Wow this game is gorgeous!

Very well done, In PICO-8 no less! My hat is off to you!

Nice one.

Biggest issue is that by the time I make out the spikes, I'm already dead. It looks great, but I can't tell anything apart.
Also not sure text is a great fit for a pico 8 game given the low res.

A beautiful game with a nice atmosphere and simple to play, its challenging and have fun obstacles that always make you die on the first try, its the perfect game to try kill some time trying to beat it

Love it. Reminds me a lot of Celeste. Good job.

Wow, this just looks so cute and polished. Good job on your game, especially considering the limitations of pico-8.

Best game I have played so far! :D
Took me a while to realize I can walk jump of the side of spikes.

Top notch. And it makes a good use of the theme by making it a suggestion, keep the fire alive, or you are going to have a bad time.

Lovely looking game, and keeping the fire alive is a good task in this kind of platformer. I did find it hard to make out spikes but I managed to get through the game. Great work!

The game feels so polished and looks lovely

very polished game, had a lot of fun playing it. Sometimes it was very hard to see what killed me. Otherwise very nice entry!

This was really cool, the spikes were a bit hard to see in some places, but other than that, I really liked the graphics.

Amazing game for the compo! Took me two or three tries to realize why I was dying after the first checkpoint but after that it was very clear. Great execution and very challenging.

Suppppper solid game! Really dig the style and colour palette choices too!

Wow awesome! Super-polished experience, cool pixelart, animations, controls... audio couldn't be more fitting... it's just great.

Great job! Super polished and great visuals and audio. Controls are a little bit floaty for my taste, and I'd make the hit box on the spikes a little smaller - generally, it's better to have any death hit boxes smaller than a sprite, as it can make it feel more fair and forgiving, even if it's less accurate.

looks nice, feels nice, plays nice

Wow, this is amazing. I love the art style (though it can sometimes be a bit tough to distinguish different textures) and the gameplay is really fun.

Damn, you really pushed the limits of a pico cart with this one! The graphics are amazing, the sound is good and I'm very intrigued on how the lighting is done. Reminds me a bit of celeste+spelunky. Well done!

You NEVER fail to deliver on these :D another excellent entry. Great work!

This is amazingly well polished and a neat gameplay idea too. Well done!

Really well polished for a jam game! I found the platforming pretty tough and I would have liked either more checkpoints or fewer things that killed me, but overall I enjoyed it!

After a lovely day out I am suddenly trapped in a dungeon with only one miserable torch to keep me company. And now a mysterious voice is stalking me. Whoever designed this dungeon is one sadistic individual. Send help, anyone.

Very polished! It took a little time to me to see the spikes, and I didn't understand before a lot of tries that the green fires are actually the checkpoints - and I didn't manage to finish the game, because I'm very bad at plateformers, especially die and retry ones. But this was fun and nice to play, good job!

This was super impressive, it has the celeste vibe, but a different gameplay concept. I can't wait to see more for you guys!

Thats awesome!!! Didn't know you can do HTML5 builds with pico-8. What is the resolution on the pico engine and what what is the res on your game?

I love the graphics, I love the sound, the platforming is satisfying. The only real critiques I have are that the difficulty curve may be a bit steep for some players, and that some textures blend a bit and sometimes make it difficult to distinguish hazards. I enjoyed playing this a lot, well done!

Amazing game, amazing adherence to theme, and great graphics and sound. There are some jank moments with the springs and how you control, that could have used just a little more playtesting in my opinion. Great job overall!

Cool game, great style and graphics! I really liked the lights. Is the music derivative of Sanctuary Guardian from Earthbound? I wish I had a little more control of the trampolines. Great work!

Really love the game ! I felt like playing Celeste, but nor the pico8 version, the commercial one. I love the palette and the lighting effect. Might have a look at your code to get inspired ^^ really great job :D

Thanks everyone for the kind comments! :D Looking back it might've been an idea to mix up the PICO-8 palette using the secret colors to allow a slightly clearer visual style! And obv not try cram too much stuff in each room!
Have added a post-compo version which includes binary downloads and another web version, contains a few fixes, layout changes and tweaks that make things a _little_ bit easier, but still preeeettty difficult!

Cheers once again to everyone who played! :D

Fantastic work as always. Wanted to play this just to hear your latest soundtrack, but the art was wonderful as well!

Thanks for the game :) I love the idea of dynamicly changing location. Wish you the best of luck!

P.S. Extra kudos for using PICO-8

Wow. I don't... wow. How do you make something like this in 48 hours all on your own? How? I don't even *like* hard platformers, and I finished it because it was so compelling. The design, the colors, the sounds, the music, the levels, the checkpoints, the controls... everything is completely on point.

My complaints are marginal at best. It's a bit hard to see the spikes. It's hard to play the game and also process the text. That's it. That's all. I don't even see why there'd need to be a post-compo version, because this already feels so polished as if you spent all the time in the world on it, and then deemed it complete and released it.

Bravo.

Super solid game. Well done using the limited pico palette to create such a vibrant world. And the movement/jumping felt so juicy and right.

Really GREAT game! Love the art style, simply beautiful! congratulations, its so juicy and polish! loved!

Good game, looks very polished and has a lot of levels to offer for the short time. Good job!

Awesome game, I'm amazed of the detail you achieved using Pico-8. Awesome gameplay and feeling, super cool graphics and audio and a marvelous and challenging level design.

A good entry! Everything feels polished and fluid, and just running and jumping around is great fun (coming from someone who rarely likes platforming!)

Only issue I had was that in some of the levels, it was really hard for me to make out just what was going on. A lot of the time I wouldn't notice spikes until I hit them. Now that could just be me, my vision isn't amazing, but I feel that the restrictions Pico-8 brings isn't helping. Don't get me wrong though, the art is gorgeous, just a little hard for me to fully take in while playing.

Good job overall!

​Great little game. I believe this is my first Pico8 game, and I can definitely see the charm in the system. The game itself reminds me of both the cave parts of Link's Awakening and many Rare games like Solar Jetman and Digger.
It struggled a bit with telling scenery from platform, spikes from walls etc. (this coming from a guy whose LD46 entry is made to look like a NES game). Looks like you've adressed those things in the post-compo version. Great experience all in all.

This is a really great entry - gorgeous art, great music, and just a really solidly designed game from start to finish.

(Feedback: I found legibility to be a problem - a lot of "oh, I guess those were spikes" at various challenges.)

Very solid platform game. In the original version the elements are not obvious, but overall the visual effects are great.

It's fantastic. I enjoyed this very much.

Dude, that's an impressive 48h game,I am stunned.
The level design is well thought and balanced,and the gameplay is flawless, I hadn't found any bugs in my whole playthrough, bravò!!

Amazing game, I don't know how you managed to do it all in only 48 hours! Beautiful art, great music, controls are perfect! I feel like there is too much going on in the background, sometimes I wasn't sure if something will kill me or not XD

Nice game! It reminds me a bit of Celeste, which is a good thing because Celeste is a great game. Nice art and music and nice level of challenge, although some times it was hard to distinguish between walls and background (I dont know if that was intentional though). Keep up the good work!!

Very nice looking game and polished too. Also cool that you can unlock abilities as you go through. I did find it a bit hard in some places to tell the difference between platforms and backgrounds. Awesome submission.

Astonishing pixel art! Feels so nostalgic and looks a lot like Celeste!

Could not see a lot of push from the torch mechanic, and checkpoints are sometimes kind of unforgiving with all the spikes, but overall an amazing job!

Well done!

I'm usually not a huge fan of the PICO-8 graphic style, but you pulled it off really well with this entry. Very tight and addictive platformer gameplay. It was a clever use of the theme to use lighting as a core mechanic and there was some very interesting things you did with it, particularly with the waterfalls. My one major gripe would probably be that the lighting coupled with the low resolution often made it difficult to navigate the stages, and that was pretty frustrating given the tough-as-nails/pixel-perfect platformer gameplay. But overall this was a very fun game that kept me hooked through to the end :)

nice game but the spikes were a bit hard to see

This is the first pico8 game I've played in LD46. It's very pretty, but it was a big hard to see (which likely isn't your fault, it's mostly a screen size thing, and I guess vision hazards are a part of the core loop considering the interpretation of the theme). The music is awesome!

Really tasty, love it! Nice one.

Really gorgeous game and great audio. The controls felt really great as well which is hard without a lot of polish time.

I liked using fire as a take on the theme.

Overall one of the best games I've played in LD46 thus far. :)

The game was fun to play and finish. I liked the main mechanic and thought it was unique. I thought the spikes were perfect because I think without them at that size and visibility, the game would be too easy. The checkpoints were close enough that when I died from the spikes I didn't really mind too much.
I feel like I heard the beginning of your song before tho. Is it inspired from somewhere? The closest one I can think of is the Olive Jungle from Pokemon Ranger but I know I have heard a song that is closer.

Impressive good overrall!

This is the most amazing compo game I've seen in any Ludum Dare. I'll absolutely be studying the cart source!!

Really good game. Floaty controlls, like in celeste (classic). Good challenge and level design. And great graphics.

The only down thing is that spikes are barely visible and it gets frustrating when you need to die on every single one of them to remember their position

Great game! The graphics and mood are incredible. The story was a bit weird (although that's probably on purpose) and it was rather hard to notice the spikes, but other than that, it was a really nice game!

Cool submission! The art, audio and graphics are really great. The darkness made it quite hard to see what was coming and so it requred a few deaths to know what to expect. I do like that getting dowsed by water gave you some leeway and allowed you to reignite your torch if you were quick enough.

Overall it was fun and you did a great job in such a short time :)

Really interesting mechanics, but quite difficult indeed. I like how you can re-light the torch and burn certain blocks. I made it to the room pictured below. The top part is too difficult.

Nicely done, a cute twist at the end. The light effects are pretty, although a couple of times I felt they almost impeded the gameplay, particularly when the spikes blended into the surrounding terrain when not inside the light radius. The controls and platforming felt good enough, although there were a few quirks – I think one Z key down should correspond to one jump. The walljumps seemed like they were checked periodically when I was holding Z, rather than when I actually pressed the key? Anyway, great entry.

Really well done on the game, graphics are great and really rewarding when you get through each stage. Can see a lot of inspiration from Celeste which I think it does well but still becomes it's own thing.
Hitbox with spikes at times could be annoying other than that great game and hope it gets further developed!

Great graphics, fun little platformer!

Cool pixel style and music. It was a nice to play, thank you for making it !!!

Nice game. I got to the wall jump part (in the compo version) but that got too hard for me.

Nice looking and music and lots of very bumpy physics. Also the interesting use of very imprecise movements and spike hitboxes everywhere. Also crumbling blocks looks very similar to regular blocks but maybe this got better in a later version.

Beat the game in 11:46. Great pixel art, music, and mood! I felt the difficulty was fair except for the checkpoint just prior to the ending where you need to wall jump past some spikes, that one took multiple tries.

great pixel art, smooth gameplay, nice polish with animations, feels alot like celeste(in a good way)

Really smooth and amazing feel! Awesome pixel art. The game is really really well polished. Solid Entry!

Loved the style , the challenge and the amazing light/particle effects. Amazging for a compo game. :smiley:

Very good submission!
Technically impressive, knowing how it's a pico-8 game, you did a very good job making visuals dynamic and satisfying.
Other that that, I'd say backgrounds are a little overdetailed, making it hard to read danger quickly, at least for me.
Also, all the text disappears way to fast.

I found your game through itch.io rather than the LD website.

Extremely moody atmosphere, I loved it. Beautiful environments. Moving around was very satisfying. I noticed that you even implemented coyote time! Very thoughtful :heart:

Agreed with @mika-la-grand , that top part is a huge difficulty spike (no pun intended). I must have died on it at least 10 times before getting through.

At times it was hard to see the level. It makes sense that I can't make out the hazards from the background from safe platforms at first glance, and the darkness really draws attention to the torch, but it was a little frustrating as well. I learned more by dying than by inspecting the level. Still, very well done on the torch and lighting engine. I definitely appreciated that the tiles had different appearances in the darkness rather than just being dimmer version of the illuminated sprite. It made for a very pretty-looking game.

I like that you made the spike hitbox pretty forgiving, and that touching the side of the spikes was safe. Then again there was that one wall-jump area where I had a very small runway and jumping too early meant bonking on the ceiling and too late meant running right into spikes. I liked the idea there, but I think that particular room felt more tedious than challenging.

The conveyor belts, disintegrating platforms, and waning torch mechanic were a great device for increasing the pacing of the platforming. Very nice design decisions there.

The particle effects on the checkpoints were wonderful! I also loved the color contrast, as the green color of the checkpoints made it really stand out from everything else, while the blue color of the water made it stand out from the red character and torch. The torch trail was so nice, I have no idea how you did that but it looks amazing.

I noticed that I re-jump if I hit the ground while holding the jump button. Personally I am used to having to re-press jump to re-jump, as this is the behavior in Celeste, Mario, Spelunky, etc. but it actually didn't bother me too many times in your game.

The narrative pacing of the game was excellent. Each bite of text was enough to add flavor, but just short enough to not be overwhelming. Spacing it out over the course of the game was an excellent design decision. It also sets up the ending brilliantly, as it reveals the narrator (I presume?) only at the very end, and puts a dark spin on the story up to the point and makes for a satisfying ending. Really smart, I might have to steal that device for next time :upside_down:

I'm really impressed by your game and it's one of the few games I've played this jam that inspires me to improve and work harder next time. Keep it up, excited to see what you put out (no pun intended) next!

In some parts, it's a bit difficult to distinguish the foreground from the background. Otherwise, it's great.

Lovely game! Reminds me of Celeste quite a bit. It has fun interaction between the player and the world and the darkness is really moody, even tho the resolution is so low. Great work!

Nice game ! I like test game with a similar concept of mine, but in a totally different way :P nice pixel art, nice level design, the jump is a bit special but good job !!

solid game, but gets very difficult. love these pico 8 game. thanks for making it.

Simple but very effective basically describes every aspect of this game. The pixel art was awesome, but the main character could be a little more detailed. This is one of the few games of this jam in which you can really speedrun in.
My time was 5:07 btw.
The audio was great and did it's job as well. There isn't too much wrong with the game. I suppose the spikes could be a little hard to see. Either way, it's a great entry. Nice job :)

I liked it a lot! Definitely my type of game! I love the style of play, art, mechanics and sound! Wonderful!
You played an excellent game in a very short period of time. I heard about PICO only 1 month ago. I thought it was wonderful! What program did you use to make the song?

Congratulations for the game!!!

Really tight platforming and so much polish for a PICO-8 game! Super impressive!

wow, great game!

Amazing art and audio. Controls are smooth. Level design is a bit harsh though. Impressive level of polish!

Very concise and artful aesthetics, aswell as good sound effects and music. This is a very solid game, although a bit hard for me. Couldn't get to the second checkpoint :/

Nice job!

Very good game feel. You nailed the jump.

I might have been me, but wall jumps felt much harder to pull off than the rest.

Well, seem a lot of "keep the flame alive" submissions this time, but I actually really like this one. It's interesting that you have to put yourself into situations that will put the flame out and recover correctly.
I'm not a fan of the pico-8 platform but if there was a game to get me into it, this would be it.

Great entry and the best "keep the flame" game I've seen this LD. The graphics are absolutely gorgeous, but sometimes difficult to read with all the light variation in high speed.

It's pretty tough and nothing wrong with it, but I gave up before getting to the end.

Overall a great job, keep makign games!

I had a lot of fun playing this but the graphics are a little limited because of the limited real estate

Amazing game! Stunning pixel art, great controls, nice level design, nice sfx... Definitely a lot of polish (particles for example) and so it feels really great to play. Very impressive, especially for compo. And a great use of the theme. Congrats, this is the kind of entry that deserves to win in at least one category :)

Loved it! This is an awesome and challenging game. The pixel graphics are spectacular. With everything I just said together, I was having some serious Shovel Knight vibes while playing this. Sadly I gave up before the end so I couldn't see what else it had to offer. I was originally playing the web version so I downloaded it to hopefully try again later...

Amazing entry as always! :v: Did beat the game in 7:02! Not that bad. The most challenging part was to get the wall jump working properly about the two spikes! :smile:
Really well done!

​Awesome! Really.. Very beautiful pieces of arts. Amazing audio, and effects.

Sometimes not so easy to understand where to go on first try, but hopefully you added some checkpoints, haha.

Couldn't go further after I got the wall jump, but bookmarked the game so I can try it again later! :smiley:

Amazing art, fun gameplay, great audio, and a unified theme. A little challenging but that's part of the fun. Awesome job!

This game is polished like commercial quality game. Great!

Very cool. Pico8 games are always special in some way.

Gorgeous game, the lighting effects (and the fire trail) were very cool to see in PICO-8!

The platforming felt great but I think the visual details were just a little too overwhelming and it made it hard to quickly tell what was a wall/ground vs. spikes and other stuff.

This game was giving me major Celeste vibes and every part of it was fantastic! The graphics and audio all contributed to a great mood(I especially loved the eyes that were watching you from the walls), and the platforming physics were well implemented.

My only issue was that the game felt like it had a small issue with lag, especially after getting the wall jump. Maybe it was just my computer, but I normally don't have a problem running PICO-8 games.

Great entry. Simple and creative mechanic. Well done!

Such a solid entry! I love everything about this, the gameplay is slick, the audio is wonderful, and the sprites and tiles all look so nice. Great work!

Awesome cart and great LD entry! Looking forward to studying this cart as well! :smiley:

This was awesome, one of my favorite entries so far! The graphics and atmosphere are great, the music is funky but mysterious. Really, really strong core gameplay and just fun to play - the feel of the movement is great. Makes me want to ditch Unity and go PICO-8 for my next jam...

For minor feedback:

* Having checkpoints instead of restarting every room does slightly add to the tension, but at least for a jam game is not worth the added frustration IMO

* While the graphics are great, it would be good to distinguish the spikes more (there were some rooms I kept dying multiple times just because I forgot where the spikes were and didn't pay enough attention)

Very nice game. Graphics are awesome, sound is very nice. Really impressive to do that much in such a short time!