Grieventide

Really pretty art!
Only thing i noticed is that you can hit enemies through walls but aside from that, great game!

Mood is kinda cool

I liked the candle light being your healthbar mechanic of the game which was very unique.
audio was wayyy too loud at some points. Combat was really easy and enemies could be hit through walls.
end boss was way too easy also.
athmosphere and mood were both phenomenal tho.


Finished the game! It is quite easy tbh, probably because there are many twigs along the way and you are never short on hp (Apart from the boss fight). Coincidence that this game uses the same font as mine :P
Obviously not spoiling the final message :)

Nice game, the mood was very good, and I liked the different enemies in each region, it would be really cool if they also had different behaviours, not just sprites

I really like the way lighting is implemented as this wobbly shape that reacts to your movement. For a while I didn't understand what the collectibles are doing because my life was full all the time, but when the hits started putting my light out, everything made sense.

Hey, nice game! I played through the whole thing twice to see if there was anything I missed.


Things I liked:

- I thought the vignette effect around the edges was a great trick to make the game feel more claustrophobic and stressful.

- The combat felt pretty satisfying since you couldn't just stand still and attack.
- Also I like how you don't explicitly tell the player what their goal is and you let them figure it out on their own! Exploring around the world felt satisfying and I liked that you had multiple enemy types to keep my wanting to explore.

- The sound was nice and worked well with the game (other than some volume issues)


Some things that I think could be improved on are:

- Communicating what has collision more clearly in the art. There is a certain ground tile that looks a lot like the wall tiles (I think it's like a stone path or something). Since I could walk over this, I spent the rest of the game trying to walk over some of the walls thinking they were stone paths. Giving all walls a white highlight along their edges would help communicate that they have collision.

- Although the combat felt good, the fact that you can attack through walls trivializes the whole game. Buildings should feel the most difficult since you don't have as much space to back up while attacking but instead they were the easiest because I would just stand outside and kill everything through the walls before going into the empty building. I'd definitely not allow attacking through walls in the future.

- I wasn't sure what I was picking up most of the time. They looked like sticks but I have no idea what purpose they served

- The main game progression pickups (looked like squares with a pi symbol on them) were way too loud when you picked them up. Some volume options would really help here.


Overall, I had a great time playing it. Good job :)

I think you've got something really cool here, both as a jam game and as a potential full-scale project. As a jam game, I think the way it's structured is awesome. I started the game lost, then slowly discovered that there was a whole quest-thing going on. The environmental discovery of the quest through pathways and runes is something I've never seen executed so well in a jam game. There's a sense of completion here. As a full-scale project, I would love to see it pushed and developed with more attack types (that said, the simplicity does add to the enjoyment, so that would need to be reconciled), more enemy types, and some environmental storytelling.

You've done some things really well. The attacking is satisfying, the art is charming, and the way you deal with health is, honesty, inspired. It looks brilliant to slowly dim it as you get closer to death. There's definitely a Don't Starve + Dark Souls feel to the overall game.

There was too much firewood around for losing to be an actual concern (though I did pick up a lot of it without knowing what it did before), and the combat was not too challenging. I think that's the big criticism I'd have. The combat gets a little bland after a while. Within the super bleak theme, I think you need to give the player more in terms of combat. Either making it more mechanically challenging, or making it more puzzle-y. Different enemy types requiring different tactics. Either of those things would fit the bleak theme better than what you have now.

Overall, it's a really good game! I really hope you push this to a bigger project, I would want to play a post-jam version with more story and variation.

This is really cool game with darkness atmosphere.
But it is possible to hit throught the walls.

Thank you!

The atmosphere is really cool! I feel like there could have been fewer pickups, as I didn't really know what they did for a while due to always having full health. The place that needed the "keys" could have been moved closer to the start so you knew what the goal was from the start. Anyways that's just some thoughts, cool entry! :smiley:

@lord-shulky Thanks for playing, and finishing it! Yeah, I think it probably was a little too easy, what with the amount of sticks. I took a look at your game too, really nice.

@sjpixels Wow, yeah, that's some great feed back there, thanks. And thanks for playing it! I made a couple of bug fixes based of your suggestions, like the audio issues and attacking through walls issues. So thank you.

@steve-dragon Thanks so much for the kind words and feedback! Yeah, I originally wanted to have a few different types of attacks, to make it a bit more mechanically challenging, but didn't have the time to fit it all in. I might release a post-jam version. There was so many ideas I had for it that needed to be cut out due to time constraints. Anyway, thanks for playing!

Ahh, the atmosphere and environmental design had a really strong dark fantasy vibe that can be difficult to pull off without coming across as generic--which this didn't. The knight with the candle flame atop his head, the creature from the end, the strong, thematic use of greyscale andn of coursen the rich but mournful composition of the soundtrack all worked together really well!

My only real gripe would probably be that the game was too easy, with none of the enemies posing any real threat or challenge, but I think the atmosphere's the main attraction here anyway. :grin:

I also wasn't all too sure what those branches I was picking up were doing--if anything--but I picked them all up anyway (I think), because of course I did...! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Great work!

@skruffye Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I think it was a little easy, I might release a post jam version with increased difficulty and more enemy variety. The sticks are used to regain health if you're hit by enemies, but if you have full health you wouldn't have noticed anything.

Maybe a little too simple/easy, but I like the mechanic of visibility being tied to your health. The art/mood are really great as well!

Great game and great mechanics. The controls are very responsible and the atmosphere is wonderful, the graphics combines too much with the audio. Congrats, i really enjoyed it.

What a beautiful game! The stylistic rendering, the well made enemy sprites, our adorable little flame knight - and that health vignette!! So cool!

Really well done, perfect atmosphere - reminds me of dark souls / bloodborne.

cool game really fun, I think maybe a knock back on the attack and slightly faster enemies might have improved it a bit since as it was combat felt a bit straight forwards (I didn't really feel threatened at all and killed the boss via standing still and spamming attack) having knockback and faster enemies would require the player to keep more awareness of their surroundings

This game is well polished and delicately made. I love how the pixel animations work well in your game, and the flow feels natural that you need to collect all the runes from defeating the boss. I could only complain that there is neither audio feedback nor knockback when I get hurt or slay the enemy. But overall, it is a great job!

Love the sprites and mood of this game. The sword swings feel good, and the animation is clean. Fighting the boss was fun -- definitely was surprised when I returned to the center and saw it there. Nice work!

Really nice art style! Inclined to ask how you manage to get it to look that way. Unfortunately, I got lost and didn't manage to finish the game :slight_smile:. Really neat experience!

nice graphic and mood :) I liked the idea that the health is displayed as the range of the light.

I had issues getting the game to run in Firefox. It pukes out a bunch of errors inside the Godot library. "Uncaught (in promise) ReferenceError: SharedArrayBuffer is not defined" but in Chrome it works fine.

It is a beautiful pixel art, it seems very good to me that the direction of the character and his attack accompany the movement of the mouse. I think the damage done with that great sword is well balanced haha! makes it more challenging. Well done! xD

I gotta say the art direction is beautiful. I like how you handled the lighting aspect for the game as well as that music :musical_note: I love it

Great job :clap:

@ugly-robot Thanks so much! Yeah, I was going for an aesthetic similar to Dark Souls.

@baubau Thanks! If you mean the wobbly shadow, I used a shader for it. [The book of shaders](https://thebookofshaders.com/) is a great resource. For this, the chapters on "shapes" and "noise" are what I referenced.

@smiley Thanks for the feedback! I just tested it on Firefox, and yep, it's not working. The game had some audio popping and stuttering issues before, which is why I opted to use the shared array buffer export option in Godot, but I might revert it back as it's not working on some browsers.


A really "moody" entry ;-) The art looked really cool, with the morphing pixel vignette and the gooey final boss being the highlights for me. The gameplay loop was a bit repetitive, although it didn't bother for too long as the game itself was quite short. More variation in terms of enemies and environment would have been nice, but for a solo (!!!) entry the amount of content was absolutely fine. Combat and the controls worked well and the audio side complemented the overall package really nicely. One minor thing/issue I noticed (not sure if intentional) was that the player sprite flickered a bit while moving causing the player to look a bit fuzzy during gameplay (played in WebGL with Chrome). The enemy sprites didn't exhibit this behaviour tho.

Anyways, AMAZING work for a solo entry! Keep it up!