & arrow animations! And the shot arrows sticking all around. And the shape shifting spirits. And just about everything - except the controls. Z is always such a needlessly poor choice on german keyboards :)

This game is Awesome! I'm out of words.. you know.

awesome

Really nice entry. Loved the style and the sound effects, though having no invincibility frames makes it a bit too hard to fight the spirits. Awesome work! :)

@flummox3d Well infact the invicibility frames are here, but I had this stupid idea 1-2h before release to add an animation to the increment/decrement health ( one segment per frame max ). In the end I noticed that collision with boss had a now a feeling of "damage on every frame" but I had no time to change this, all I had to do was coloring the animated segment...

@deepnight @bradleypollard Acually I had no time to design an ability for the rabbit form. I had an explosive arrow in mind. The vulture steal life ( or at least it should ? I need to check this :D )

@thegoofromspace You're totally right about the arrow collecting thing. At first arrow was generating very slowly so grabbing them was still an interesting move. After that I had a version with hold up ( without moving for 1-2 sec ) to generate a arrow. This one was the most tactic and fun to play but even witht good gfx feedback it was weird to have to "build" your own arrows while fighting. Finally the problem was unsolved 30 minutes before release so I added this bow feature really quick, and it's not even as good as the two previous tries.

Nice entry!
The idea is a bit similar as Mega Man, but working in your own way.
The difficulty is quite tough, I like it :D

This game looks amazing and feels almost perfect... I love the challenging gameplay. I love the pixel... really!!!! Could not rate the sound cause my laptop speakers are broken... sry!

Hi, nice game ! We're realizing a video with several games of the Ludum Dare #35.
Can you add your game on indiexpo.net ? (it's free)
So we can include also your game in the video ;)
p.s. write #LDJAM in the game's description

Really fun, with a feel similar to Towerfall when firing arrows. I died pretty often, but managed to defeat a couple of bosses. Would love to see this developed further! :)

Love the graphics, and the interpretation of theme was great! It was fun to switch between the different animals! The sound was also really nice, though a little background music would have been good instead of just sounds for the different actions.

Fun game! Good controls and graphics.

As always, challenging good game, thank you !

this game is one of my favorites!

I really like the pico aesthetic. Also, I think I liked playing as the chicken the most for the double jump.

A pretty good take on Mega Man! Capcom, please make a game where Megaman LOSES powers to the masters... it would be cool. The game was very cool, and the theme was used perfectly - it was fun to switch between the spirits! Graphics are the best I've seen in Pico8 games, but the game is pretty much lacking in the audio department.

A game featuring archery does not a Towerfall Clone make, guys. >:I

I could praise the fantastic pixel art, the simple and readable sounds, the clever take on the theme, and so on... but I'll try to keep it brief.

A+ Platforming and level design. For example, I was worried I couldn't reach Horse's tipi after I defeated Eagle and lost my double jump, but I was glad to see that you left a horizontal platform that you could long-jump from using Horse's speed boost (as long as you still had Horse, you could reach Horse).

The idea of a game where the player decreases in power over time, rather than increasing in power was a brilliant tweak. As you the player get better at the game, your handicaps and advantages are taken away, which is a brilliant way of creating rising tension without "artificial difficulty" like stat bonuses and harder bosses. This sort of inversion of Power Fantasy tropes in games is something I'd love to see more of.

I couldn't figure out what Vulture or Rabbit did. Snake as a Totem was overpowered as heck; the only form I really used against bosses, due to that damage over time. That snake boss fight had a pretty brilliant touch too; despite you not having access to poison arrows anymore, you could pin snakes along the arc of your arrow, and poison Snake that way. Finding that out was one of my favorite moments.

Thanks so much for putting this together. It's games like this that raise the bar for what folks can do in a 48-hour Ludum Dare game.

Great game as always, a bit hard. Keep up the good work!

Looks amazing and is a lot of fun, but it was way too hard for me, I almost beat the snake once but I got frustrated and quit :(

Great game but really hard to learn at first (also the controls you described in the link have z and x reversed)

Wow, very impressive. It's like a minimal Megaman (though just as hard)! Great design.

GReat stuff, nice graphsims

first time ive played i didnt notice it was made with pico ! great job !

Awesome, reminded me a bit of A Precious Arrow!
Didn't find all the weaknesses/abilities, but beat the game anyway.