Awesome entry, and a large number of enemy types, backgrounds, and animations! The gameplay is really straightforward and satisfying, and there's lots of "juice" in the UI elements that bounce to the beat and the various squash and stretch going on in the attacks.

Is this a one-person team, or is there just one Ludum Dare account? Because this would be a truly impressive solo work for 72 hours.

Music is nice and catchy.

Great entry!

This is an incredibly polished game. Took me a little bit to get the hang of it, but once I did.. well, I still died. I was a bit confused about how to buy things, I kept trying to drag them to my character or my hand. I should have read the tutorial more closely. Overall, an awesome entry. It's insane you put this together in a weekend.

Stellar core gameplay, this is really fun and really addictive. It's a little on the easy side once you get the hang of it and it stops overwhelming you, but it feels like there is still a LOT I could improve on. I can really see how you put it a placeholder for an online mode, because if you add more interesting runes to this this could be an absolutely stellar multiplayer experience.
No idea how many people worked on this but it would be impressive no matter what team size.

Incredible game. All the elements moving to the rhythm of the songs really makes you get into the the flow of it, and the phases of the battles hapenning in such a short amount of time force you to think and act fast, which really adds to the challenge. Also the boss battle was tense af, very well balanced difficulty. Well done!

What an amazing entry! I loved the art, the idea and the music. Good joob!

The effort put into this shows this project is going places. The art is very good looking and the gameplay is very smart, I like these kind of card game rpgs. I played the web version and it has this problem where it looks like some stuff is off screen, might just be me. Thanks for making this!

What a game! A think that you should give the player more time in the shop and display at all time the price of the items. Other than that, wow! Amazing job!

Ah, I was looking for a pixel art like that! Amazing!

Great game! Had a lot of fun fighting enemies. I will to return to your game later and will try to finish it with great pleasure. I think you really like what you do and it reflects in your game. Wish you all the best!

Wow, really cool concept and well executed!
I had trouble putting it down, to be honest!

I did run into an issue, there seemed to be either music drift or something introducing lag in the web version. The animations and music became increasingly decoupled as I played it. Not a big deal, but I thought I would let you know.

I can tell that a lot of thought and care went into this game, it really shows. Amazing job!

Full of charm in the music and design, this game's gameplay is both straightforward and thought inducing with the way the player must manage resources in real time. A pretty fun card game with a rhythm theme that doesn't demand some inhuman reflexes (Something i totally appreciate).

As for critique, the game is pretty solid, but from my own point of view, gold could have a couple more uses, to allow for more flexibility.

Excellent work nonetheless, and congrats!

This is one of the highest scores I've given a game yet, so cool and fun! I definitely had to go back and read the instructions to "get it", but once it clicked I was jamming lol. Great entry! Editing to add - as an artist myself I need to say I LOVED the art!

favorite game of the jam. seriously.

Pretty cool game ! The gameplay is quite original and works well ! The art is great, even if some things are not really clear, it took me some time to understand how the shop system works. Great job !

Ahaha some of these dance poses were incredible! And the moving background elements really helped to build up the entire feeling of movement. Music is a banger as well!

Truly a great game! I could recommend to add some audio hit at the first beat to indicate that the fight has started and maybe something that tells you prepare so a player would not need to get that information by looking at something, just from the sound. Other than that this game is awesome.

I had fun playing this on stream! Maybe the variety of abilities is a little on the low side, but that probably has more to do with the time constraint than anything else. Beautiful graphics though and really nice music!

Super underrated game so far. I hope more people pick this one and give it a try. Very fun gameplay and lots of potential to grow. Thanks for the great submission!

@jeremy-ryan Thanks for playing! we are a team of four (2 programmers, one musician, one artist). We updated the our page to show that since we share the itch page.

@yossarian Yeah the big thing we've noticed with peoples confusion is the shop. definitely something post jam we realize could have been designed to be more intuitive. Thanks for playing.

@lazenman we found that if you full screen it should be good as long as you have a 1920x1080 resolution, otherwise you will get some stuff cut off. never noticed until after since we only have those resolutions while developing haha.

@corentin-benoit-gonin Thanks for the feedback, definitely showing the gold value for each item would make it much easier to know if you can afford them given the short time you have for the shop.

@no-grapes-games Thanks for letting us know! I think its more apparent in the web build compared to desktop but for sure something that can occur especially if you play for longer periods of time.

@charlotte-raymond Thank you for the kind words we really appreciate it!

@jrevel Thanks for playing! definitely the shop could be improved on for better readability and intuitiveness

@gentoogames Thanks! I spent a bad amount of time making those background transitions look so pretty haha.

@jakob-reborn Great suggestion we never thought about that, it would help for sure signal to the player its their time to start strategizing, thanks for playing!

@renge Thanks again for playing it was awesome to see someone live play our game for the first time

@overlook-studios Ah, makes more sense! Still a fantastic entry, one of my favorites so far.

Awesome idea, and very polished. I had a little trouble knowing how to counter certain enemy actions, but overall understood. I really like the way the whole game moved with the music.

Wow, this pixel art is absolutely stunning. I especially enjoyed those background transitions.

Came here from a youtube video, from "Randomise User: The Best Indie Games". I LOVE the idea. It's so clever and fun. Would probably be fun in a multiplayer setting against a friend.

Once you have some strong ruins it gets a little easy but that's ok. Awesome entry. 5/5!

@mrmaico Thanks for letting us know thats so cool we got featured! Glad you enjoyed it. We also think a multiplayer setting would be pretty fun too!

That was great guys!
The idea is great, there is indeed quite some potential for multiplayer mode and further. This is a nice loop which catches really well until the boss fight (and that was great), didn't really feel like continuing the loop over and over again though.
The art is GREAT, really. Animations are nuts and there are some really good details. The overall UI is pretty cool as well. However readability is a bit an issue, most obvious example for me is the tutorial, I like these kind of images / charts for the visual, but man I clicked the tutorial button before playing I was totally lost x)
Music is great and well fitting, I love the smooth evolution throughout the terrains. Great synchro with the game as well !!
Overall I really liked your entry ! Kind of game I would prefer playing a definitive edition on mobile with a lot more features :3 Thanks for this game and good job!

super fun! loved the gameplay concept, implementation, graphics, animation, sounds, etc ^^ all v good. I think for the the gameplay is broadly intuitive which is great, although some of the finer points are less clear.

only some small aggreviances:

- the way runes are drawn from your deck isn't explicitly statedis it just at random from your deck, until you get through it all, then it's shuffled again? would be good to know this when you're deciding what to buy. would also be good to have a way to remove things, I guess (unless there's an actual gameplay reason you're against this? I suppose it'd get monotonous quicker, and there'd be less need for discard and draw)

- kind of annoying there's no preview for the cost of items before dragging them to the buy thing/buying in general is a bit unintuitive? I think a basic shop interface where you can see the gold cost of everything and just click to buy it would've been easier to use. I also thought the gold coins said "80" at first...

- would be nice if you saw your final score on the death screen

- it did feel like it was beginning to get repetitive once I had mostly 5dmg, 5block cards. ofc there's still lots of room to tweak your deck to be properly balanced (e.g. more draw or more heal or more block etc) so there's still skill expression, but it's less fun if you're just optimizing for that. slowly introducing 7, 9, etc dmg cards as a rare thing would be exciting, or some other form of new mechanics.

- would be good if it was really obvious in the beat animations whether an attack was partially/completely blocked, or mis-blocked; e.g. if the shield got bigger and the attack got smaller when it was completely blocked, or something similar

still very enjoyable, and well polished for a jam game!

@barbiche Glad you enjoyed it! We agree that the tutorial is definitely a bit overwhelming to look at. We originally wanted an in-game tutorial, but we had to prioritize other things!
-Adam (artist)

ps. I'm thrilled you like the art! it was super fun to have all the enemies dance to the music (:

really cool concept, but i get this problem in all versions,,,

@indivicivet All great suggestions! Thanks for taking the time to write such an in-depth critique. We're glad you had fun with it (:

@indivicivet Michael(programmer) here adding on to what you said since you had some of the more indepth suggestions so far (really appreciate it!):

1. I think we decided to hide any ui to show when things are reshuffling to give that better illusion of more of a infinite pool of cards that you own, but I can see how it would be useful to show the player when a reshuffle is about to happen. Additionally there is a discard button (in between your hand and the enemies hand) that you can drag and drop runes to to discard from your current hand. If you mean to discard from your deck completely I think that would be a great idea as well to help sift through the bad cards you started off with

2. Looking back, having the shop be more intuitive is probably the thing we wish we changed/tweaked since its the biggest hurdle to understand (given most of peoples feedback).

3. Adding a final score to the death screen is a fantastic idea and would enforce trying to get that highscore given the endless nature of it, great suggestion!

4. Totally agree once you have a stacked deck with the max cards the game becomes very easy, one of the ideas we had was actually to be able to upgrade ur existing cards to do more damage, have elemental effects. Obviously given the time constraint we went with a fixed damage/shield number instead.

5. Another great suggestion, that was something I thought about afterwards but didnt have the time to implement. Definitely a nice polish and would be very satisfying when you fully blocked the enemy. would feel like you out-played them

Thanks again for your comment we really appreciate the rating/comment/play!

@rs11s21n Unfortunately the web version in non fullscreen-mode will cut off some of the game. Additionally if your resolution isnt 1920x1080 you will get things cut off. Hopefully you were still able to play!

@overlook-studios Well, this is weird...

Excellent game! really good music, sounds, and an innovative concept for a turn based RPG! I had a great time playing it.

Neat core gameplay loop. I think it would be better with hotkeys and bigger collison boxes for dragging cards.

Felt like it was far too easy to heal through encounters, especially when a full heal only cost 10 gold.

@matthewrobo thanks for the feedback! We originally were going to have the cards be both draggable and set via 1-4 hotkeys (or asdf for example). Didn't have enough time to get to that unfortunately. Thanks for playing!

@drevilbrain we definitely agree the heal is too low of
a cost and does result in the game being pretty easy if you don't buy cards in the shop often. Thanks for playing and the feedback!

Well polished Game. Had a blast! Thank you!

This game gave me no choice but to give it straight 5 stars. everything is amazing. If this is in steam today I would think it has been in development for years. please develop this game and don't let it go. It so good

I liked the game a lot, possibly the highest rated game ive played so far. The animations and the music felt somehow uncomfortable. as if they didnt match or something, i dont know. I downloaded the zip verison because i thought the webgl version was broken but i guess it probably wasnt. Theres some kind of lag on the menu's i dont have enough time to figure out what i was seeing, but im sure you'll find the answer

@blue-pin-studio ah damn that sucks to hear that the music was desyncing with the art, we didn't have much time to test on various setups that could cause desync. Thanks for letting us know and thanks for playing!

This I think is my favourite game I've played so far, everything feels super solid and works really well, absolutely awesome job - smashed it!

I think this is the best game I've played in the jam so far! The signature and most awesome thing is that everything matches perfectly with the music!

It does get a bit repetitive at some point, but that's understandable given the amount of time in which it was created. It's very impressive for a 3 day game!

really fun, super polished and fits the theme in several ways. I could go on and on but lets be fair, you must know you smashed it.

One of my favorite games in this LD! Art, music, game design were all top-notch and provided a clean, polished, and fun experience. My one gripe is that the game throws a lot at me at once when I'm just starting out, and it took me a bit to figure out what's going on and how to perform each action (like buying an item from the shop by dragging it down). All of this cleared up once I figured things out, and the game then became truly amazing. I can see this being polished up and released as a full game with some more content. Great job!

Now brb, I'm going to play more of this game.

This felt like one of the most complete and polished games I I've played yet! You've gotten some great feedback already, but I'll reiterate that I couldn't figure out how to properly buy things from the shop at first. This is a game I could easily see myself playing more of.

Insane entry! I'm in love with this rhythmic game. It's so polished and the visuals felt so alive. I mean, I have nothing bad to say about this. PLEASE bring this to mobile, I want to play every day instead of sleeping!!!!

I mean, where to start. Art is on point. The music is spectacular. I love how everything (including the menus) moves to the beat. I found the tutorial section a little cluttered, but still got the hang of it pretty quick. One of the best entries!

Really awesome game. My only nitpick is that the resolution clipped on both the web version and the downloaded version. I was still able to play it without issue but the first rune was only about half on the screen. Loved the art, music, and concept. Great work!

This looks like fun, but I can't see the edges of the screen, on either the downloaded version or the web version even when not full-screen :(.


@echo-gameworks @jimbly Thanks for playing, sorry to hear the screen gets cut off. Are you guys on a 1920x1080 resolution? We only really tested on that resolution so if you don't it probably will cut off like the screen shots @jimbly has posted.

Really well made game, had a lot of fun playing! I had the cutoff problem too, but going fullscreen on my browser fixed it.

@overlook-studios On the web version, it gets cut off at any resolution, you should be able to see that, for a quick fix, perhaps you can configure the web wrapper to be a 16:9 aspect ratio resolution? On Windows, my display is 2560x1600 (16:10). If fixing it to letterbox is too difficult, perhaps just change it to launch in windowed mode by default, or to decrease resolution when switching to windowed mode? Right now toggling out of fullscreen mode leaves it as a 2560x1600 window, which doesn't help. Bugfixes are allowed after the end of the competition by the rules =).

@overlook-studios FYI - I'm running 1680x1050

@jimbly Thanks for the help, I am looking at it that now, itch.io doesn't seem to resolve much when fixing it to a set 16:9 ratio for the view port (tried 640x360, 1280x720, 1920x1080). I will most likely attempt to try to make changes to the build itself. Apologizes for the cutoff, thanks for pointing this out and offering solutions I appreciate it.

@echo-gameworks I'll try to continue working on it to fix issues with cutoff. Full screen most likely won't be possible since you dont have a 16:9 ratio but we should still get it to work non full-screened in browser.

@jimbly @lazenman @rs11s21n @echo-gameworks @pranjalbisht

We just released a patch for the web build so now it will default display on a 1280x720 canvas. This should at least make the game playable for those that dont have 16:9 aspect monitors (make sure not to full screen).

Thanks for bringing this issue and we appreciate you guys playing and giving feedback.

The game throws you right in. Took me some time to start getting how it works but then it started to be fun. Well done!

@pfs Yeah we had planned to make an interactive tutorial but didnt even having time so we went with a image tutorial (albeit still a lot as others have put). thanks for playing

Very innovative, I haven't seen a game like this before. Well done!

Cool, fresh concept, amazing execution and great animations soundtracks. Pulled me right in and had me play for a while, even though endless "highscore hunt" games aren't normally to my taste. Making decisions to the beat was a great challenge and it was balanced very well to give me just barely enough time to set everything up before a round.

The only weakness I see is the "learnability" as others have pointed out already - I think organizing the UI elements and interactions in a different way (e.g. not dragging to buy) and tweaking icons could have gone a long way, that might have worked well enough even without something like an interactive tutorial. The tutorial page is still very much appreciated!

Great submission overall and super fun to play :thumbsup:


**This was really fun, unexpected and well done!** :sparkles: Mixing up both a combat and a to-the-beat system really makes for a surprisingly fun and interesting combination. I really like the whole pitch of the game, as well as the different effects of the runes and how you have both a defend against magic as you have against melee, making you have to swap runes as the battle goes on.

**I really like all of the details that were put in pretty much every aspect of the game.** Having everything from little menu prompts to the background elements also scaling up/down based on the rhythm really helped both backgrounds and interface feel alive. The inclusion of different sceneries was also pretty great, and given that this is a game all around the beat, having the beat also change a bit depending on the area was an awesome touch and kept the game feeling fresh!

If anything, I wish there was a way to see some sort of rune inventory while you're in the shop screen. As I started getting gold and buying runes pretty much every round, I wasn't sure of how many of each runes I already had. With the current depth of the game I don't think it'd matter much, especially since the runes were also escalating with the difficulty, but I guess it's something I am used to from make-your-hand/deck games. Oh! And showing the price of a rune by hovering rather than having to actually drag it to preview the price would be a nice quality-of-life change too!

While I might have only played a loop and a half, my time with the game was fantastic. I don't know if the locked game-modes in the menu were a teaser, or just a joke regarding the jam's theme, but even then, if you continue working on it, I think it'll be a fantastic time. Overall, thank you for this entry, and cheers! :whale: