Abit annoying that space bar is switching characters even though it is mostly associated with jumping but overrall nice work!

Yellow hair is Naruto?Accepted the hokage seven generations

Wow this is great! I really enjoyed it and immediately wanted to get a highscore!

Solid entry, very well-made puzzle game. Would have been nice to know more about character abilities, but it was also interesting to deduce them in-game. Agree that spacebar to change characters was not the greatest choice as it's often associated with jumping. Also the difficulty ramps up waaaay too fast for my taste ^^

Great job!

Wow I love your pixels and animations. Nice entry!

It was certainly a good use of the theme and the first two or three rooms were nice, but it's a bit too easy just get stuck because no one else is left.

No bugs. The pixel art is pretty. It's easy to understand and control. I made sacrifices. Congratulations! I like this game.

A very well finished game, very nice graphics, interesting mechanics, good levels and a brutal characters selection :D
Good job!

Really cool game, similar to mine in mechanics which made it a bit easier to figure out :wink: (though my game has group of skeletons that you control at once instead of different characters that you can switch between). I especially liked your audio I think it's great, both music and different sounds.

I guess my only problem is how it's related to theme as you actually can't sacrifice anyone if you want to reach the "true" end, but it's nice that characters say something when you sacrifice someone.

Twisty! Really loved discovering the abilities of each character, great surprise! Good job!

Nice entry. Enjoyed the unecessary sacrifice feature, but I still hate Glark :D

Really well designed. I felt like I'd accomplished something when I worked out the puzzles!

Nice little experience! It took me too much to find out how to finish level 1 without leaving anyone behind. I tried to make the jump with Naruto asuming he could jump more or climb walls until it finally clicked that Bunny was the jumper... It wouldn't frustrate me as much if I didn't have a backlog of 100 games to play and rate quickly. Nice level design, Eva!

Very nice sprite animations! Cool mechanics that you only learn by playing the game!

Great take on the theme. There's a surprising amount of depth in the puzzling.

Awesome idea to keep you figuring out the best way of who to sacrifice!

I have some problems when I played on the HTML version, the biggest was in the second level only appears the leader and I could do nothing. I restarted the game many times when I access to the door because E and R are so close to my fatty fingers :sweat_smile: Anyway was nice to play, love the art and the characters and how the theme was applied.

Amazing entry, pretty good graphics and animations. I like different abilites of characters and mechanics where you have to sacrifice someone which you loose for ongoing levels.

Nice entry! I love the replayability you give to it. nailed it.

Great and very polished! Agree that spacebar in not intuitive choice for characters change - died more than once because of it. + ability explanation would be nice. I like the dialog feature and tutorial drawn on the wall. Good!

Great game! The puzzles benefited from the different character abilities. I liked how the pros and cons of each character were quite subtle. I had to play it a couple of times to realise that I could get through without sacrificing someone each level if I knew their strengths. Really clever.

Like some other people have mentioned, the controls really tripped me up. Especially the E, R and T keys being so close (I restarted a few times by accident), maybe a menu with the restart option would be help avoid that. I kept mixing up the space bar and jump button too.

Really fun game, good job!

A grim take on Thomas was Alone, with a cast similar to Order of the Stick. I loved it! Found the dialogue witty, the art beautiful, the puzzles fantastic. It was fun to learn each characters ability, and a neat choice to decide who to leave behind while not knowing what you will face moving forward.

My biggest issue is the breakdown of the theme. With the "true" ending - or I guess only ending (unless there is an alternate ending I couldn't figure out) only possible by not sacrificing anyone, that really took away from that aspect for me. (Please note: I still loved this title! Just found that one negative aspect) I did very much enjoy doing a second playthrough, this time considering how to bring everyone to safety.

Well done all, you must be a very solid team, as this is a great entry.

Great entry! I really liked the twist, and replaying the game with a different mindset!

Realy nice game, here are some things that I noticed:

Its a bit annoying that space bar do another action than the classic one, we have this "zelda botw" strange effect where we want to jump and an another character is selected. (in botw you throw a lot of time your weapon for nothing because the controls works in a weird way).

Maybe the "restart game" button just beside the "restart level" one can be frustrating if you miss-press the key (on trackmania its the delete key to restart the game for example).

The characters lines works pretty well and makes the game very immersive, the graphics are awesome, maybe the return of the jumps are a bit to high but you can restart the level easily and you dont have to wait to long before the moment where you failed so its ok, and I understand that this type of jumps can be done this way because of the game design (mechanics based on jumps).

The gamedesign is realy polished and I realy appreciate how you took the theme, its original compared of many of the other games, this take the player by its feels when you just understand "oh, why I did so easily all those sacrifices when it was possible without".

Awesome job guys!

Awesome game. I did not expect I'd have to replay it, which plays with the theme-based assumption of the player nicely.

The only thing that was a bit weird sometimes was stacking the characters on top of each other. It seemed the jumping one couldn't be touching a wall, otherwise the jump would be cut short.

This is some superb level design that, combined with the theme, leads you to assume one solution when a harder but better one exists. I don't think the character abilities should've been explaind as some suggested, as that would ruin the effect. Thanks for making me feel like a smarty pants by letting me figure out the twist ahead of time from the title alone. I gave the theme 5 stars, because I love the evil subversion you made with it.

One note: I ran into a bug where pressing R resetted the level with all the characters missing, so I had to start the game over.

Nice game! One of the few I willed to replay :)

This one is so good. I only got to the third screen before I had to restart and rethink things. The level and puzzle design is great :)

Fun references, good concept and well executed! Was cool to try and work out the best way to get through each level without sacrificing the characters I wanted to keep.

Interesting concept. However, the perfectionist in me hates this game. Not only do I have to kill some characters to get to the end of the level, *I don't get them back the next level.* I like how all the different characters had their different strengths and weaknesses, and how only the leader had to survive.

However, there is an extreme conflict of art style in this game. The characters appear to pixel art, but the rest of the game isn't. Because of this, the game loses a lot of polish it would have had otherwise. If you have pixel art, stick with it.

Good work, excited to see your entry for Ludum Dare 44!

Hodor! Hodor hodor hodor!

Really interesting game, I love how all the characters have slightly different jumps. I would love if there were more differences between characters as well. One bug I found - on the web version, if you restart the level while dialogue is playing the dialogue won't go away.

That's a really cool game! I like how the theme was introduced and I like the characters and that they differs a bit from each other. The atmosphere was really nice!

Holy sh*t!! This game is a masterpiece.
(The controls are a bit clunky though.)

@mertios: Actually, you don't have to sacrifice any characters, if you do things perfectly. Hence the name of the game, "Unnecessary Evil". That's the point!

I thought the controls were "fine", I really don't think the complaints were warranted. That said, my personal suggestion would be to have a separate key dedicated to each person, for example the number keys from 1-5. That would make things more consistent since it's difficult to remember what the rotation order is, especially since it changes once you have less than the full 5 remaining in a given level.

I liked the spin on the theme. People should be a little more open-minded about how the theme is interpreted, clever subversions of the theme or ways to incorporate the theme in ways other than the standard "sacrifice HP/abilities/..." should be encouraged!

The fall speed of the characters was a bit unexpectedly fast, especially for the little dude, I think I'm used to more parabolic jump arcs with lower terminal velocity, but the platforming wasn't really the focus here so it didn't really detract from the experience, just something a bit unexpected.

The music was not super amazing but worked well enough. I found the mechanical sounds a bit distracting, but YMMV.

Good job overall!

Hodor hodor hodor

Great job, liked the music and feel of it and the way you displayed the controls

Awesome game! I really liked the puzzles, and it's a nice "twist" that you can eventually win the game without sacrificing anyone. I didn't find any problems with the controls (though agree about the comment above that a number for each character would be better than cycling through them with space). Anyway, really awesome entry!

Awesome puzzle game, I really enjoyed the story telling and characters, and discovering that I had to take a new look at the game to reach it's real end: great take on the sacrifice part, with gameplay elements that are actually not needed to end the game but seems at first the easiest (and most unecessary evil) option. I loved how I had to take a closer look at the characters abilities to solve the game, instead of just feeling they have one and just go through the end sacrifying them one by one. I loved how the sprites feel alive with some code behind it and their design overall, added to their different quotes according to the situation. For once the mix with 3d backgrounds looks quite nice to me;sounds and music were were coming along nicely with the game.
Very smart and well executed!
Cheers!

Amazing level design!

I love the fact you can finish the game by sacrificing a character at each level and have to start again with this information that made the second run completely different.

This game is incredible! The art and music is really nice, the script for all the characters is kind of funny, and the gameplay is really fun. What I found most interesting was the fact that no matter if you beat a level, only the people who got to the door could continue. Most games would have allowed everyone to continue, but not allowing that made for a much more interesting puzzle. Great job!