:triumph: :metal: :fire:

I really liked this game! Amazing sound, music, combat, art! The tutorial and boss are well made too :)

Smooth and addictive, an hour flew by!

Very Fun! :)

This isn't a jam game, this is something I could buy on Steam for like 4$. Honestly, very well done!

This is absolutely amazing. Well done! More people need to see this.

A roguelike in a 72h jam? Damn! Super impressive. Loved the fluidity of the animations and how snappy everything felt. I just wish it was a little easier (those circular eyeball enemies really had their way with me). I would buy a full game of this if it were to be released.

The best game of the whole Game Jam so far. I could play this for hours. You can see the passion in every corner translated into quality, from the music, to the fast paced combat, to the theme perfectly executed, to the art style, to the enemy design... this could very much be an Steam product. 10/10, PLAY THIS.

This game was really hard at first, but after several runs I felt like I was getting pretty good at it! Graphics, music, atmosphere are top-notch as expected from the names in this collab. I played this for too long at the start of my stream. :D

@lectvs do you have a VOD? thanks for playing!

Beautiful roguelike with nice, quick combat. Only problem seems to be that the game tends to revert to windowed mode every level on Windows.

Man, great gameplay, visuals and sound! My one tiny complaint is that I often felt like the upgrades didn't matter because of the debuffs. If I got more damage and the enemies got more health then there really was no point to the upgrade. Would maybe be nice if the debuffs were always on something that you hadn't just upgraded. But really impressed by this overall!!

It all work so well together, can't believe how polished you guys managed to make this, wooah!
Also love the clockwork thematic and the beautiful beautiful music aswell <3 <3 <3

This is incredibly polished and feels great to play! I love the upgrade system and the complexity of choice the debuff element introduced. I wish there was a way to keep track of all the upgrades since I ended up taking so many! The sound design was particularly impressive, as well. Really just a joy to play!

Guys, you did excellent work, the game feels like a full game. Incredible art, animations, balance and core gimmick. Frankly, I have had a similar idea of cards with buffs and debuffs in my mind for years, and you make it very well. Great job!

Really well done! Interesting mechanics and engaging fast paced combat, good job!

oh man this is awesome! incredible production value/polish, feels like a game i would just buy on steam or something. loved the main mechanic, being able to choose how many upgrades you take while making the game harder for yourself. really cool idea, and i imagine balancing such a thing is tricky. but having randomly less or more difficult enemy cards alleviates some of that while putting a risk/reward sense on the player's behalf, if that makes sense
anyway really cool. lovely art, lovely music, lovely sounds. my only two complaints are 1: it's very hard to tell when you actually take damage. a screen flash, screenshake, some aura around the player, etc. would help. i dont even know what the current tell is, which means it probably isnt obvious enough heh. but the game is easy enough that i never actually died, so that drawback never turned into frustration for me, which is good.
and number 2. the sound mixing is a little harsh. some sound effects are 4 times louder than others, and sounds of the same type stack up causing them to be louder even though it's the same sound playing.
other than that, really great stuff as always. couldnt imagine less from a team like this.

Elite!

Not much to critique, this is better than anyone should expect for a 72hr Jam Game!

-kicked out of full screen mode when I enter a portal (windows) :( I want to see all the shine in full screen!!!

-the cards are cool, but the random de-buffs don't feel good. I pick a card that makes me stronger, but then the enemies get more defensive? Maybe it would've felt better if a few de-buffs were presented and the player had to try to pick against those tactically?

Very nice atmosphere

Amazing game. Very well executed. Main complaint is that I cannot tell when I take damage.

I'm a bit torn on the upgrade system, just getting random debuffs makes the upgrades feel kinda pointless. I'm just gonna pick what I feel like, and I pick more if I want it to get harder. Seeing what debuff I'm gonna get could make it feel more tactical, but would make it easy to always pick simple debuffs. But maybe you don't see all of them, or maybe there is an upgrade that let's me see what debuff I'm gonna get from a card (which can be picked up to 5 times to see all five potential debuffs). Or instead of a debuff being associated with a card, I can see what debuff I'm getting when I pick e.g. a second or third card, but it doesn't matter what second upgrade I pick. (anyway that's my ramblings on that)

How far do I have to get for the bossfight? The game starts to feel a lot like discroom once you get your seventh loose gear. It's hard, but still felt pretty fair. Kudos.

This is great, much more than i expected, really. Spent some time, had lots of fun. The ticking clock+soundtrack really add to the game, so hat off to the sound designer!

Hey @dev-dwarf , why is this game not top 10?
I love action games in general and this game is hitting ALOT of good spots. This is almost a full-fledged game, you could DEFINITELY take this to a full release. If you are doing that, I'd like to be a beta-tester please, hit me up.

Let's start with the positives:

1) Lots of juice here. Everywhere. Sound effects, music, the hitting, the dashing/teleporting, the killing. There is a lot of things done right in this game, and the pacing/flow feels really good! Very reminiscent of my time playing Hyper Light Drifter where it's a lot of dash and slash. Really good feeling here!

It's good enough for me to say, I'd pay for this. It's amazing. I love what you did here.

2) The artstyle is something worth celebrating. It's absolutely cohesive with everything else in the game.

3) Thematically? Simple, it's a roguelike. Execution? Perfection.
I personally advice your team to start posting about your game on the LD feed. It really brings the game a lot of publicity, as it did to mine, even when my game was a humbling idle game.

You guys deserve a lot for this!

Some other qualms with the game:

1) Once you get the hang of the combat, you can really start pushing with getting all the cards and the pros can quickly outweight the cons. Obviously, it's a jam game, balancing is not exactly the top of the priority (especially in end-game balancing) but it's something worth noting.

I reached the point where I basically don't die, and I kill the boss by him touching me (thorns(?), it was the second playthrough though).

But other than that, this was great. I enjoyed this game so much.

This is the most polished game I have seen in any Jam! wow! The sound designer really did a good job and the sprites are amazing as well! Let's not forget the addictive gameplay! Picking all the upgrades and not bothering about the debuffs makes this game chaotic hell of fun!!! if there is one thing I found that could be improved is the enemies are a bit hard to see with the fantastic background. Sometimes I thought the round was over but there was one enemy still lurking in camouflage. Asides from that, absolute stunning of a game! A true GEM I would say.

Just Great

@steventus thanks so much for the kind words and thoughtful feedback, well be sure to implement it if/when we make a post jam version :)

@klianc09 thanks for playing! the boss fight happens when the big hand of the clock is at 12 (so you have to beat 11 waves first)

@grizzliusmaximus thank you! that's some high praise!

Gorgeous game. Great sound effects. I just ended up clicking every upgrade and in the levels leading up to the end I was starting to lose interest because I was just totally invincible, but also the enemies had a ton of HP so I just had to hit them like a hundred times. Being able to hold down the mouse to was appreciated. Great entry. Also if anyone is having an issue with the MacOS version, install and launch the game through the itch.io app.

Awesome game! We did something quite similar with a looping roguelike where you can get a choice of upgrades and curses after each loop so it was interesting to compare.

Interesting that others noted you can just pick all the cards and you end up nearly invincible. I didn't realize that and just mostly picked one card at a time focusing on health regen, drain and the shield and did manage to win the final boss that way.

I really loved the graphics, enemy variety, and the various buffs and debuffs you could get! One small complaint is that I think the player's movement speed seems pretty slow which made dashing felt strictly better, especially since your dash also damages. I pretty much just ended up playing the game via dashing.


Now this was a very fun game, I had way more fun than (my already high) expectation!
I certainly am bad at bullet-hell like games but despite that the gameplay was very fair & fun enough even for blokes like me to actually enjoy the game instead of getting instakill'd by the amount of enemies.
And the random perk selection followed by random handicap was very innovative to me, and frankly I think this game was the first game (at least for me) that has this kind of extreme tradeoff system... And it surely made the gameplay more unique & interesting.

My only nitpick (sort of) was that the dash seemed kinda OP, I was able to just dash around the room & bash everything into a finely-chopped mush... But who can blame it, it's a jam game afterall and this level of pollish is like, next level already.

But in overall, holy crap, it's GOOD. I won't be suprised if this entry ranked the top 10.

really liked this game, i loved most of the random abilities you get and how it effects the gameplay, i also really dig the sound design definitely 5/5 for me, I just wish if the stage was bit bigger, Great game!

@zik I love this image

Fun and super impressive! great variety of specials and abilities, hectic combat and overall it just plays great! It was a bit easy, but then I got beaten pretty quickly when I started to take all the cards and get all the debuffs. I think the debuffs was an interesting way to keep things more balanced. Just great, congrats and well done!

The combat was really great dude. It's a really fun and polished rogue-lite. I felt that the arena was a little too small for the action though. Or maybe there were a little too many enemies at a time at some points which made things a little hard to see. Still, a very fun entry and one I'll probably keep playing for some time :)

I'm trying to play the Windows version and can't seem to get it to work right - the controls don't work. I can't move the character at all (though he'll sometimes sort of 'twitch' when I press WASD) and attacking and dashing barely work either (it was strange, when I spammed the mouse buttons, an attack/dash would occasionally happen, but only maybe 1 in 10 times).

I thought it might be some freak problem on my end since nobody else has seemed to have any issues playing, but the problem persisted after I tried re-downloading the game and rebooting my computer.

Then I tried on a another machine and got the same problem there... so now I'm not sure what to think. Any idea what might be wrong? This looks fun and I'd like to give it a try.

Very impressed to see a properly fleshed-out rogue-like, it feels pretty feature-complete, great job y'all! Overall visual style is very consistent and well-made, but so are the rest of the elements, really.

The upgrade/debuff cards are pretty evocative, although it wasn't always easy to guess their effect at a glance. I think I would've been more invested in the upgrade system and each individual run if I had some information about the current upgrades and debuffs, if not in a way of explicit numbers to the side of the screen then in a way of maybe some symbols, icons, visual cue on enemies themselves or other indirect info. I don't mean that as a significant critique and I understand that a) all this was done within tight time-constraints and it already is very impressive fidelity-wise and b) rogue-likes often are obscure by choice.

The biggest issue I've had was with the lack of feedback from the game: I couldn't always understand if I'm hitting enemies or if me simply keeping my swords in their sprites without making an attack damaged enemies and the only way for me to understand I've been damaged at some point during the level was to look up at the health bar.

Anyways, the game got me hooked so Imma bolt - gotta kill that pesky boss!

absolutely amazing entry as usual! genuinely really fun and super engaging roguelike with totally beautiful visuals, sound, atmosphere, everything, honestly a 5 in every category -- proud of you guys!