Wow, I love this game!

**Concerning** the graphics, I’m in love with low resolution pixel art and 8-bit sound effects. So this is totally a game for me!

**Overall** I think this game was a little too hard, but that might not be to bad because of the lack of levels. I’m addicted to this game and i guarantee I’ll play this until I beat it.
Thank you so much for this experience and good luck in the future!
Have an awesome day, and I hope to see you in the next jam!

// Isak (one half of [LiquidBrain](https://ldjam.com/users/liquidbrain/))

This game is pretty cool! The minimalist aesthetic is well executed and the victory jingle is catchy. The game is certainly on the difficult side. I really like how hectic it can get with how quickly everything is going and how many competing objectives you have to juggle. I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. That being said, the only way I found victory in the later levels was by ignoring the machine entirely and just focusing on taking out enemies and collecting amulets. All in all, I had a blast playing Gargoyle's Curse. Great work!

Wow, that is tough! Nicely balanced frantic gameplay, with a good amount of randomness but still some strategy. Great audio and graphics!

Hey! Noticed your comment on my game so I thought I'd respond here so you were more likely to notice it.

The song I linked in my game's description was **not** written by me, I linked it because it inspired me for the feel of the song I did write. I have since removed the link to avoid confusion, and instead linked the actual soundtrack :) you can find that here: https://soundcloud.com/user-565506175/fredericks-theme

You might want to adjust your audio rating accordingly!

Sorry for the confusion, just wanted to clarify things so I didn't end up getting a rating based on a song I didn't write.

Regarding your game, I liked it! It definitely has that classic 8-bit kind of feel between the sound, graphics, and gameplay. I only got to level 5, after which it's really hard to get everywhere fast enough to not die.

I like the little audio bit it plays when you progress to the next level, it reminds me of the beginning-of-level sounds for the "classic" mode on the GBA Mario games.

Well done!

EDIT: Oh wow, I didn't read the description before and didn't notice you had to pump the machine. That changes things.

holy crap level 5 gets insane.
cool game

Quite a nice game the graphics and sound worked well together. The game got very intense in the end and took a couple of tries before you succeeded. And in the end some fun dialog :P

Well done!

so much replay!! I love every bit of this. especially you're sprites, everything is so small and so clear its incredible. sounds are superb as well

Wow, i just love the controls, they are sooo smooth! The graphics are nice too. Fun game! :)

Haha, what a fun concept for a game. I liked it, even though it was very challenging. Graphics and sounds worked great together, I'll really have to try Pico8 sometime. Fantastic job, thanks for making this and sharing it!

This game is so hard. I can only get to level 3.
The concept is good. I personally think it needs some balance adjustment.

I really like the retro style graphics and music/SFX. Even want to go learn PICO-8.

Very fun and very arcadey! I have a soft spot for retro-like games, and this one truly feels like it's from 30 years ago (I mean it in the best way possible, of course)! It was quite frantic at times and never felt too overwhelming (but it was close to it!). However, my trick of finishing the game was to just ignore pumping gramps’ machine and try to kill gargoyles and spawners as quickly as possible.
Overall: Very solid entry!

Fun, good style, fitting sound effects. The gargoyles attacked so fast, I could never walk over to the machine to pump it before they swarmed on grandpa tho. Basically seemed impossible!

I think you nailed the theme with this game - well done! Gameplay wise, it is a bit shallow, but I love time-management focused action games. Once i saw that you can break the boxes, I won pretty easily. In fact, I barely had to pump at all, as long as I broke the boxes quickly enough. I really liked it, nice work my pico friend.

Really liking this retro style 8-bit game. simple but well working mechanics. congrats!

Great game! The difficulty curve is really well done and the different tasks make for a nice layer of strategy. It took me a few tries, but I eventually saved my grandpa and got a score of 3150 (and I should add that I loved the ending as well).

So dam stylish nice job!

Simple and fun retro-styled game, it remind me some of the NES games. Graphics looks just as if they were created in the 90s. Really fun, but some pickups or more enemies would definitelly make it more playable for longer time. Also, the game is a bit to hard(one hit and player dies and get reset to the first level).

This game is insane! Awesome graphics and sound.

I like this. Classic gameplay, I could totally see something like this on the 2600.

3100! This game is getting tough pretty quickly! I love it.

Greate game, nice using the Pico 8, I have found it to run fine in the browser, unlike some unity webGL games. I like how easy it is to play these Pico 8 games.

The lack of an instruction in your game, other than to press x, is a very good thing. The controls are easy to grasp and even though the Pico 8 graphics have few pixels, your graphics were really nice, after less than a minute I was able to figure out everything by myself, this is how a game is supposed to work! Very good job with that, I could quickly see the two weak points I had to fight, the bars for the machine and grandpa's health were clear, I have not read your introduction on this game page until now, the game told me the whole story. I cannot stress enough how important that is and how good of a job you did on this!

Overall I would say this is how an entry should be, thank you for this cool game and keep up the good work!

Hey, I just saw your comment for the Linux build of my game. In the meantime I had actually used a virtual machine to try and build the game on Linux myself. I have added my build instructions on [my github page](https://github.com/gonutz/ld39) (down at the bottom) and they look similar to yours. Actually if you just say "go get github.com/gonutz/ld39" the Go tool will automatically download all dependencies so go getting the gl libs should be done automatically. Maybe you could see if my instructions on the page are correct and work for you. If you see something wrong or it does not work for you, just let me know and I will update it.

Thanks also for your nice review, we all love to update our page and find a nice new comment :-)

@liquidbrain thanks a lot for playing man! I hope you can get to the end that is somewhat funny :D
@superpokeunicorn as you guys have mentioned, if you're fast and kept grandpa healthy you can ignore it, maybe I have to make it drain grandpa's energy faster haha.


@jeremy-ryan ohh! But I listen to your tune and is just as awesome!


@ianburnette @jakylgamer @cyfixus @tim-eriksen @ironfroggy @pbg @gris @stevenjmiller @sylvestar @theflyingkeyboard @alejandrodlsp @ganbaregameskyle thanks a lot for playing and giving feedback!


@svarttand thanks for playing man! I'm glad you got to the end :D!


@aircraft-terrier @junjunlowpoly yeah dudes! pico8 is awesomely fast. I got into it since the last LD after seeing what other devs made with it.
This game was done in less than 12 hours on sunday :P so yeah... it's really fast to work with, I recommend it.


@philstrahl hey phil! I'm glad you had the chance to play my game :D


@gonutz thanks a lot for the feedback, it was a nice read :D I feel the same way about games. That's how I played them when I was a child.
in my famicom playing all games in japanese or english while being a native spanish speaker child, I wouldnt even understand instructions so It was all gameplay for me

I love the Pico 8 -- glad to see it pop up in this compo! The graphics are perfect for this style of game. The controls felt tight and responsive, and I loved all the sound effects. Overall this is a fantastic entry. Thanks for sharing!

This is a really solid entry! I love the pico-8. I found this one pretty hard but I kept trying because its fun. I managed to get a score around 3000 but not quite. Its pretty addictive actually.Good show!!

I feel like its possible to 5000 or even more and like save the grandpa as well

I liked the style and concept of this a lot. I played up to level 5, but couldn't beat it. My strategy ended up being to rush amulets, rush back, kill bats, fill tank, repeat, but it always felt like the bat spawns showed up too quickly for me to be able to fairly fight them.

But, A+ execution otherwise!

Is a very good game. It looks nice and the controls are great.
It may not be very original, but the execution is great.

I like the game, very fun and challenging

I really like this one, well done.

There is a lot of things one needs to balance which makes it quite hectic. I didn't realize how to refill the machine at first. Some indication that "X now does something different" would have been nice. But that's a minor issue. The gameplay, graphics and sounds just work fantastic together.

It gets really tough, and my strategy for the final level was to ignore the machine and just kill all bats before they reach grandpa. My final Score was 3450.

That was a pretty frantic game, and I liked the animations, specially the winning animation. You did some very expressive sprites with very few pixels!

I was a bit confused to what I had to do in the first few times I played though -- maybe you should have the amulet count go down instead of up, since the goal seems to be to collect all the amulets in the stage?

Thanks for the cool game!

Fun little game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 39 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DrJOSU_FjM