Amazing art and music! Super relaxing but also sooo frustrating! It's super rare but some of the tiny bumps kill you if your kinda close to it and jump, seems like a bug but it doesn't affect the gameplay.

The take on the theme, the mechanics and the graphics is amazing!

Loved the art! Looks gorgeous. And the controls are so unique and innovative, a little hard to control ill admit but definitely one of the more solid entry's!

Very challenging. Having fun with it though. The art and music are great and calming. Definitely brings down the stress of timing those perfect jumps. Still working on getting to the end of this level.

Nice graphics, audio and mood

Hardcore for me, but something made me try again and again. Thank you for the checkpoint! I wouldn't be able to go so far without it.

Probable bug: I fell in a hole right before some portal (red pulsing thing) and got a blackscreen, but music continued.

This one's really cool. The controls are unique and interesting and the design is good but I think the game is sometimes too punishing. There should be hit points for some things. I get pitfalls killing the player, but it's super frustrating to die from lightly grazing a wall or a bump in the floor. Music and art are very nice, sets the mood well, and I love the comments from the robot as you play. Overall this is one of the more interesting games and takes on the theme I've seen

Hey.
Honestly, great music and great art.
A few notes tho:
- I feel like given how often the player dies the fade away screen takes too much time.
- I wish there was a way to cancel a "jump" after having pressing A or D.

I quit after realizing the white flag near the sword was not a checkpoints. Please understand that people usually don't play game jam games for that long on your future games, so adding lots of checkpoints usually makes your game more enjoyable.

( I'm not so sure on how the game fits the theme. ( Maybe it's related to the ending? ) )

Thanks for all the feedback!

We tried to apply the theme in story and mechanics. I agree that fade away screen is a bit long. Not being able to cancel your jump is definitely intended but you can change the direction before releasing the charge.

I put the white flag especially there because I thought people would give up there :smiling_imp: There is a checkpoint just a little after that point.

Unfortunately, the tiny bump collision bugs are not that easy to fix because of the graphics (not using tiles or anything).

Have fun!

The presentation was very nice, I loved the pixel art. As others have mentioned, I think the difficulty took away from the game a bit, but the controls themselves felt nice and it was still addicting despite being maybe a little on the punishing side. The black hole art at the end was stunning and I love the little vignettes you run into throughout. Great job!

The Theme was really well brought out in the mechanics and story of the game. The art is simple and beautiful and the little details like the key winding up when you go to jump is just mwa chefs kiss. But..... It is so HARD like omg I was trying my hardest to get through it but I kept dying. I wont call that a negative though it kept me wanting to keep playing to make it further than before.

This game has the right balance between being difficult but also letting you feel like you're making progress. I'm not even close to getting through it, but I feel like I will eventually make it if I keep trying, which is exactly what you want in a game. The art and the music go so well with the theme and really set the atmosphere. It would be nice if the jump meter would go back down after reaching full though so you don't get locked into a jump you know will be too high if you don't release soon enough.

Very hard but very pretty, and a well made first game as a team! The jump being (feeling) exponential in power makes it much harder to predict how the jump is going to go. If there could be a visible arc that shows the path you will take it would help a lot. I also think having the charge bar ping-pong back and forth instead of staying at max can make it easier to re-gauge your jump without committing to something more than likely to knock you down. Great work all around though!

Lovely game, great atmosphere, but I have no idea where to go when I get to the boat

There is an arrow pointing top, maybe try playing it on fullscreen if you can't still see it.

Very hard. Things that would've been nice

* something like a trajectory which shows you how far you jump
* faster respawn time
* maybe checkpoints, it was kinda frustrating begin a the start again

I enjoyed it tho. Well done

Hey, there is a checkpoint. Thanks for the feedback!

I really like this game and especially the art is beautiful!

A few suggestions, I hope they're helpful:

* I, too, would have liked more checkpoints (I didn't realize there was one until I saw the comments).
* Maybe also some kind of indication of how far the next checkpoint is, or how far the end of the level is?
* At least once, I accidentally missed some of the dialogue. Maybe there could be some way to see previous lines, like maybe a window with a log of what the robot said?
* As for changing the collision difficulty - even without using tiles, maybe you could use a different bitmap to encode the collision info?
* Also, it's not obvious that making a large jump won't punish you for the hard fall.
* Maybe if you press A/D for too long, then the meter could go back down, so if you miss the jump strength you wanted, you could get another chance?

This game is infuriatingly difficult. I really wanted to finish it and I gave it a lot of honest tries, but I ended up being ready to smash my keyboard through my screen. The art, sound and overall mood are great and very appealing. The concept of the game is also cool. The issue I'm having is (as mentioned above already) that it's difficult to guesstimate what your jump will look like as the jumping power seems to increase in a non-linear fashion and once you held the jump button for one 'charge' too long you can't undo it, potentially ruining a decent run. I might give this another try later and I've tried my best to not let my frustration about my own failure to git gud influence my rating, because I do like the overall game!

This game is very calming and has a wonderful graphic. I loved the colors of the art and the music complemented it nicely. I agree with people here - it is soo difficult. Lowering the difficulty by adding something like a line showing the jump or being able to cancel it would be nice. You were right with the white flag - I gave up :( I'd love to play it when it has a difficulty level for noobs like me! (pwetty pwease)

Looks great and combined with the charming soundtrack it's hard to put down. It's also pretty hard :sweat_smile: I found that lots of small jumps to line up for a big one worked well. Good entry!

I put more time than I was expecting into this game since it was difficult but I wanted to get further. I imagine that is a sign of a good design. At one point I thought I got to a checkpoint but I still started at the beginning =(. Graphics were great!

Wow. I am bad at this game. This was about 50% of my playthrough.


Beautiful.

On to the actual review, this is great! The pixel art is very nicely done, overall, and the audio adds to it to build a strong atmosphere for the game. The pixel art for the UI here especially is a great attention to detail. The gameplay is simple (which makes the above more embarrassing), but very polished and well made (having a little power bar goes a long way). Very nicely done!

My all playthrough was like @proxy-games's image. With trajectory lines game could be awesome. I like story and graphics. :robot: :sparkling_heart:

This is a beautiful game, but I simply don't have the patience for it. ^_^;

Death is punishing and it's effectively random - there's no visual indicator for how far a jump will take you. It took me at least a dozen times just to get up to the second floor of the cave, and when I slipped and fell into the pit and had no recourse but to die and restart, I simply gave up.

I really hate to say this: this game really isn't fun at all? Dying on hitting a wall is frustrating, all the more since, again, you can't tell where a jump is going to land you. It's not like Dark Souls, where you have enough feedback to determine what move to make next and a decent amount of margin for error if you make a mistake; this game demands trial-and-error experimentation but also brutally punishes any mistake you make. (Imagine if Dark Souls sent you back to the last bonfire if you ever took damage for any reason!)

Add a visual indicator for jumping and remove death on collision, and you might have a lovely, chill exploration game here; as it stands, the theme you've nailed here is less "delay the inevitable" and more "death is inevitable."

Thanks for all the feedback! I agree that trajectory lines and linear progression of the charging bar would make the game a little bit more easier and intuitive. Though death on collision is definitely the core mechanic of game, I don't think the game would have any depth without it. I think the correct way to make the game a bit easier is to add more checkpoints so it's easier to progress.

I wouldn't say death is random, there are some tiny collision bumps but they shouldn't affect the gameplay much. Game definitely requires you to build a muscle memory to understand how long your jump will be.

About the theme, you "delay death" by using waterfalls and the ending/plot is about "delaying the time" which is definitely inevitable. :fireworks:

If I'm being honest, I was trying so hard to climb up (and I did! But then I crashed near the cross and game glitched as well, maybe it was my grave after all. I was playing on html, so maybe it was a browser glitch), but after a countless number of tries I failed. All people above elaborated on this problem and how to solve it, so I have nothing to say but to agree with them (not in a bad way though!). The style and the sound of the game are GREAT, nothing to add either. To be honest, I would try to pass this game, just because my curiosity is stronger than my failure. I almost memorised the right amount of strength we need to use, so I hope luck will be on my side. Your project is just so charming, so the countless tries was worth it after all, despite all the failures. And of course, mechanics are great, but need a little improvement for a convenient gameplay. Really nice entry, thank you!

It was an awesome experience. I felt the flow and it was really nice. Wonderful artstyle and addictive mechanic, that makes this game challenging! Nice entry ^^