Fausto by PabloAbraham
UNRAVEL THE RITUALISTIC SECRETS
Face the limits of reality in Fausto, where you take on the role of a necromancer in a struggle of luck and skill.
PLOT
In Fausto, you are a necromancer that, thirsting for knowledge and power, summons the demon Mephistopheles. To fulfill the pact, you must capture the sinister entity known as Maledicta, using a mystical board provided by the demon himself.

GAME MECHANICS
- Sealing Ritual: Throw dice on a mystical board, aiming for zones that amplify your sorceries.
- Risky Reroll: Reroll dice to attempt more powerful combinations and more efficient rituals to capture Maledicta.
- Symbol Combination: Use the symbols in the dice to trigger incantations that aid in imprisoning the entity.
- Necromancer's Sanity: With each turn, the entity rolls their own die, which can reduce your sanity.
SETTING
Fausto takes place in a dark and somber world of atmospheric horror, where the threshold between known and unknowable is thin. Face the challenge of using your ritualistic knowledge to capture supernatural entities, without losing your sanity.

GENERAL EXPLANATIONS
Given the number of people commenting on the difficulty of understanding the game mechanics, we decided to explain a bit about what's happening. - Essentially, the player and entity uses their dice to try to hit areas with numbers on the board. - The values there add up after the roll, and the total value progresses the ritual, which is measured on the left side. - The player has a list of powers, described on the right, which they can execute by making combinations of the symbols that appear on the dice. - The entity's die has 4 types of powers, and depending on where it lands on the board, the value is deducted from the player’s sanity, which is tracked on the right-side meter.
Below, you can see the board:

ADJUSTMENTS AND BUG FIXES
- We fixed a bug that prevented the entity's dice from functioning correctly.
- We adjusted a collision bug with the player's dice when throwing them onto the board.|
- We fixed the dice disappearing.
- We fixed the victory animation.
- We've uploaded a new version, available both for web play and for download ("Fausto-BugFix2.zip").
- We've fixed the bugs that were preventing the end of the game from occurring, as well as the bugs that caused the dice to disappear.
| Itch.io | https://wondernaut.itch.io/fausto |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/fausto |
Ratings
| Overall | 187th | 3.971⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 816th | 3.212⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 322th | 3.66⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 43th | 4.423⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 40th | 4.593⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 37th | 4.279⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 5th | 4.574⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 84🗳️ | 135🗨️ |
One thing I noticed is that hitting the arrow keys switches between scenes, maybe a debug key left in?
Anyways, very well done!
@milano23 @lisek-gagatek
Yes, that is the end of the game. We wanted to do a bit more, hint at something bigger at the end, but you know how jams are - it was either that or squashing some critical gameplay bugs, haha.
Art is gorgeeous, and the visual mood and style are also on point!
Gameplay-wise, it took me a while to understand what was going on and how to play, and I'm still unsure whether I actually understand what the dice are doing. Throwing the dice is rather satisfying though, and I feel like if I better understood how to play I would enjoy this.
Amazing vibes!
I think I got 80% of what ws going on, but it added to the feeling!
We also made a different Dice game inspired in Quarriors instead of Dungeon Fighters, yours has the perfect vibes.
Nice!
I also had troubles with disappearing dices, is the webplayer the first version ?
Visually, it's perfect, I love it. The audio too.
The only thing I didn't like is the dice throw, the feeling is a bit cumbersome. I would like to be able to smash them on the board with a quick mouse move, especially because it's the only real interaction.
Congratulations, very polished entry and excellent artistic direction.
I don't understand entity's dice effects. Did I miss some clues?
Problem with disappearing dices is still prsesent in web wersion on LD page.
Really liked the visual style too,
Great Work!

EDIT: With Brave it's ok, the game is very very beautiful, the mechanics are original well done!
TLDR: I enjoyed the experience, the audio and visuals alone are worth it, though I think the strategic aspect doesn't come out too well because all the stuff mentioned below.
I liked the game's state happening both on the board and in the room, that and the unsettling tone reminds me of Inscryption, also very fitting.
Though while it looks really cool, I felt quite confused. I had to return to the game's page multiple times to try and make sense of what I was supposed to be doing. After several turns I got that the left gauge is the "winning meter" and the sanity one is the "losing-meter", but how each are affected remains a bit unclear. It also took me a minute to understand the mystic dies aren't just "auxilium" dies but feature all 3 symbols, maybe they could rotate in place to show that.
The board's layout with high values being in smaller regions surrounded by smaller values hints you're supposed to aim for bigger numbers, but even after beating the game 2 times I feel like almost no matter what roll you get it deals more "damage" than you need to win in a handful of turns.
Then the winning state, it says I win, but drinking or pouring seems to just restart the game. I got super confused at first and thought I picked the wrong option or that I actually had lost haha.
I played a third time to try to lose, and I really had to only pick one die or specifically combinations that didn't figure in the top right list, and even aim for the fire zones to destroy them. Most turns I wouldn't lose sanity, sometimes I'd lose a huge amount. By the end I was roughly 3/4 of the way to winning despite trying hard not to make progress.
Only during this 3rd try did I understand that you had to roll the symbol face up for it to count in the combination list. I was wondering why it seemed to randomly trigger the combinations. But well even without triggering them a single time it'd be easy to win just by always throwing 3 dies into fairly high value areas.
The losing cinematic was worth it though, really nice :ok_hand:.
Overall I'm getting the feeling that the unclearness is intentional and part of the mysticism for the ambience, but I'm wondering if it's maybe a bit too unclear what's happening or why. This said I quite like obfuscated puzzle games which often do that, so I guess it's a matter of what genre you want to be in haha.
The balancing of how often the sanity debuff happens and how easy it is to get points don't help the confusion, it being easier to win that to lose despite all the rules felt like I didn't understand it correctly and that I was playing wrong.
I played on version Bug_Fix_2, I only encountered two bugs :
- sometimes when picking multiple dies to throw again, one disappears when starting to aim.
- sometimes the UI isn't super responsive, when clicking on a dialog choice or on the face entity button, it occasionally doesn't do anything and I have to click a few times, 2-3 times max.
For some reason I'm picturing something like the We Were Here game series, not on the coop side but for the kind of puzzle design where you start confused but progressively find elements to help build towards the solution as you get familiar with each part of the mystery and understand how they tie into each other. Kinda like an escape room if you will.
The gameplay on the board was quite boring. I read the instructions you posted so I believe I understood it. It never felt like I was in danger (my sanity seemed to drop once and then never again?). Partly this might be because I ran into the bug where one of my attack dies disappeared. I also only got one mystic die, never the other two, so the gameplay was artificially slowed down a bit.
The "horror" of being in the room was also greatly diminished because of the long play time -- a room is much less scary if every time you make a trickle of progress you look up and keeping seeing the same empty room.
I think with some bug and pacing fixes this could be a cool moody game.
Although, I have do admit that I played the game watching through my fingers LOL - I knew there probably wasn't going to be any cheap jump scares but I couldn't help myself, the immersion is just that good :laughing: