Closing in on Pascal by gamepopper
Pascal the raiding racoon has taken something from a temple, and now the walls are closing in on him. Help Pascal escape the rooms before he is crushed, or killed by the obstacles that are in his way.

Written in a custom C++ engine using SFML 2.5.0.
Run - A & D - Left Stick
Jump - Space - A
Switch -Return - B
Enter Next Level - Up - Left Stick (Up)
Jump Down - Down + Space - Down + A
How to Play: Find the exit as fast as you can before the walls close in on you. Make sure to press Up to enter the exit. A few levels will require a key to open the exit. If you see a switch, you can flip it with the Switch button to expand the walls for extra time.
| Windows | https://gamepopper.itch.io/closing-in-on-pascal |
| Linux | https://gamepopper.itch.io/closing-in-on-pascal |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/closing-in-on-pascal |
Ratings
| Overall | 345th | 3.417⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 326th | 3.31⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 479th | 2.967⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 222th | 3.828⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 255th | 3.5⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 216th | 3.267⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 161th | 3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 241th | 3.183⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 29🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
I like the art, realistic but the dangerous objects a bit less so you can see its "interactable".
I thought the walls moving with time + your position was quite clever. Overall a pretty good entry in my opinion.
But our game is better)))
I think the movement was a bit too fast for the platforming, but still doable and not too hard.
The walls adjusting to where you are and still closing does make it a bit hard to see how much time you have left - I would make the closing slower but have the walls visible from the start (I guess location of walls closing would be percentage of distance between player and the edge of screen). Either that or try and set more of a restrict with levels and have set walls slowly close in on you (could make for some interesting mechanics, like waiting for a wall to close up so that it lifts you high enough to escape and other stuff like that).
The game design follows a very conventional platform idea and could help define itself by adding some more ideas that feed back into "running out of space". Pascal needs a good raccoon power like being able to dig up trash to build platforms. It doesn't just have to be the walls closing in, this could be an own-goal type of thing.
Anyhow, a great great entry, well done!
I thought the game had a good amount of juice and little details that greatly improved the feel of the game (such as the screen shake and death animation). The graphics were well done and the controls were responsive, but the gameplay felt a bit too floaty to me.
Some nice additions would have been:
-Having an option to move to the next level after beating a level in level select
-Speeding up transition time after beating or failing a level would be nice.
-Making the numbers selectable in level select, rather than the ROOM text above them, which seemed quite unintuitive to me
Nicely done, with all kinds of tricks and a wall closing on you. Took me a while to realise you mean to use the W key to exit level, too.
But it's a good complete game, well done!
@mike-inprinciple Thank you for playing it when I was on your stream, even though you had already played it beforehand. I can see some issues with wall jumping that should need to be fixed, even in the post-jam build.
@aeveis I see what you mean with the walls, I think it would have made more sense to have the walls clamped to the sides, so no matter where you moved they are always in view.
@nam-nguyen The idea was that the more time you spent in a room, the less space you had to work with. Although I did intend for you to use the moving walls to your advantage in some levels.
@mza Just to let you know I did include arrow key controls for post-jam version. :)
What you have is a decent platformer, with occasionally sticky but generally smooth controls. I can't really complain about this as a game jam entry. It's definitely fine. I'm just dissapointed because the mechanics are there to make for a great puzzle game and you have no levels that take advantage of this.
Wait, I lied. There is one massive complaint I have about this as a fast-paced platformer. After every death is a 5 second animation of the racoon being crushed, then the score slowly crawls on screen, and all this time I'm mashing the A button to get back into the fucking game. Don't do this. Please. If you make a game where the player will die often, give them their controls back within half a second. If this game was longer, or more difficult, I wouldn't have finished it because waiting to respawn was so frustrating.
Also, if you have a post-jam version up on your site, please add a list of changes in your description. Sometimes the changes are small enough that the compo can still be judged by the postLD version and I get a better experience. If I don't know what the changes are I'll use the old version to be safe and this might be to your detriment.