Absolutely brilliant. A new way to explore an old classic. When I'm not worrying about taking damage, its a very very serene and peaceful game. I could see myself getting lost in something like this!

ty for the Game!

such a unique idea! love it. great execution. well done to you all!

Really unique and interesting game. Graphics and music is nice. I'm not great at reading, so I ended up going up and down skimming for the words I needed, and avoiding the once that would damage me, so I got non of the story, still kept me engaged tho.

So interesting idea! Beautiful graphic and adorable character! Good sounds! I really have fun to play this game! Thank you! Awesome!

Very unique game! Would definitely benefit from having more than a singular goal in each level.

This concept is wonderful, I would love to see this turned into a full game with a huge twisting story. What a neat take on the theme and I love the puzzle aspect.

wow. brilliant concept, and great execution. well done!

This was so cool! I loved the main mechanic. I got slightly frustrated with the collision, I expected words that I step on to reveal their effect but it felt like if I let my head get too close to any dangerous words they would trigger as well. Absolutely would like to see more of this game in the future.

I think the concept is great, and the game had really cute graphics, animations, and music, but ultimately, I got too frustrated just trying to beat the first level. There are too many words that kill, some of them not expected, like "anxiety", and it became too much of a burden to memorize everything. I loved the funny effects like scream and cage, and cloning with "yourself", but it was actually really frustrating to hit "old", because it doesn't wear off, and just makes the whole rest of the level feel really annoyingly slow.

I think giving more visual clues, or some kind of way to mark hazards once you discover them, would make the game a lot more fun to play. I think having the random effects, and the key and the door hidden in text is awesome, but the amount of landmines strewn about just made me really afraid to walk on any text at all, and discouraged me from exploring. If that could be solved, I think this game would be great!

I absolutely **loved** this concept! I've never seen anything like this done before... maaaybe "Baba is You" gets vaguely close, but this is something wholly unique. I had a great time accidentally turning Sherlock Holmes into a baby, getting that baby **drunk**, and stumbling onto words that spawn an **army** of little green men to demolish me... hilarious moments like that were **key** to winning me over. The music was perfect to the Sherlock Holmes vibes, and the pixel art was beautiful--even when I accidentally spawned the devil, I couldn't help but admire the lil **flame** puffs he hurled at me.

The cool portal space behind the book, the weather effects, even the **door**'s distinctive shape... all of it is undeniably **pleasant** and contributes to a fun and memorable game experience. I've never read so carefully before, tip-toeing around words that might cause **pain**. You've got top marks from me, and I'm sure you'll do really well in the ratings. I'll also join the chorus of voices asking for a full game... expand this out a **little** more, list it on Steam, and the sales would **flood** in.

Brilliant! Reminds a lot of Letters and Scribblenauts for their word-foolery even if they have completely different gameplay!

A really unique concept! I loved it!

Fun game, I enjoyed discovering the different "actions" that could happen. I had to keep dying on purpose just to run through the paragraphs to see what would happen. Very creative, definitely a unique game.

Love the concept and well made. This can be expanded to so many great stories! I hope there's further work on this!

Really nice and unique concept! It was really fun to explore all the little effects that were hidden inside the text. Music, graphics, atmosphere its a well-rounded whole and very good job for a jam game!

HAHA! The stamped made me LOL. Cool and super original game! Those mechanics can really be further developed into a lot of interesting things. Loved the pixel sprites and the music fits really well. Congratulations! I'll keep an eye for this development

Entertaining and immersive little game, really well scoped and executed. Excellent job, and a joy to play. Well done!

Greats mechanichs! Got stuck at the green falling blocks. There seems to be a problem with the music on the html5 version. Suddenly bursted really loud at the middle of the game. Lots of fun and cute character!

Loved it, the concept is really fun. Art is great, music fits well. I can definitely see this game as a full release, with more levels and more things to find. I had a lot of fun with this. Great job! :)

Hands down the best thing I've played on this site

Путешествия Шерлока прямо на ваших страницах!

Читайте о похождениях знаменитого детектива!

Очень оригинально ^_^

This game is great! Can still hear the smooth music UwU - This game has a lot of personality and I love that. Some things for me, I found myself sometimes frustrated with not being able to coming back from a state, like being old/young was funny but the walking speed was UUUUUUUuuggghhhh and when you cant find the right word is just frustraiting, maybe adding a dictionary for words or make it last a time would be an idea to explore. Other tahn that this is great, i laughed a lot, congrats!

I guess you could this a really NOVEL concept haha! Puns aside, what an absolutely smashing concept, can't compare it to anything I've ever played.

Really fun art and music and I love the little records as the sliders, that's a really cute touch.

Like others have pointed out, sometimes being turned into a state and it being permanent like old/drunk is a bit too much, so maybe they wear off after a while? I also think perhaps there's some kind of middle ground between normal mode and casual mode. I think having one difficulty mode and no health, but instead having a timer might be a direction you could take it into, so traps would add time and the animations would add time. Because playing on normal mode I didn't really get the sense that when negative stuff happened to me, I had the abilities to avoid them through movement/lack of an attack. Conversely I think noticing damage/hurt words was very easy to understand but understanding healing words was a bit more tricky so unsure what could be done about that.

The only other crit I had is maybe a little more zoomed out to show an entire page at once? Maaaaybe? Or a few more words, but other than that your team knocked it out of the park in charm/style and idea.

Great stuff, hope you continue to work on it post-jam and look forward to seeing anything from you in the future!

Really innovative, I am so happy you had a no damage mode!

Awesome game. Found myself feeling surprised over and over again. The core gameplay mechanic was very interesting. I like the idea of skimming for words. I could see this being really amazing in a random/procedural generation context... maybe even a form of competitive play with time/scoreboards? Game was a complete idea, yet looms with so much potential. BTW... thanks for no damage mode. Streaming is hard and makes gameplay a notch harder so it was great that I could still see the content without having to get too intense.

My VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1004793106?t=00h34m25s

If you don't make a full game, I will cry, a lot.

As I said in the stream, you guys need to take this game and run, don't look back. This is a clear gem for ludum dare and it needs to be continued.

Anyways critique time...

Your collision should only be based at your feet and shrunk slightly so your not trigger words quite so easily.

You should remove the plain damage words and make them effects like revolver and devil, your charm comes from the effects. You should also make them escapable.

You should change healing words to checkpoints and have healing be passive. Also add effects to the words.

What a creative idea. Games this unique strike me as very risky, because they often just dont work out the way you imagine them, but this one definitely does. The art is top notch, the music and sound effect are deliciously retro. And above all, the game is just good clean fun. Amazing work!!
Thank you so much for bringing this by my stream. Here's a link to the VOD:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1004676947?t=0h16m33s

Drinking brandy as a "young man" was pretty stand out. Only weird error is that sometimes the game-over options just sort of fly off to the right of the screen and if you don't catch them in time, they're gone.

Depending on how much you wanted to put in to this experience I could see the idea being taken pretty far. I can imagine little pop up scenes, and all kinds of interspersed gameplay elements overlaid onto the simple key and door puzzles.

Very cool stuff!

This was such a unique entry, loved it. I hope you'll find ways to keep going with it.

Loved the concept! It was interesting to see all the different types of things the words would trigger! The music is a bop too :smile:

really really cool! I had a lot of fun with it. I'm not sure how well this would work as a bigger game (I think I might get annoyed trying to randomly stumble into the key/door for too much longer), but it works really well at the size it is now. I liked how I eventually started to be able to recognize threats before I activated them

Also, I'm dying to know; what's the entrance noise? I swear I recognize it -- it's the one when sherlock pops out of the door; right near this timestamp: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007659333?t=07h09m31s

Is it the same noise that plays when you exit to map in sonic adventure 2 battle?? This next video clip is the best example I can find - it's the sound that plays as the screen fades to white (at 7:15), but the youtuber cuts it off early I think, plus it's very quiet and difficult to hear:
[video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e6kB2q5X4o&t=435)

[Thank you for the submitting the game to the stream. If you want to rewatch the feedback, you can do so here.](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1008357028?t=02h29m00s)

Creative approach to the theme! Loved the mechanic, and the music is cool too! Great job with art and effects, the game looks polished. Stumbled upon a bug: sometimes when the character dies during movement, the words "retry" and "quit" move away with him. And you have to click something before they move away from screen completely :')
Overall, great entry, keep up the good work!

Congratulations your game is wonderful, I imagine in the future the same approach being applied to educational themes to reinforce studies of various disciplines, here in Brazil there was a company that produced this type of content, and I always found it very creative and didactic for school learning, a big hug to the whole team, it is a great honor to know your work! , and I await your feedback regarding my game.

This was a really cool idea! I really liked all the different custom effects you included for specific words. I think it could also be neat to make the words you need to find different every time, so it's more of a puzzle - for instance you could be looking for specific clues related to some crime you're investigating. Overall this was an amazing concept, and you did a great job implementing it with lots of fun little Easter eggs!

As promise, I finally had time to play your game on stream :) Here is a link to the correct place in the video: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=Sx1MQ445u7k&t=7510s

What a neat game! I really love it: the concept, the art-style and the variety of triggered action per words where awesome. It would have been even better for me if the text where organized in 4 columns book to avoid having to go left and right constantly to read the story. The random long pause to walk back to the beginning of the next line, combined with the possible distractions of words along the way make it harder to me to comprehend the sentences.


Here is an exemple of what I mean as it my explanation may not be clear in the video:


Congratulation, you made a really cool game!

I feel bad for not commenting or rating this one earlier in the jam. This entry ended up being a real highlight, if not for the absurd premise then the perfect execution. You can get a vague sense of certain word placements based on the actual text, but otherwise the large font size and small player acts as a great fog-of-war for your actual objectives. I can't say I've ever taken this approach to old literature, and it was amusing to say the least.

I think there's some missed opportunities here and there-- for example, Lawyer not spawning a demon or a few other instances of words acting differently from how you'd imagine. There's also some cases where I felt like words had larger hitboxes than expected. Most of that criticism can be chalked up to time constraints, and they're footnotes compared to the overall experience. It's also much harder to criticize difficulty problems thanks to the included practice mode.

I wonder if you could incorporate a number of other works from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the like to expand this further, with different authors bringing their own themes and positives/negatives into the mix.

Thanks for putting together one of the most interesting entries I've seen in any jam. :smile:

### Hey everyone! We're doing a massive post to conclude our Ludum Dare 48 experience ###
#### First of all, we would all love to thank you for our kind words. Thanks to your feedback and support, we've decided to launch this game as a full game, including online co-op, to steam! [Check it out here](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1626280/Explory_Story). We would be incredibly grateful if you wishlisted the game if you enjoyed it. We aim to make a lot more fun and a lot more features and characters. Ok enough self-promo, let me respond to each of you. ####

@cinderblock Thanks for your feedback about taking damage. We'll work towards a version of the game that isn't stressful for the final release.

@Rujum Shallom! Thanks!

@nopogo Thank you very much :)

@nohac Thank you for the kind words. Yeah a lot of people played the same way, we have some ideas how we can make reading easier but by all means its not necessary. Parsing the words is fine too :)

@alina-baybulatova Thank you for the kind words!

@bamallama Thank you! The singular goal thing is something we came to release as well, thanks to people leaving feedback such as yourself. In the full release we aim to have different types of levels and different words to search for and activate in various ways. Hopefully that will mix up the gameplay a bit, not to mention bosses!

@krassenstein Thank you! You'd love to see it turned into a full game?! Well your wish is our command, its now available to be wishlisted on steam, check out the link above. That is thanks, in part, to you!

@miej Thank you so much for your compliments!

@paetramon Thank you so much! Yes, the collision is something that isn't immediately clear and frustrated some players. We wanted to make words harder to avoid, and to make it more difficult to avoid all the words entirely. Perhaps we missed the mark a bit on that, but we'll work towards a more elegant solution for the full release.

@sakura_magika Thanks a lot for all of the feedback. The main thing you mentioned was hazards and their effect on motivation. This is something we noticed immediately once people started playing. For the jam version we had a casual mode where you don't take any damage, but that solution isn't very elegant. We're aiming to make the game less frustrating for the full version. One of the ideas you mentioned, about marking hazards is a planned feature. As well as dismantling them prior to stepping on them.

@breadstick Thank you so much. You're possibly the person who put the most effort into the comment and it really shows. Complete with a mini Sherlock! Your wish is our command, there is a steam page in the link above. We'd also be happy to hear more from you! On discord or twitter or twitch :)

@lenophie Thank you so much! I can't say that scribblenauts was a huge inspiration but it is a fantastic game. It's quite possible that it is the closest game there is to ours.

@dom-de-re Thank you so much!

@MilkWine Thanks a lot! Hopefully the deaths weren't too frustrating...

@midamida Thank you! Yes, we think so too. We are initially aiming for Arthur Conan Doyle's detective series but we'll sprinkle in some other public works as well. Stay tuned for the full version on steam :D

@kfischer-okarin Thank you so much! There will be plenty more music and art in the final version. We hope to see you there :D

@macdoom Thank you so much! Yeah the stamp was a hard one to get working since it has a big collision box. We will be adding dozens of new effects and new levels to the full version. I hope to see you there!

@judgezedd Thank you so much! Yeah the scope was, dare i say, perfectly tuned for the amount of people and time we had. If there was one less hour in ludum dare, the game would likely not have any sound haha. It came close!

#### If you're still eager to chat with us or leave us more feedback or follow the development of Explory Story, check out my website for all relevant links. https://bluepinstudio.com/ #####

### Hey everyone! We're doing a massive post to conclude our Ludum Dare 48 experience ###
#### First of all, we would all love to thank you for our kind words. Thanks to your feedback and support, we've decided to launch this game as a full game, including online co-op, to steam! [Check it out here](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1626280/Explory_Story). We would be incredibly grateful if you wishlisted the game if you enjoyed it. We aim to make a lot more fun and a lot more features and characters. Ok enough self-promo, let me respond to each of you. ####

@mtwhateverest Thank you so much! Yeah we can see it as a full release too. We're planning to add bosses, collectibles, online co-op, and secrets. Its gonna be a fun time :D

@sobercake Thank you so much! I've said the same about so many great games, it warms my heart to see someone say that about my game.

@xpoho Большое спасибо за комплименты. Скоро мы выпустим игру в Steam и будем рады, если вы в нее поиграете)) привет от русского парня, проживающего в Канаде!

@aguahervida Thank you for the compliments! Yeah we received that feedback a few times. We will certainly make those type of effects wear off over time. It can even be a puzzle mechanic, where you have to be old to enter a certain place but the old effect wears off, so its a race against time. As for the dictionary, we're not certain how we can make that compelling but we'll talk it over on the way to the full release :D

@2bitcrook Thank you so much! You're likely one of our biggest fans haha. A lot of the feedback you left i answered to in the comment directly above this one. Two things i wanted to touch on was the zoomed out feedback. We are definitely going to make the text more easily to read, but not by zooming out. Stay tuned :D And the other piece of feedback was the different game modes. Those are largely there for the jam version because we didn't have a ton of time to flesh out the game design aspect. For the full version we aim to have different win conditions for different levels. Some will be timers, some will be key words, some will be other types of puzzles.

@simpathey Thanks! Yeah the casual mode saved a lot of frustration. We hope to make it a little bit more nuanced for the full release though...

@josephdevelops Aloha! Thank you so much for the kind words :D We'll see what we can do with competitive mode or scoreboards. Its a tricky thing to implement meaningfully but its definitely possible.

@codeman1010 Well! We have good news! No crying for you haha. Scroll up for the link to our steam page

@wolfier We're taking it and we're not looking back! A lot of the stuff you recommended we're going to implement in the form of items and skills. These will reduce your collision radius, let you heal, etc, etc. Thank you for your suggestions and kind words, its incredibly valuable.

@ramble-house-games Thank you very much for your kind words! There are a few hiccups but we'll iron them out and hopefully make a pretty fantastic full game.

@threeli Thank you very much for the feedback :D Yeah there are a few things like the flying text bug that definitely won't make a comeback in the full version.

@arguablyarugula Thank you very much!

@midnightmist Thanks a lot :D

#### If you're still eager to chat with us or leave us more feedback or follow the development of Explory Story, check out my website for all relevant links. https://bluepinstudio.com/ #####

### Last but not least... We're doing a massive post to conclude our Ludum Dare 48 experience ###
#### First of all, we would all love to thank you for our kind words. Thanks to your feedback and support, we've decided to launch this game as a full game, including online co-op, to steam! [Check it out here](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1626280/Explory_Story). We would be incredibly grateful if you wishlisted the game if you enjoyed it. We aim to make a lot more fun and a lot more features and characters. Ok enough self-promo, let me respond to each of you. ####

@pancelor Thanks for all of the feedback! Yeah we've had the same reservations about making a full game. We have a list of things we will do to improve the gameplay, and more importantly, create different types of gameplay. As for the sound, i'm being told it was made in-house from scratch but its using a soundkit that has a lot of retro sounds. We looked into the licensing and everything for the program and its all clear haha

@poweranze Thank you for playing and recording it :D I had a pleasure being in the chat while you played it.

@syudzius Thank you very much for all of the compliments! Yeah that bug was a nuisance, its long gone now...

@etrealjunior Thank you very much! Its quite possible we pursue a more child friendly theme, instead of murder, and perhaps it will do quite well! Maybe even a natively Brazilian Portugese story :)

@paul-nadan Thanks a lot! Yeah we're aiming to make the puzzles have more variantion. Sometimes it won't even be about finding words perhaps, maybe pushing props around or combat.

@togis Thank you very much for playing, i really enjoyed watching the vod and hearing the feedback. We're 100% going to use that idea, in at least a portion of the game, that is a really elegent solution to the problem. Thanks a lot, we'll hope to see you in Explory Story's future!

@anchorlight If it isn't AnchorLight, the under water expert! Its not surprise you're recommending Jules Verne. 20,000 leagues under the sea is one of the first books i read, along with Sherlock. I would absolutely love to work in Captain Nemo in some way. Thanks for all of the feedback and suggestions!


#### Welp, that's all. If you're still eager to chat with us or leave us more feedback or follow the developement of Explory Story, check out my website for all relevent links. https://bluepinstudio.com/ #####