Contrary by Nekopi
Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of a mentally ill person?
He desperately needs your help to deal with his fears. An exciting platformer awaits you, in which, you, will have to fight hordes of enemies, and meet each personification of his fears face-to-face, and fight great depression in the end.
But be careful, because our patient is extremely unstable!
Controls:
Ratings
| Overall | 1064th | 3.28⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1299th | 2.85⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1313th | 2.704⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 982th | 3.28⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 291th | 4.13⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 443th | 3.684⭐ | 51🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 103🗳️ | 100🗨️ |
Graphics are really good, but I have a few problems with the gameplay :
The walls are kinda sticky and tends to get your character stuck, and the alternating stats are a good idea on paper, but having them all turn on and off at once is a bit frustrating. I think a good idea would be not to turn them all at once, but to alternate (ie, disable attack, enable block or jumping), that way block would also have a use when attack is disabled.
Otherwise, it's a fun game and I reached Loneliness, but got stuck to a part where everything was dark. I don't know if that was intended or not.
Congratulations on making it to the LD49 ! :)
My main point of critique has to do with the gameplay. It doesn't feel very responsive to me, for a variety of reasons. The movement feels very slow and floaty, which could work, but the animations are a tiny bit faster than what the movement suggests, which creates a disconnect between what I perceive on screen, and what I'm doing with my controls. As someone else pointed out, the character tends to get stuck to the walls. This is an issue that tends to happen when using Unity's physics system for character movement, which I know because I've made a few platformers using it. It works well enough for some kinds of movement, but for platforming it tends to create a lot of issues. If you do want to stick to using physics for the player, I would recommend removing friction with walls, probably by using a slippery material and assigning it to all wall objects. Lastly, there's no feedback for when the player hits enemies. This combined with the desync between controls and animations means it's hard for me to tell if any of my attacks land on an enemy, or if an enemy has hit me. Simple things like changing the sprite colour, adding particles, sound effects, maybe even knockback, all go really well to create that kind of feedback that informs the player of these kinds of actions.
Good job on finishing the jam, and with more polish this could be a really great game!
I liked the look of the characters and the enemies. The setting is very well done too. Visually it is one of the most beautiful and creative games in this gamejam.
The sound is pretty nice too.
Gameplay is ok. It's interesting the combat mechanics, involving the block. A point that I found subtle but very interesting is that the boss' HP decreases while you defeat enemies. This makes the player pay special attention to enemies, otherwise he would simply ignore them. In other words, you are rewarded for defeating enemies in a very creative way.
However I believe I have had my experience affected by bugs, especially collision bugs. As I said earlier it is possible to completely ignore enemies, and although I don't know to what extent this was intentional. But I think you could put some limitation when the player tries to get "inside enemies". Another bug I had problems with was the jump, sometimes the jump didn't work as expected, making me have to jump several times to pass a simple piece of platform. Finally I witnessed a bug when I fell into a hole "on the second level", since when I died, the game screen went black and I couldn't do anything. This happened every time I tried, and unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the end of the game.
But I fully understand that in a gamejam bugs are normal. These points I raised are only intended to help you in some way.
Speaking a little more, I couldn't stop talking about the interpretation you had on the topic. It was a very creative interpretation and it sends an interesting message. Associating instability with adverse psychological situations was a very well thought out point.
In general I liked your game! Congratulations to all of you!
P.S. I like the graphic with controls. Really nice.
1) The graphics have a lot of seams or glitches around the edges (eg. top of the player character) that could be fixed
2) The block mechanic isn't very clear, mainly because of its animation. It's slow and makes me want to think there's a windup but I'm not sure when it captures the Block value. Overall it seems better just to flit around and spam attack when the bar is high as the enemy attacks aren't very threatening.
3) The sort of sine wave RNG doesn't fit well with the jumps and moving platforms since you can't control either except stand around and wait.
As for the main downsides of the game :
- I felt like there was a lack of feedback at times, as I was sometimes unsure whether I would hit enemies or not of if they were hitting me except by looking at the health bars
- At times my focus was more on the bottom left corner and the UI to get the timings right rather than the game itself, and it's not easy to focus on both at the same time.
- Having both attack & block share the same time window to use make it so you have to either choose one of them, which ended up always being attack in my case (as it works best). Would have felt better to have them available at different times to encourage using both.
- Difficulty curve was a bit off, with the first boss being rather hard as you are still learning the game while having to get the right timing for attacking. And the following ones being a lot more easier as you would be able to attack freely.
For me the controls felt "squishy", it felt as if something was softening/ dampering my actions. In addition, I was not sure if I was hitting the monsters or just hitting the air.
[EDIT] Now I understand: the bottom left bars tell me how much jump/ attack/ block I have and it changes continuously. For the whole first level this was not clear to me: I perceived it as a regeneration/ cooldown. Maybe if the bars or some other indicators would be at/ close to the character it would help, as my eyes are on the character in front of it and not at the left corner.
I like the concept/ idea, ... probably if balancing/ adapting a bit it is more intuitive? And adding some clear feedback (visual/ sound) when jumping when attacking and hitting.
Little bug (?) in third level (city): first previous music was playing and when I died, the actual music started.
I always prefer controller instead of keyboard/ mouse. So I had a hard time just due to this.
Overall, very impressive for a game jam!
The moody music fits the visual style like a glove. Very cool.
The gameplay itself could use a few improvements. Some visual and/or audio feedback of dealing and taking damage would be great. Even simple flashing, modulation on the sprites would already add a lot to the player feedback and make the world feel more visceral and interactive. Some more player feedback in general would be great.
It is also very easy to "stick" to the walls and edges of the environment. And the enemies themselves are not very threatening - the first big boss dies from something like two well-aimed strikes - it felt kinda anticlimactic :laughing:, the cool battle music didn't even manage to get going.
I really like the slow, meditative, sad atmosphere you created in this game.

Thanks for the experience!
just small bugs needs fixing but it's a good game after all