very cool!

I love the graphics and audio in this game. They combine to create a beautiful environment. Not sure if it's my platform (Linux with 8 GB of RAM), but twice the game froze on me. Aside from that, I didn't encounter any serious bugs. The game has a lot of character, though I had some difficulty in learning how the cards worked, and the goal was unclear to me. Aside from this, the game looks beautiful.

Nice music, strong visuals, and an interesting story. Unfortunately, the game was stuttering a lot for me, like different layers were flickering on and off every second, which made it quite hard to play.

Aside from that issue, the overall atmosphere is really good.


Thanks for the comments everyone! I think we might have put some absolutely massive textures in the game which might be causing these issues, I'll see if I can compress and re-publish the game this evening

I've reduced some massive textures and also released a windows build so it can be run out of the browser - hopefully this helps!

Oh this has some great polish.

I love the art, and the game feels really intuitive to pick up. The hunger and fire mechanics especially are things I didn’t need explained, they just made sense right away.

I also really liked the small touches you put into the deck. The way cards are drawn from the pile and all the little animations for discarding and reshuffling feel really good.

I did run into some issues that got in the way of the experience. The game crashed twice during my web play session, which prevented me from finishing it.

There were also a couple smaller issues. It seemed like I could play cards from the discard pile, which I imagine isn’t intended. I also ran into some visual glitches, like card text lingering briefly after the card disappears, and some odd text layering when transitioning to the second zone.

I really wish I could have finished the game! I really enjoyed what I played so far. It was fun to explore the mechanics of the game with the cards I was given!

Great one! Nice gameplay, perfect atmosphere!

I love this game! I actually played through it three times, but kept failing on the screen where you lose a health when you explore. I even got the blindfold, and used it, but it didn’t save the damage (I thought maybe it’d keep you from seeing horrors lol, but it’s fair that it doesn’t protect you from anxiety). I hope someone else beats this, so I can watch a playthrough :D It was also cool playing both chasing insanity and making sure I was as sane as possible, as that changed cards and the environment up, and that’s super epic.

Note: In the browser version, when I failed and restarted the game, there were still 5 travel icons (two were full) and I had no health. The travel cards also said they removed one health, but after using two of them, I still didn’t die (so either they removed health but I wasn’t shown my proper health, or they didn’t actually remove health). After refreshing the page, it fixed it.

@beastpanda Thanks for playing! I've been pulling my hair out about why other people are seeing these issues, the game seemed to play fine on my Desktop, my laptop and even my phone! :sweat_smile: Thanks for pointing out the discard pile issue - that caused a crash, so fixing that fixed at least one cause of game-death!

I hope that maybe fixes a class of issues that was the cause of the problems. The text is a known issue that would be a lot of work to fix, and its also worth noting that some of the glitch effects (you might notice them on a new day, for instance) are intentional.

@cataclysmicknight Thanks for the feedback once more! It was really difficult to try and balance the game, and we're really interested to maybe try and spend some time to get closer to our vision for a post-jam version. The 'sane' state in particular (🤫) is really difficult to complete the game with unless you have certain items (the travel alternative), and there is definitely a lot of RNG which needs to be on your side in order to complete.

I've pushed a version with some bugfixes, bringing the total changelog to:
- Reduce texture sizes
- Fix broken encounter
- Fix being able to play cards from discard pile (which would cause crash)
- Fix health/pathfinding pips from rendering incorrectly on reload

@ciaranw when i get the chance, im happy to record myself and pass along a video if i soft lock after i try playing the updated build?

@beastpanda Thanks for the offer, that would be much appreciated if you could!

@ciaranw I did see the travel alternative on my last attempt, but wasn't able to get it at the time. I do think that, even if the game isn't technically a roguelike, I like that roguelike aspect of it: learning what's helpful and when, then aiming to prep for it. For example, my first playthrough, I didn't understand how fires worked until about halfway through, and then I struggled to set up the smoke signals. The second playthrough, since I learned about that card, I was able to prep my wood and make it happen.

I legit look forward to you working more on the game, and it's awesome you've already made some fixes!

I really enjoyed this one. Loved the atmosphere and visuals, took a couple of turns to understand the deck building but once i did it was smooth sailing. I liked the story that was being told too, I only got as far as a couple turns after the blindfold guy, but really liked where it was going. Can't wait to see where this game goes from here.

Liked the overall idea. Not quite sure why my card turn red suddenly, but it was a nice journey after all

This is so fantastic. The main game loop is really fun and the graphics set the mood perfectly.

I love the animation when traveling, and the art style over all! I enjoyed figuring out what the different items were good for, but it wasn't clear how much (if any) progress I was making overall - I'm still not sure if I just needed to travel more or wait for a certain signal random encounter. Lot of interesting stuff going on either way!

I love the art, and audio is fantastic. Very nice mechanic. Cool game.

I really like card games, so I enjoyed this one! As others have mentioned, it’s quite hard to beat the RNG (at least for me, lol). The audio could also be a little more balanced. That said, I loved the artstyle and the theme—it was really dark and atmospheric!

learning that being insane changes the cards and world around you blew my mind still lost like 4 times but wanted more

> That's not water!

Wow, this was really cool! Beautiful artwork and music! Great take on a deck building game. I did not find it easy and make it very far, but that's a good thing and I happily retried it! The sanity mechanic was a wonderful suprise. I am curious now what's more to come in later stages.

Very difficult but I enjoyed it a lot! The sanity aspect of it was very cool and the overall mood was great. I will come back to this one to see if I can get further than my first couple attempts.

Very difficult but I enjoyed it a lot! The sanity aspect of it was very cool and the overall mood was great. I will come back to this one to see if I can get further than my first couple attempts.

good game

Loved this line from the description: “Luckily, the forest is a simply lovely place to be!”

Kudos to the team. Beautiful aesthetics right from the start, and the twist in the middle genuinely caught me off guard.

Would be interesting if there were a few subtle hints/guides for when the player gets stuck. Also really curious how the card shuffling/adaptive system was handled. Made me want to try building a mini-version of something similar someday.

The way the props moved around felt very dreamlike too. Loved the humor in the quotes and the irony behind how situations unfolded from player choices. “Wish for fish” genuinely made me laugh 😄

The whole thing sparked ideas for me. Something like blending bits of The Witness with Balatro, where smaller signals/combinations build toward a larger final signal or state.

Feels like the game already has all the ingredients for even more layered audio and juicy shader effects too. Really cool entry.

Ahhh, this is a tough one! Played it for over an hour but I had to give up eventually because every time I started to get somewhere I would inevitably run into a bug where no new cards would be dealt and I'd just get stuck :(

I really did enjoy it while it lasted, and a few game overs (including force restarts) weren't too bad because it was fun enough that I wanted to try again and again. But I just have to move on to the next game now, sorry! If you can fix the issue, I'd love to come back and try again before the rating period ends, if I have time. I don't really have any useful debug info to offer unfortunately. I get the feeling I shouldn't be clicking stuff too quickly, but it's difficult not to when the campfire (and I!) is dying :p

Disregarding all that, the game looks and sounds really nice! Things moving in and out like in a pop-up book was very cool. Got caught off guard by the glitchiness the first time around, but it soon became clear that it was all part of it. I couldn't quite figure out whether insanity was good or not since a bunch of cards would increase it, but maybe it's a tradeoff.

The card system itself confused me at first. Maybe just a little bit more info in the description would've been good. I thought I was doing it wrong for minutes when I was just clicking cards and nothing seemed to be happening in the world behind them. Maybe the first event should occur sooner, or the first hand should force you to pick something with a special effect. But I understood eventually and after a few playthroughs I felt like I was good enough to start strategising etc. and it became a lot of fun!

Would be good, I think, if the fire paused when reading an event screen. I was in such a hurry to get back to the cards to add more wood before it burnt out that I often just skipped reading them and clicked whatever :')

The parallax when moving the mouse is neat but if you make this a full game I'd suggest making it at least something you can disable. It can induce a bit of motion sickness, especially when you're focussing on the cards and not the background moving behind it.

Just needs some bug fixing and I think this would be amazing! Like I said, I'll try to come back and finish it if I can. The core card game itself is great and the story is intriguing and I want to see it to the end! Really cool stuff.

Excellent scene design! However, some bugs do affect the gaming experience, which forced me to start the game over. But the overall quality is still quite good. I look forward to your team fixing some of the bug issues.

This is my favorite game from this jam. Amazing job. I played for probably 2 hours and finally beat it. If this game were expanded upon I would definitely be interested!

@lloydlobo Thank you for the comments! Definitely agree we could do with some more info. I think in an ideal world, we would have introduced cards/concepts in a way that kind of explains itself a bit more.

I love that you loved "Wish for fish"! I think that's my favourite encounter and I was genuinely becoming so unhinged at that point in the jam having spent an hour despairing last minute that I suck at writing then just word spewing out of desperation xD

@ben-delvin So nice to hear and absolutely amazing that you played for so long! I still haven't even beaten it so congrats! When we really like a game we've made, we always say we'll work on a post jam version but never do... Although, this one was built in a way that makes it easy to tweak and build upon adding new cards etc so maybe this will be the one. Maybe...

@ectucker1 Thanks for playing! Yeah I think we could have improved the progression feedback - should be that you travel 4 times (maybe 5, I forget) then win. Whether this is possible kind of depends on your luck with the RNG at the moment.

@mashedpotato haha, thanks!

@chuchugeralt Glad you liked it, yeah I agree the RNG can be very harsh (even for me)

@lloydlobo Thanks for the feedback! You ask how the card system was handled. With the disclaimer that this code isn't the most readable, and I inline-coded the animations, you can see the high level logic here:
https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD59/blob/master/Global/GameDriver.gd

And the more detailed card movement logic here:
https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD59/blob/master/Global/table.gd

Which drives the individual cards which are derived from this base_card class:
https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD59/blob/master/Cards/base_card.gd

And so adding each card is really simple like:
https://github.com/CiaranWoodward/LD59/blob/master/Cards/bow_card.gd
(with the description and properties set in the editor)

@ava-skoog Oh no, sorry to hear you hit bugs, I tried to recreate them by clicking like a madman, but haven't been able to unfortunately (although clicking end turn while cards are being handled does sometimes have a weird effect - maybe that's related). Thanks for the feedback and good point with the parallax. I would note that the fire only actually burns down when you press end turn - its not real time! So while an encounter is playing, or you are playing cards from your hand, there is no rush! It is really interesting to hear about how other people perceive the game mechanics that we take for granted as the designer. Thanks for playing :)

@zhangzhimu Thanks for playing - What kind of bugs did you hit? Was it similar to what Ava said, with not being able to draw cards?

@ben-delvin Wow, thanks for playing! Congrats on beating the game, I know that's a challenge even when you already know all of the mechanics (I've done it 3 or 4 times, but definitely can't win every time, and cheated by knowing how it works!). I hope you enjoyed learning about the mechanics and world :)

@teto Knowing "Wish for fish" came out of late jam pressure adds context. The slight uncertainty fits the atmosphere too. It matched the feeling of wandering through an unfamiliar forest.

@CiaranW Appreciate you sharing the code references! The structure makes sense: GameDriver -> table -> base_card, with individual cards mostly just setting properties in the editor. Good to know.