Nyctofobia by Cubanfrog
Nyctofobia is a 2D puzzle game where you fight the darkness with your light. Travel through your dreams, turn on all the lights in your area to defeat the shadows and go back to sleep in your bed to move to the next area. Remember to not let your light go out!
Controls: interact: SPACE intensify light: E move: WASD pause: ESC

| Link | https://studioavanto.itch.io/nyctofobia |
| Link | https://studioavanto.itch.io/nyctofobia |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/nyctofobia |
Ratings
| Overall | 82th | 4.182⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 264th | 3.841⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 356th | 3.727⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1338th | 3.286⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 119th | 4.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 93th | 4.182⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 27th | 4.5⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 31🗨️ |
I can't confidently rate the technical merits of the lighting system, but someone with experience on the topic might appreciate the implementation of lights and shadows. All I can say is that the lamp you carry and the ones you light do cast real-time shadows that look pretty good to me.
While repelling darkness monsters with a light source is an intuitive and a cool concept, I think it could be hard to turn the smooth real-time movements on a plane into compelling and balanced gameplay with just more time and effort thrown at the project. I don't think it's necessarily a completely hopeless cause, especially as the game might rely more on the merits of the atmosphere and aesthetics, but it might require a lot of revamping to reach the esteemed status of a puzzle classic!
I didn't get if there was an end to the game, as I couldn't do much other than wandering around the rooms escaping the dark monster. But I enjoyed the experience a lot anyways.
We also used godot for our submission and we have an initial cutscene that shows the protagonist waking up in the bed. So much in common!
Nonetheless, it's a well thought out game on all fronts, the gameplay may be a bit simplistic, but it does make up for it in other areas, good job!
Very interesting game and enjoyed it, thanks.
Also, this absolutely needs to be played with headphones! The atmosphere is just amazing and brilliantly captures the childish feeling I still feel when walking through a dark room -- oddly relatable :smile:
Vitun mahtavaa! :D
Cons:
- cons? There is no cons!
Pros:
- Lovely art style,
- Very atmospheric music, and light
- Nice puzzles
- Simply Wow!
Congratulations! I save this game into my favorites!
If I have one complaint, it's that it was too short. More levels please :). Oh, and it was a bit strange that the terrors were actually scared of the intensified light through the door.
So critical feedback: Maybe some different enemies will make it more interesting. Maybe bigger ones that move slower for example. Other thing that was slightly unclear was that the sprite at the top was for the timer as it doesn't have any recognisable shape.
Overall good and enjoyable!
The gameplay is simple yet fun and I think it's interesting that it's essentially a puzzle game. I definitely would like to see more enemies or behavior of some kind. I also think it would have been nice to be able to walk around after turning on all the lights. The home was a nice place that I wanted to just take in, but I had to rush because of dwindling fuel. It would be neat to piece together even more of the story by interacting with the world during some kind of downtime.
I really enjoyed it. Great work on it!