The game looks great and the music fits the atmosphere perfectly :thumbsup:

A very coherent looking and sounding game! Everything fits really well together. The only problem was that I never found out what I was really doing. I could progress by trial and error, but it was unclear why and when to use the phone.

A little bit more of player guidance might make it really complete! Well done

Nice job！I like the atmosphere

I really appreciate the graphics, sound, and the whole atmosphere in general. The gameplay was a little confusing but all in all a solid game.

Woah! What an entry! The whole time I felt like I was on the RAZORS edge of softlocking, hah! Which was quite cool - I think this game must've felt like a nightmare to balance, making sure the player could make one, maybe two mistakes - but otherwise had to be pretty perfect in their managing of when-to-level-up vs when-to-drink-vial.

Also - you have tremendous skills as an artist an musician. It is so easy to have a jam game song drone on, but I enjoyed that tune throughout, and miss it now that its gone! A haunting, sonorous, almost dark lullaby.

The background was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The bold purple mists reminded me of 'Off' - one of my favorite visually stylistic games. The bold, almost typographical elements were especially fitting of the alien-but-tactile style (the icons for the different signal colors, the sigils for the checkpoints, etc). It made it feel intriguing and diegetic, the way that like the Voynich Manuscripts have an innate allure.

All of the enemy designs were quirky, strange, and felt right out of that classic era of early japanese nes games where their abstract quality enhances their spooky and enemgatic feel. Reminded me of Hylics in that way.

Also - you made a whole friggen 2nd set of tiles, characters, and items for the virtual-world! Crazy!! _How_ did you do this much art and code in 48hrs??

Super impressive entry - fantastic work!

@ugly-robot Thanks! I'm just pretty fast, and to be fair, neither the art style or game style here were new to me this time around :)

Woah. This is a seriously impressive Compo entry. There's a lot of rooms with their own interesting puzzles. I was a bit confused why the "signal rooms" (?) were randomly selected from a pool of rooms, instead of each spot having a unique room. It makes me wonder if I didn't see any rooms due to RNG.

I will also say, I wish it didn't just close on its own. If it had a little "press ESC to close" that would have been a lot better. I probably only feel this way because I was recording though, and the "desktop jumpscare" would be a lot less annoying if I wasn't suddenly recording a discord chat, my downloads folder, and my messy desktop.

After conferring with the eldritch, we've all agreed that you have won the **Abstract Horrors From Beyond My Nightmares** award!


Here's my recorded playthrough to provide you with a lot of feedback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJTV8f50uMA

@100th-coin Thank you very much! The signal rooms being randomly selected ended up being my "cheat" to have as many hidden items as I needed without needing to design a puzzle for each one. The few puzzles I did make fall flat anyways, though... :p
I appreciate that you recorded this! It definitely helps with the post-jam ruminations :)

Wow, this game has quite some content! Some things were a bit difficult for me to understand (e.g. it took me a while to understand that when you step on an enemy the attacks repeat until one dies). But after I understood the rules it was a fun game! Turns out I am a puzzle-rpg fan and didn't know beforehand :smile: One thing that made me a bit nervous was the fact that I was never sure my checkpoints were still solvable because I didn't know how tight the game was designed. But in the end I was able to end it with quite some health items left :smile: Very cool game and also nice work in the graphics and the music!

Hold on this is absolute kino! The music and the visuals are so good and the gameplay is so smart and cool!

I didn't fully understand why I kept getting some of the same "signal" puzzle rooms over and over, at one point it was a bit annoying since they just slowed me down and I had enough without them, but at the same time I needed to clear them to unlock the last programs. Also at one point I had so much stuff in my inventory that the inventory was showing up over my character stats. But both of these are very minor with how good the game was. I really really liked this game. Probably my favorite game I played this LD.

I think you should basically just add some screenshots to the ldjam page so more people will want to try this, the game itself is amazing, people just might not know it from a page which has just a few lines of text and nothing else. I am really happy I tried the game anyways!

Excellent and meticulously crafted mechanics, congratulations.

Fun game!

!> Later on it became more of a "how can I kill everything" kinda game, but that was also a good challenge, to see how high my stats could go.

One thing I'd recommend; let the player choose to go to the ending of the game. Right now there is a hallway with "end" at the.. well, end. Let the player walk to the end instead of booting them to the end screen right away. That way the player can turn back in case they missed anything (I had a couple of rooms I still wanted to explore!)