This game had a great atmosphere! I definitely felt a strange sense of urgency to complete the puzzles as quickly as possible while playing.

I love this entry! I really enjoyed going around looking for clues and solving puzzles. Really dripping with atmosphere, and with a lot of small touches, like the limping at the end and the screen tilt, that make it really interesting to play. Overall a great entry!

I liked this game, although the position I was facing would jump around quite often. Great atmosphere and especially sound design.

The atmosphere was really good and a bit scary especially because of the music. The puzzles were conventionnal but simple and effective. Nice work!

Great job. This has a good mood for a game where very little is actually happening. Nice puzzles. Also, i liked that the sound of the footsteps changed when you grabbed those orbs.
Keep it up.

Not working on Firefox on Arch. Worked in Chromium though! Also after finishing there's no retry option, E told me I couldn't go back, not now. As others have said, great atmosphere, and I normally feel queasy in these games, but I actually finished this. Very functional layout, too. Cool that this is your own framework, too!

@willowblade, could you look in Firefox's error console for me to see if there were any errors reported, this would help me track the problem down. Thanks. Oh, and that E shows you the prompt is actually a bug ;) That's what you get if you look at the exit before the end of the game.

I Really enjoyed it. That second puzzle was really good. I had the same issue as Patrick D, where the camera would reset to the direction i was looking before turning while moving the mouse.

Got this: SyntaxError: missing ; before statement
[Learn More]
stardazed.js:5865:295

It's this line: effect.flattenFunction=flattenFunction;})(effect=render.effect||(render.effect={}));})(render=sd.render||(sd.render={}));})(sd||(sd={}));var sd;(function(sd){var render;(function(render){var effect;(function(effect){effect.registerModule({name:"grading/srgb/lofi",provides:["ConvertSRGB"],code:`vec3 srgbToLinear(vec3 colour){return colour*colour;}

And
ReferenceError: sd is not defined
[Learn More]
ld40.js:57:43
Which is probably the code for your game?

That was fun! I wish there was more!

Great game! I really enjoy this kind of puzzles. I loved the atmosphere and the music.

Great experience and very spooky. The puzzles were fun and not to difficult. Game sticks with the theme as well.

I'm a sucker for this aesthetic. High marks there. Wish the numbers had a bit more differentiation: it made it a bit of a challenge to keep things in my head. Still quite enjoyable, and the ending was great (and unexpected).

This is fantastic! I loved the mood and atmosphere! The sound and level design was well done also. I really enjoyed the effects of the orbs. Coupled with the atmosphere, runes, and sound design, it had a first-person Eternal Darkness feel to it. I was an interesting take on the theme as well.

The second puzzle took a while to work out, but I'm glad you had included in the description that there were three clues in the level, because I stopped looking after I found the two "keypads" and corresponding clues. This is one of the first LD40 games I have played that had a story too it. It was intriguing and I would love to see this game expanded upon. I noticed that you opted out of the graphics category, but I think you did well with the textures and look of the complex, but you could do some really cool things with the orbs. I enjoyed the runes as well!

Thank you everyone. I have a list of things I want to add and improve for this entry and your kind feedback makes it feel worthwhile to implement this list!

My favorite entry so far!
I loved the mysteriously creepy mood, combined with interesting but solvable puzzles, this was just perfect!
The background soundtrack sets a spooky mood, the way the footsteps become irregular and the view becomes crooked (never seen this technique in any other game, excellent idea) added to the feeling of uneasiness ; at this point, one unexpected obstacle on the way back would have been great!
This reminded me of Kairo (the indie game by Richard Perrin, which I consider to be a reference for this kind of moods).

@Ace17 Thanks! I was going to have some obstacle / enemy things but simply ran out of time. But I'm working on my engine and this entry for a "HD remake" so to speak to make it a) look and feel a lot better and b) add in in all the things I wanted to do but couldn't.

As for the effects and mood: I am a big fan of Frictional Games and and I strongly encourage anyone who appreciates these types of experiences to play all their games. It may be nice to start with their older games (Penumbra: Overture and Penumbra: Requiem) or get straight into their more well known titles: "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" and SOMA, which is closest to the experiential vibe I believe you refer to. All available on GOG and Steam and also on Consoles, etc.

I also remembered that the camera tilting and movement impediment was done very nicely (though in 3rd person view) in Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube. If you can find a way to play it, I recommend it, a nice classic.

For those interested, the numeral system in this game I based on Riven's 5-based counting system. First the digits 1-5 and then 1-4 again combined with 5 to form 6-9. The system in Riven is more elaborate but I needed to keep it a bit simpler. :)

(Just checked out Kairo, intriguing. Will investigate further, thanks for the tip!)

I liked the eerie mood, and strange effects of the orbs. I'm glad there was no actual gore or horror elements, just that kind of atmosphere. The puzzles were neat, and I had to jot down the symbols to solve the 2nd (brought back fond memories of the Myst series!). Sometimes it was hard to select the button I wanted- a crosshair or something would've been helpful there.

@furet, thanks for playing! Your comment may indicate I have a render (or UX) bug though. Did the buttons not light up when you hover over them? I probably made it too subtle based on my monitor but if it didn't light up at all, I'd have to look into cases where this may fail, thanks! (and indeed, a crosshair is a must have, at least as an option)

@zenmumbler The buttons did light up- the reason was just not seeing exactly where the center of the screen was, plus the buttons being close together, so I'd have to "feel my way" by moving the mouse around a lot, and a slight movement could cause me to select the wrong one.

@furet, thanks for confirming that, yes indeed a usability problem. Thanks for letting me know, this kind of feedback is very useful!

SUPER DUPER cool, aww man. I really enjoyed how the player movement actually began to stagger more and more as you picked up the various orbs. The more puzzle-y of the two actually took me a bit--not because I couldn't figure out the puzzle, but because I couldn't find the room to solve it in, haha.

Great job too in creating atmosphere, from the fog of war to the very decaying graphics to the good choice in music. Definitely a rush when I grabbed the last orb and ran to escape at like a 45 degree angle.

Weird bug to note---when playing in Chrome, I found that if I ever moved my mouse too fast, or too far in any direction, it would cause the camera to snap back to its position before I started moving the mouse. I was able to get around this by lowering the sensitivity of my mouse though, so I was still able to enjoy the game.

@jjjjason great that you liked it and thanks for the feedback! Some others mentioned this camera snapping too. If you've played other mouse-capturing games in the browser too and have not seen this problem before then it's just a bug in my movement code, which is still a bit… unrefined. I do hope it's not some weird bug / edge case in the pointer lock implementation itself. I will try it out in Chrome Mac and Windows to see if I can replicate and fix this. Thanks for the good story and I'll be sure to let you know when I've updated this one.

I liked it! The only problem I had was a bit of motion sickness, but I get that from most 3D things, unfortunately. The atmosphere is great, and makes just walking around (umm, yeah, I got lost a couple of times) feel interesting! I would have liked to play even longer, but as it is, it's an excellent little minimalist horror story.

A+ on the mood, and good storytelling with minimal interactions. The puzzles were good, and the use of the theme was decent. If the map had been any bigger, a map would have been needed. Overall great job!

You know, it helps to have a map.


@zenmumbler looks like a spaceship!

Very good mood!

Mood is captured excellently. I had the same issue as @patrick-d, unfortunately, so I couldn't get too far in this one. Still really enjoyed exploring around in the space!

Yay! Another mystery puzzle game this year too. Unless I missed something or encountered a bug, it does seem a lot shorter this time around? The ending did confuse me a bit. Can I actually go back or does the game really end there, after grabbing three orbs and escaping? It said "unless I go back", then "the end" and then "unless I go back" again. I actually reloaded the page to see if it was one of those sneaky things and redid the game at almost speedrunner level, but no difference. I also tried checking out those wells/pits instead of going back to the entrance/exit since I thought it was odd that attention was brought to them despite them seeming not to be used for anything, but nothing there either. Just want to make sure I'm not missing something before I rate and comment properly! c:

@ava-skoog Thanks for returning! It's not perse a lot shorter, but perhaps easier this time around. I thought the indirect puzzle was already overreaching, but I was pleasantly surprised by all the people here finishing it.

Sadly, the end really is the end, there's likely a bug in the final titles. Hitting E for example will also make the player say something, but that message is for in-game, not end-game. Reason is the end game titles were added about 5 mins before submission time ;) Sorry for the confusion.

The "Unless I go back" is meant to convey that the protagonist, despite being almost destroyed by the orbs, still yearns for the power they could bestow upon them, but it's rather concise story-telling indeed. Hope to clear all this up in my "hd remix" version.

@baby-dino-herd Thanks for reporting! Can you tell me which browser and OS you played it on? This will help in creating a repro case, thanks!

Ah! Well, here goes then!

While your game last year at least *felt* longer to me, this was still very much enjoyable. You set up a great atmosphere and the effects of the orbs added to it. That was obviously the hook into the theme. Would have be interesting to see where that could have gone if the game was a little longer.

It was rewarding once I finally figured the layout out and had the map in my head despite the darkness, so that I had to go back where I'd already been was a good thing, since it allowed me to put that to use. c:

You say you thought the indirect puzzle would be difficult and I guess I can't say! We (I didn't play alone) are rather seasoned players when it comes to games like this (The Room, Myst, Monkey Island and more) so it was kind of obvious to us, haha. We did use pen and paper to copy down the clues on the walls. I hope that's not considered cheating, because we usually play that way if the game has no built-in system of keeping track. 😛

I guess I'm a little confused about the pit and the well, since like I said in my previous comment attention was brought to them, but they didn't seem to actually serve a purpose in the end. I hope I didn't miss anything there!

Just my cup of coffee. Good job once again! Also didn't know that these games were made with a custom engine (I pretty much assumed Unity by default), so that's really cool. C:

@ava-skoog, thanks for the full write up again, it's very appreciated! As for the puzzles, I think adding some text to them probably made them easier, I explain a few elements that the player otherwise would have to infer or guess, but for more experienced players it's apparently quite obvious what to do. Always a tricky trade-off. I really want to make a "puzzle level" selection a la Silent Hill 1 & 2 to my upgraded version. I have a soft spot for PSX 1 & 2 idioms ;)

I think writing down hints is the "proper" old school way of doing it, now I see people just taking a picture of the screen with their phone these days, which is fairly obvious but something I always forget I can do in the moment.

About the pits, the reason for their existence is that I was bothered by the 2 empty rooms before the orb chambers and I needed something quick to add some ambiance. Now, a pit in Sketchup is made in about 30 seconds. — In general, I can recommend Sketchup for quick creation of indoor spaces. With a bit of practice you can create quite elaborate architecture quickly. — Anyway, I added the 2 pits, put a trigger collider in them and had a message pop up with a sort of … SH-like ambient detail text. But beyond that they play no role in the game.

If you don't mind I'll be sure to give you a ping when I release a better version of this. Thanks for playing!

This is a really cool game :). It has a very myst feel to it. I would've loved if there were more puzzles!

Holy crap... that was enjoyable. This might be one of the most enjoyable games so far that I've played this LD. The puzzle was clever - my only gripe is that there wasn't enough game because it was super fun. I really enjoyed the mood of this and level design was so obnoxiously confusing that it took me forever to find my way around.