A cute little game about an odd square that you control? Yes please! also Vinny, I want to get 1,000,000 of them bananas, truly he trumpet man needs it!

Interesting concept and quirky characters, definitely some potential here but unfortunately i got lost after finding the space dog

Such a cool concept! And so funny writing and chill music and art. Love me some 4D limited space.

This is such an interesting game. The visuals & audio really mesh well together and tweaking the chunky dials makes it feel like I'm meticulously evoking some arcane magic. Great job with this one, not something I will forget soon.

I really like the concept here, I was able to get to the purple forest with space dog's directions, but I couldn't find anything else from there. I had fun searching. Great job with the dialog.

Oh haha maybe we made the forest too hard to find. I've added some of the harder to find coordinates to the post, in case anyone wants to just read the dialogue.

Such a cool concept, still never made it to the forest. I love how the sound tells you what is nearby.

~~Oh no, it seems like the forest texture isn't actually loading properly on the web version. It seems to work fine on the PC version though.~~
The issue should be fixed!

I... Have no idea what I'm doing here. I met Vinny but didn't see any obvious clues for what to do after that, and I don't quite understand how the knobs work. The game is clearly giving me hints but I'm not quite picking up on what they mean. I found sgt salt by just trial and error; but then the instructions from there got me lost and I couldn't proceed further than that.

I love quirky games like this, and the concept is neat, but it feels like there's just too many dials with that take too line to tune to really feel comfortable just exploring, and if you mess up it's hard to recover without just resetting back to the crow.

The writing is lovely, every character feels unique and stands out.

Nice work!

Insanely creative game. I didn't really have the patience to explore toooo much, but what I saw was pretty great and unique.

@fireslash Thanks for playing anyway! Yeah, the next thing we would've added, if we had time, was a bookmark feature to let you save locations and more easily recover.

Interesting concept! I especially liked the feel of turning knobs and listening to the soundscape morph underneath.

I've completed two of the "quests" but I'm not sure if I've seen the definitive end. That might just be part of the intended experience though, so I'm not complaining. It was a nice interactive experience overall!

A very interesting concept, I think with a bit more time you could make an awesome piece, but right now it is quite confusing and as you said on the top of the entry, it's hard to find the characters.

I would have loved if there was a little more direction/information on how to use the dials effectively, but it was still cool just blindly scanning around. Really neat visual effect, and the audio is very soothing too. Even though I didn't fully understand the gameplay, I enjoyed it a lot :)

@chitoyuu Thank you! If you mean the Siren/Vinny quest and the Dogs quest, yes those are the only two we had time to implement.

@sylvic @croze Yeah, it was definitely a challenge to think of ways to make the space navigable.

The intent was to have a few lines that stretched out from each key location; you go from the crow to the city following one of the city's lines, then to Sgt. Salt on another of the city's lines. The same goes for the forest. I guess in the end we didn't communicate this very well; maybe we should've stated this directly?

I think if we were to develop this further, I'd like to incrementally add dials as the player finds new locations, rather than giving access to all of them at once.

Another consideration is that this game is pretty dependent on color perception. For instance where Sgt. Salt says to go to where the screen just starts to turn purple, some people have told me that what I see as purple, they see as blue. So the colors need to be adjusted to be more obvious, or color-based hints need to be thrown out altogether.

Very unique game I should say, the music it fits the aesthetics. Very nice

Quirky game that really played into the theme. I enjoyed the characters, their dialogue was amusing and mysterious. I found it difficult to find characters though, perhaps a hot or cold type system to help point people in the right direction might help. Honestly my only gripe, this was an extremely charming game. Well done!

Phenomenal mood and innovative controls with a wonderful feel to them. The way that the gradients of colour vibrate as I turn the dials is mesmerising. It feels like I am trying to communicate with a different world across a great distance, and I am only picking up partial signals and echoes that might have been sent out from a long time ago. The characters are so softly sketched and have loveable personalities that make you glad to have run into them. Beautiful work!

The dial mechanics is unique, it could be much better if you add some mechanics to give players hints to find meaningful positions, instead of roaming around.

Amazing game, I loved the characters, the music, the art. Very creative and original. Also I liked the idea of the square and the knobs. The only note is that is hard to find the characters, I had to use the coordinates that you left writen. Congratulations on an awesome game

This is amazing!!!!
I love the scanning mechanic and the visuals, music and writing are so good 😄
I got lost many times, had to use the cheatsheet in the description for the forest. It helped that the music would fade in if you were close to something but maybe that raidus could be higher and there could also be another hint of sorts 😛

While it is pretty easy to get "lost" and not progress, there is a certain charm in just experiencing the soundscape and static. It's all the enjoyment of exploring a vast, open-world game but on a granular scale. Ironically, the fact that you are scrubbing through CMYK is both limited and nearly limitless. The game could use some more auditory "sign-posts" but it is an absolute joy.

I like the idea here, I think the square/dials interface could be extended to other stories.

Wow, well, that was innovative! I liked how fluid the animation was, at some point I even spent some time just pressing random buttons and watching the image change, haha

Loved the characters! The music really helped me feel like I had traveled to different worlds

The square... the square is so pretty... and it makes such nice sounds...
Lovely, lovely entry! I'm a fan!

This is amazing. I wasn't sold on the crow, although the banter with the statue was funny. But Ol' Vinny won me over in about 3 seconds. Your sense of humour is great! I love the way directions are given. E-ward and F-ward are at once foreign and familiar. "Shift S-ward from here until you start to see purple" is an amazing piece of dialogue, with or without context. The music is extremly varied and interesting. Each character has its own distinct mood thanks to the audio. I think it would be helpful if the player dialog had an indicator or something. Often I read actions and player dialog in the voice of the character I was speaking to and had to pause for a moment when I realized it was not something they said.

Some of the directions got me mixed up. Especially the colors, because we have different ideas of what's purple and what's blue. I think this could be fixed if you added some more objective shape landmarks. ("If you get to the polka dots, you'll know you should have gone R-ward at the squiqqles, then S-word into the blip blops before taking a Q-ward turn at the spherical cubes")

I also wish there was an option to turn the dial faster. I got lost a lot and scanning through the dials randomly takes a very long time. Sometimes I would start to make out a location and tweak the dials to get to a sweetspot, but then I'd get to a point where any dial I turned made the location fade. I guess I don't understand how it works.

But overall this was awesome and so creative!

I thought this was a cool navigation concept, and I'd love to see it expanded into a bigger game! I got lost after a point, and would often get mixed up pressing another direction's dial instead of reversing the other direction. (As in, after going to A-ward I'd accidentally go S-ward instead of Q-ward to correct.) I think this is because the dials increase from left to right, but the controls on the keyboard are up-down.

That aside, I really loved the atmosphere of the game. The sound design in between locations was pretty otherworldly. Moving the dials felt like tuning an old oscillator, and I got this sense of eerie wonder when I'd stumble upon a new area and try to tune it into focus.

Great job!

Thanks for the kind words and feedback everyone!

@lovewerk Those are all good suggestions. We'd thought about using some sort of shape/pattern for Sgt Salt's directions rather than just "purple" but I ended up wanting to use landmarks that were part of the static itself. I think if we flesh this out in the future, we'd use shapes/patterns for most directions except for things intended to be secrets. We'd also tweak the gradient so it would rely less on really subjective interpretations of what purple means.

I think it's possible you came across one of the "lines" that were diagonal? In that case, to focus it you'd have to move in two directions at once, whereas turning any single dial would make it fade. I can see how this can be very confusing since we didn't explain it, haha. Or maybe we just made it too stringent.

@bill-marcy Ooooh, good point about mixing up dials. That's the sort of QoL problem we wouldn't be able to spot on our own.

Intriguing idea with great atmosphere, very eerie and unique. Audio was the highlight for me, it set the mood perfectly. Visuals were a bit plain, except for the character sprites and the effect on the square which looked great.

Gameplay-wise the core concept is extremely promising and unique. However, I think the dials moved way too slowly which, combined with the unclear hints, made it hard to progress to the next "layer". Making the dial movement faster or allowing to set position precisely with mouse click would have made experimenting much more manageable.

Great job with the game overall. I can see this concept being taken further, there is a lot of potential. Keep it up!

cool game, keep up the good work