itch.io

I'm not a fan of horror in general, but man, the richness of the story and the family connections that you've put into this outweigh any aversion I might have.  (I'm not surprised by this!  I was blown away by the demo for Funeral for the Sun.  Already wishlisted and greatly anticipated.)

(V qba'g guvax jr svaq bhg ubj?)

oooh, wait, I got this one!  Tvira gung uvf fcvevg vf fheebhaqrq ol svfu, naq tvira gur ubzr ivqrb cynlvat ba gur GI jurer ur'f fjvzzvat jvgu uvf fvfgre naq gura uvf byqre oebgure qvfgenpgf gurve sngure jvgu oveqjngpuvat, ur irel yvxryl qebjarq gung qnl.

In rot13: gur pebffrf pna or zber guna guerr-ol-guerr, ng juvpu cbvag lbh arrq na bireurnq ivrj gb frr jurer nyy gur lryybj sybjref ner.

Which is to say that it does get more interesting, but very much in a "draw a map" way.  If you're not looking to map out a 3D space, then no, it won't get any more interesting. :-)

I love what's going on here but boy does #8 have me stymied.

Oh, certainly the hint method lets you work around it, but it's a basic flaw in a puzzle if the only way to get the answer is to ask for hints (or, in this case, to more or less literally spell out the answer).

OK I'm also having trouble with "Tiling the Floor", since it tells me to take a quarter of the area of the diamond-shaped regions, and I have diamond shaped regions with a total area of 18.  (I don't think I'm supposed to put "4.5" in the sudoku grid?)

I'm more than a little confused by the Kitchen Counter.  The extraction says to "The number that the finished grid shows - the number of Briquets used in the puzzle", but...I'm not really seeing a number in here?  (Note too that the upper left is underdetermined: several more rectangles can be put in the spaces that don't have numbers next to them.)

Is it a 19?  It looks kind of like a 19.

I think I may come back when it's been updated.  I'm interested to see how it all works, but with three spells I'm not sure where I'm going next. 

And...guessing the spells may be kind of a lot.  I thought the ambiguity of the second spell was interesting--I know I'm not the only person who tried [rot13] "whzc" first, and I liked the little challenge of figuring out the right word, but for the third spell there were just too many options: I thought it was "fyvqr", and then tried "tyvqr", and even after hints for all but the first letter I was trying "fyvat".

I plan to be back though! 

So...in the second mosaic, where there's a blue gate on the left and two orange ones on the right.  If I step on the black square on the right, is it not supposed to take me to the next level?  Did I misunderstand the goal?

> checkpoints are available

OK but do they have to be?  (I used a red key on the north door, and then to go out the east door, and I can't restore back past that, but also can't push the red or purple key out of the room I enter.)  

OK that was really sweet.  (And not easy!)

Hey, cup of tea and a cat is a great ending!

I love how new this is; the idea of the room behind a door depending on what key you use is a clever fantasy trope but not one I've seen come up in games before, I don't think.  The levels put it to really good use, and there kept being twists I didn't see coming.  Great game!

To be honest, at first it felt like a pretty standard sokoban-like, but you introduced some really clever elements and challenges; by level 15 or so I was already going "wait there's more? that wasn't the hardest one?".  Very satisfying to get through!

Very nice.  Some neat level design in there.  (I will say that the level where you start in the C-shaped cage was my least favorite, insofar as it hinges on what I found to be counterintuitive behavior--the ability to push a box away even if you yourself can't move.  But otherwise, no complaints.)

Is "exercise in mapping" a puzzle?  Is it thinking, or is it a mechanical task?  Eh, given how much trouble I had keeping myself from getting turned around, I think yeah, puzzle. :-)

Once I did start mapping, it came together much more clearly.  I appreciated the penalty for guessing being non-fatal but enough of an inconvenience that you wouldn't want to do it.  

Got about two rows into Tetris before it hit a bug (pieces dropping in the wrong place, and appearing as overlapping other pieces, and then a piece stopping right above a gap instead of going into it...).  Did not look further.

Oh.  Yes.  Using "X" was not on my radar for that.  Well, thank you--I'd finished the game otherwise, so with this I just had to go play several series of notes and I was all set.  Glad to have officially finished it, because it was in fact fun overall. :-)

...it's taking me even longer.  How do you use the piano?

For anyone who made the same mistake I did: You can use a key on any lock on a door, at any point.  I found the game pretty much impossible when i thought you had to wait for timelocks to disappear before you could open a regular lock on that door.  (Just me?  Oh well.)

Once I got past that, I won the game on the first try, but it still felt like an accomplishment and not something trivial.  It's quite good.

OK, I see there wasn't much more than the final message, but I'm glad I went back and read it anyway.  I like this.  The main thing it might have lacked is risk: navigation seemed very easy (I fell off the screen once this time) and generally low-penalty.  But the exploration aspects were very cool, in terms of transforming the world around you and in opening up new places to go.  I hope you decide to see where you can take this!

Huh.  I was kind of enjoying its surrealism--got as far as, um, making a green...thing...rise from the ground.  But then as I went back across the space, I reached the starting point and suddenly I got the original "you know what to do" box and I couldn't dismiss it.

It's...interesting but it's also a lot of sitting around while the computer plays with itself.  And takes all the good letters. 

Generally delightful; I particularly liked the way Foraging came together.

I did run into a bug where I'd filled in all of the words in Sword Practice and then started connecting letters, but when I got a connection it told me "define words".  I ended up reloading and having to type them all in again; not sure what happened there.  (Ultimately I probably would have actually preferred solving them all on paper; I'm a pen-and-paper kind of solver.)

The final puzzle felt like there was something more planned for it--spoilery discussion in ROT13: Lbh bayl hfr gur svir sbhe-yrggre jbeqf...ohg gur yrggref va gur sbhe svir-yrggre jbeqf ner gur fnzr gjragl yrggref.  Vg sryg yvxr znlor fbzrguvat jnf fhccbfrq gb unccra gung hfrq gung, ohg raqrq hc abg?  Juvpu yrsg gubfr sbhe nafjref xvaq bs sybngvat, juvpu jnf...jrveq?

As a concept, it's good, but the execution feels like it could use some work.  Idle notes from a couple of rounds:

• It's really easy to overlook exploded bombs, because they're dark on a dark background, and therefore fail to count them.  Giving them a different background would help a lot.
• I won the first round, and it told me something about a bomb that was getting added, but I didn't really understand what it meant.
• In the second round, after I clicked on a bomb, it revealed over half the board (is that what the new bomb did?), which made it impossible to win (I ended up with 30 gold), which felt like a pretty serious consequence of one misclick.

There's already an E as part of its set; it should be pointing to that E, as far as I can tell.

Sorry!  Yes, it's rot13, translatable quickly with, say, https://rot13.com/.  (Serves me right for coming from a world where that's immediately recognizable and therefore forgetting to explain it.)

I am utterly stalled on the last one, and I think my not understanding something in the next-to-last is making it harder.

Va fdhner gjb, V gubhtug gur oenpxrgrq-fvk zrnag "sbyybj gur vafgehpgvbaf va fdhner gjb bs tevq fvk", ohg gubfr vafgehpgvbaf ner "hc hc yrsg yrsg", juvpu vf abg cneg bs gur cngu gung fdhner gjb vf ba.  Nz V zvfvagrecergvat jung gur oenpxrgrq-fvk zrnaf?

Aha.  I had AI-assisted suspicions but didn't actually know before now where to look for the tag.

Dear developer: setting aside any questions about the wisdom of using AI, I'd suggest running through your game a couple of times before releasing it.  However you code things, AI or otherwise, it's always a good idea to try to catch mistakes before they go out into the world.

Seriously, though, what are we looking at here?  You'd think that after thirty days the developer would have noticed this.  Or indeed after one day.  Or preferably before that, in testing.

Yeah, this needs like a few thousand more trigger warnings.

Is the illegibility of the file part of the puzzle?

It's very cute, and I like the journal aspect!

One thing to think about is that nonograms become a lot easier to complete if you can click and drag--especially true if you have to click several times to select the right stitch.  (To create a line of six box-shaped stitches, instead of click-click, drag, it's click-click, click-click, click-click...it's very repetitive.)

Glad you're on top of this already, because I had exactly the same thought as clansing: I did see the hint about the New Year's party being on Sunday, but a party on the night of the 31st is (in my dialect? I don't know) a "New Year's Eve party"; something called a "New Year's party" sounds like something you'd hold on the day of the 1st.

(So it should just be as simple as specifying that it's a New Year's Eve party.)

That aside, I enjoyed the deductions and the clues!

This was very good: a clever new take on pathfinding.  Some of the levels were much easier than others: #10 took a little care but not so much that it needed more than one attempt, whereas I took several attempts to get #7 and many, many attempts to get #9.  Overall very satisfying though!

ok but what is it. is it just a troll?

It's intriguing, but:

• The controls for turning are really slow.
• I couldn't tell what pink vs. white meant on the stars.
• I can't tell how you can tell where the connections go.  Is it just a matter of going from star to star and trying each connection?  (Again, this would have been easier if the controls were more responsive.)

On the one hand, "leave yourself behind as a platform" is, apologies, not the most original mechanic.  On the other, though, the level design of bridging spaces, moving straight up, and handling moving platforms do bring something fresh to the genre.

But there's one thing it needs, and that's a reset button that removes all your past selves.  If you're thinking "But no one could play this game so badly that they'd leave a practical wall of bodies that they can't progress past": hi there, it's me.

EDIT: OK, I made it to the end, but just to give you a sense of how bad it was, this is me and I swear I wasn't trying to see how badly I could block myself out.

Bit of a problem--when I finished the third level, it took me back to the hub on top of a lock (the middle of the five lower paths), which kept me from moving at all.

Neat!  (Also love the credits level!)

Aww--this was really sweet!