The main character is so cute!

This game has a really good intro!
I loved the main character, the way that the background music gets creepy every seconds... it is scary!
Nice entry! :)

It's an interesting idea to add different levels of difficulty. And I love scenes with narration, but it would be great if you could skip them. In the case of second passing game. Also, when it gets dark, you can hardly see those purple clouds. Good game!

I really like this game even though I haven't been able to finish it. I will attempt to do so soon! :slight_smile:

My only feedback would be to tighten up the mechanics just a tad as it felt that there were some inconsistencies in the jumping and moving side. Other than that this is a great entry!

EDIT:

What I said above here did not quite do my feelings toward this game justice. I was wrong in that the controls did not feel as tight as I would have liked it. They were really great. I loved how consistent the game was and that you had presented enough information to the player to make their decisions in (except maybe those last few doors that I did not quite manage to figure out). I loved how difficult the game was even on easy mode.

My cousin has a lot of hate for those moving 1 block bouncy platforms of doom, but I'll be honest I loved them. I felt the animation that was done around those bouncy blocks gave me enough information that while they went off screen I could spend time and figure out the timings. It might have helped if the jumps and the shadows were swapped around so that you can face the new threat first and fail there without having to traverse another quite difficult, but known threat as well. I did figure out a way to manage those jumps by timing it right and doing some counting in my head to match my movement to that of the platforms.

While this was not necessarily an innovative game I definitely feel it was a good one. You mentioned that the game wasn't supposed to turn out creepy but it did. I think even if you have a certain understanding of what the it means to you it ended up meaning something completely different to me and that's the magic bit about this game that I loved.

I love this game! The mood is awesome and Emma is way too cute. The idea of the music coming with the monsters is really cool. I wasn't able to finish it but it is a very good game.

Whooh! The atmosphere is very scary! Good job!

Great game, I liked the graphics and the gameplay, continues to make games

I really liked this game! I just had to beat it, but I gave up on hard and went to Normal difficulty. The lack of checkpoints on hard was just too damn brutal!

The controls felt pretty tight! I could sort of feel where Emma would go when I was pressing the buttons, and that's the hallmark of well tuned controls. In other games the controls have had me over or undershoot, but in this game it felt just right. It made those nearly pin-point precision jumps needed for the small blocks pretty overcomable with practice.

The music slowly fading in as the light goes out was a nice touch, it really added to the urgency of it all. It made me feel the tension Emma felt as her light was going out.

If there's one point of criticism I have, it's that the cutscenes feel a bit slow and they're not skippable. This made changing difficulty sort of a pain, so I just minimized the game while doing other things just to wait the intro out.

Really good entry though, one of the better ones I've seen so far! :)

Thanks everyone for feedback, My BF and I made this together. (This is his second Jam game and my first.) I did art and story, he did coding and level development. During transfer from my image editing software and his software the timing on the scenes became a bit distorted. We wanted to make them skip-able but ran out of time, so if we add anything that will be top priority. Also, this game is really difficult, I'm really glad to hear other people say it because it was tough for me, but I'm not typically a gamer, so I thought it was just me. XD Thanks so much for playing our game. (And thanks everyone who thinks Emma was cute) <3

Hey there! I really liked the game, the art was cute, and the story of the little girl got in my heart. There was a great mechanic when the music started changing while the environment was getting more dangerous that made me feel uneasy but in a good way, immersed in the game. It was kinda tricky jumping on the tiny blocks :P I really liked the purple orbs, interesting mechanic. Overall, really liked the game, cute, dark and engaging all at the same time.

Hehe... little girls somehow always make it creepy, but it makes the mood work great. I hit a bug where I somehow teleported on top of the ceiling in at the very start of the level after colliding with it. Other than that good job, I'm really happy to see Godot being used more, I think it's a fun engine to use.

Was impressive that you did cutscenes for the game. The platforming itself was super challenging and felt a little unfair (especially the part where you have to bounce across a chasm on moving orbs, that was nuts as your fall speed was too fast and the orbs are out of sight making it really difficult to gauge where to land). The final puzzle was a little incoherent (that was a minus sign!?) as well as inconsistent with the rest of the game so far, although I managed to power through. In terms of mechanics, I'm not sure but it seems like having lights out means you restart from the beginning of the level but as long as you touch the torches you can prevent lights out, so if you were ever in danger you'd suicide to restart at a torch which feels a bit odd. But I really liked that you synced up the audio with the lights running out, lent a scary feel to the game. Nice entry!

Good game overall! Art was great and sound was amazing. The way the audio changed and got louder and more foreboding as the light gets darker really added to the atmosphere. For the cutscenes I think it would be nice if you could go through the dialogue at your own pace (like an rpg), that way those who want to skip can go through quickly and those who are slow readers can make sure they catch everything.

I found the game itself has pretty tight controls which is good, but the level design is a bit sadistic. Having to perform very precise jumping repeatedly (while under a time limit) can be fun for hardcore players but for me it was a bit much. Specifically there were 3 sections I found where you had to make a jump to a 1 tile wide block like 10 times in a row while some of them had enemies jumping up and down them. I think in a normally difficult game you would only have to make like 3 jumps like this:
TTTTT.....T.....T.....T.....TTTTT (Imagine the top of the 'T' is the platform)
instead of:
TTTTT.....T.....T.....T.....T.....T.....T.....T.....T.....T.....T....TTTTT

It could be that you were going for making it Nintendo hard, but I quit after 3rd time being faced with this situation.

Anyways, that the difficulty is higher than my skill is really just a nitpick. I'm a scrub gamer anyways. Everything else was great!

The two of you take the award for the toughest review I've had to write yet this jam! :sweat_smile:

My cousin @Cyberwiz told me to play this as one of the best entries he's played so far, so I went in with my expectations pretty high... I only have about 1 hour a night to review games at the moment, so I went straight to the _"Normal"_ difficulty setting...

Let's start with the __good__:
- The art is great! Emma is super cute; the dungeon, darkness and monsters are all nice and scary.
- The music is a good fit and the effect of fading it in as the light runs out was brilliant at setting the mood and creating tension.
- I liked the story, it kinda reminds me of a Hayao Miyazaki movie, in the sense that it takes you back to the dimly remembered bits of your childhood when monsters and magic were still real.
- The platforming controls were quite tight. I didn't like them at first, but the speed with which I got through the 1st level on _Hard_ on a second play confirmed that they allow for quite skillful control of the character and that I had in fact improved at the game in the hour I was playing.
- This is your first / second / 1.5th game jam?! Well done - great job! I've participated in many more jams and my games are still probably quite terrible in comparison...
- The pacing and introduction of new mechanics was quite good.

Sounds great so far right? So why the Good, The Bad & The Ugly format? Well I thought there were a few things that were __bad__ from a gameplay perspective:
- Those one block platforms! Sometimes under time pressure and in nearly complete darkness... Tight as your controls were, if I have to do 6 tricky jumps in a row I'm bound to screw one up sooner or later.
- Failure to let me fail fast... By which I mean that when I do screw up in the above scenario I now have less time and less light making me much less likely to succeed on a 2nd attempt... so now I have to waste my time on a doomed 2nd attempt?! Better to kill me immediately on failure so I can try again with the same chance of success (better chance if I learned anything from the last attempt).
- A difficult sequence of darkness clouds to dodge followed by 5 moving one block platforms that each catapult me so high into the air that I can't see the next platform that I need to land on?! :sob:

Which brings me to the __ugly__:
- There's a save point just after the the moving one block platforms of doom, but I somehow missed it on my first 2 successful attempts at crossing the moving catapult platforms of doom area... So I probably spent about 20 minutes trying to get through a 3rd time, because I had started on what looked like an interesting end-game puzzle, but failed to finish it the first 2 times.

Sorry if this review is a bit negative, but I feel like your game had all the ingredients of greatness, but then difficulty for difficulty's sake dragged it down into mediocrity... your ending was heart warming, but by the time I reached it I was raging too hard to appreciate it. You clearly did a lot right to hook me into playing for more than an hour, but what was intended as difficulty often seemed more like punishment and I think that undermined the story you were trying to tell.

I'm about 2.5 hours into the 1 hour I had to review games tonight and I'm not sure if I've done a good job of articulating the feelings your game awoke in me, so I'm calling it quits now to go sleep - I hope there is at least some constructive criticism that you can take from this review... if not I leave you with a few videos I ran across while trying to understand what I wanted to say (as well as a link to another entry that was thematically similar, but a bit which I found less punishing).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Y6y1MOoEo

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/a-night-at-grandpas

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'll admit I did make the game waaaay to hard from the start. I wished we had more time for testing, but I tried to make the levels difficult, but doable, which was my error. I am used to playing old platformers with absurd difficulty like mega man 1~10, ninja gaiden, tmnt(the original with the water stage), ristar, and super mario bros: the lost levels. So it is probably, not so good that I was the only person testing the levels. (My girlfriend played after the contest submission was over and she was mad at me that the levels were so hard. :0) At one point Hard was the only difficulty, but after some careful consideration I tried to make a level below that. (In normal you can cheese the lights by falling into pits if the monster is close to coming out.)

@chaoikza Thanks for the detailed review! Sorry about the difficulty, thanks for the videos though! I remember watching a videos on some teens playing the original mega man and realizing how difficult of a game that it was. These were the games I played growing up. :)

Wow what a lovely surprise, this game is so well made, first I loved the audio, the use of audio in this game was really good, very surprising, the art is very well made and the gameplay is good. The game is also hard, which is good, it is challenging.

This game has the potential to become something more after ludum dare, one great game for sure !

A well put together little game. Nice work. I liked the premise of the story and theme was really good. I feel like the mechanics could use a little tightening though. It was pretty frustrating that my jumping got nerfed when I hit a dark circle.