This game is really a fun puzzler. BTW, I was moving right and hit C and ended up getting stuck behind some dirt. I guess that's what "R" is for in part.


I thought this was a slow puzzle game at first and then i had to hit a double dash like in celeste. Loved the digging up mechanic.

neat idea!

Cool game! Nice on the theme with no jumping.

I was missing some feedback on what square I would interact with. The white square is great, but it felt strange to me that I needed to stand in the middle of the square to pickaxe. I also think it was a bit non obvious that your only allowed to carry one piece at a time. I later realized the very nice graphics feedback when you have one, but I think you could probably double the size of the filled backpack to make it super obvious when you carrying a tile. Maybe the white square could change to blue when you carry a piece, and then indicate where the piece would be placed instead (typically one step up of the white one). I was also confused why the tile is placed on the first enemy you meet. Maybe it would make more sense what was going with the blue (or what ever) indicator :)

Got too frustrated, you can call it skill issues but some checkpoints would be awesome, also a better indicator for where the blocks will get placed would be great. Love the game, love the mechanics, but also frustrated :crying_cat_face:

@runningopenloop Thanks for playing! We had a great time designing ways to make the puzzle work. We had some bugs we tried smoothing out, but placing the tiles down needed a complete overhaul if it was to be fixed :( oh well! Yeah, we knew very early that we'd need a reset button haha.

@jhonny111 Yeah, we tried making the game more of a platformer in the initial design, but it became more puzzle based as we went on, but there's a mix of both for sure. Especially as you make it to the halfway point, and can unlock jumping.

@mackain Thanks!

@bjornstenlund Haha, if you got to the point where you got backpack upgrades, you could carry 2 and 3 tiles, and the filled backpack is like... your size and more when totally filled. Since it was in stages, we didn't want it to be too big a difference each time. But you're right, there should have been SOMETHING to say how much you can hold to start. Maybe even starting yourself off with 0, and getting a backpack upgrade or something. I like the other ideas for indicators you had as well. I think those suggestions would go a long way in making the game more readable. The tile spawning rules were really tricky. It pretty much tries spawning on the space in front of you, or on top of you if that one is blocked. But there are some ways around it, and I Didn't have time to fix it. And the first level is so .... packed with things needing tutorial text, that it was too tough to ease people into that information. Oh well! Thanks for playing and thanks for all the feedback!

@gifarre I certainly would not call it a skill issue! The game is really tough! We thought it might be too easy when making it, and even we had trouble beating it, knowing everything about it going in. Not enough time left in the jam to ease things up a bit, unfortunately. But Appreciate you playing. There ARE checkpoints, but only when you go from stage to stage. We didn't want to make mid-level checkpoints, and potentially let the player get in a softlocked state and not know it. Thanks for playing!

This game is so clever! I liked all of the different upgrades, especially the ones which allowed you to jump, those really made you think about the game from a different perspective. There was a bug however that made the little worm guy put the dirt inside of another block of dirt which caused quite a bit of frustration, the game could also use a little bit of music. I did really like the sprites.

I'm liking the puzzle aspect but the platforming not that much (just personal preference, not a fan of platformers in general). I enjoyed it but didn't get too far (I couldn't for the life of me get past those spikes after getting the dash).

I really like the puzzle mechanic. The platforming got a bick tricky for me by the time I had three dashes though, so I only got to near the end of screen two.

From what I've tested and what I've read in the comments on this page, I feel like I should try it again! However, I feel like this game could benefit from a more guided first level; Maybe thats just me; Good work nonetheless! I will make sure to try it again before reviewing it!

Cool game, very unique puzzle mechanics and a cute lil worm dude. My only desire is to have a different button bound to the dash so that I can move and dash more easily. Awesome entry!

@larsievl Thanks for the compliments! Yeah, the bug where you get stuck under dirt you spawn was REALLY hard to figure out, and even though I've tried fixing it many times, it always shows up :(. I always overscope, so music and SFX are usually cut out, oh well. Thanks for playing!

@toreskovic Right. This is a ... very different take on platforming too, as for the first half you can't even jump. We also were making the levels really late in the process, although I like the puzzles we came up with. Not eveyone's cup of tea for sure! Thanks for playing even though it's not a genre you're a fan of.

@googlefrog Right. the dashing, jumping, and puzzles can be a bit too much. Thanks for giving it a shot though and leaving a comment! If you struggled with screen 2, be glad you didn't try screen 3 :laughing:

@teist ABSOLUTELY! One thing I noticed almost instantly was how little room I had to even cram tutorial text in the opening window. There's just so much you're given at the absolute very beginning. Definitely we could have done quite a lot with a bit more time and smoothing out the levels. Hopefully you find the fun if you try it out again!

@floppynub Yeah, audio sliders and button mapping is something I usually try to add, and didn't have time for this time around. If I used WASD to move, the Z X C controls were almost impossible to use. Had to use the arrow keys haha. Thanks for playing!

@floppynub Thanks for the review! Hey are you moving with WASD? Your comment made me wonder - controls easier with the arrow keys, I'd say.

Unique idea and good level design making use of various aspects. I had to give up on level 3 after reaching almost the end and getting trapped after boosting past the last enemy and the dirt i was supposed to land on. not sure how much more there is after that. very unforgiving game and finnicky placement controls (seems like pressing c if not past the midpoint of the current block just doesn't do anything?), i think if you were going to continue the concept further some local checkpoints would make it a lot more enjoyable to try hard parts over and over again. but overall I think a well done and well thought out experience!

I pushed through Level 3 and made it to the top. I kind of expected a bit more difficulty thanks to the comments warning about it. There was a lot of retrying. I do agree that some checkpoints would be appreciated.

I did hit a bug where if I wasn't pushed up right against a dirt block, instead of burying myself with the next placed block, it would "stack" on top of the first block as though I were placing the first block again. Effectively, the second block would disappear.

Cool worm game! I liked the level design and the mechanics of the game. I would love to see more. Great job!

try finding a more cohesive colour palette for your pixel art! otherwise awesome game

@tsaot :bread: :french_bread:

@helloimbenjamin Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for playing!

@sarah-upton Thanks for playing! I'm not much of an artist myself, so I can't really recognize cohesion between colors :laughing: . Any tips or resources you can point me to to learn more about it?

@helloimbenjamin This guy gets it. Worm is life!

Oooof this took me over an hour to do, but I got there!


I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on here! I really liked how you traversed down and back again, and by the end you kind of had that metroidvania feeling of zipping back through an area you'd already been through, but with new powers to trivialize some of the old challenges! There were a few pain points that made the game way more frustrating than probably intended

I think if I had one piece of advice to give, it would be to zoom the camera out and let the player plan out their route in advance - There were a lot of blind jumps (or blind rises) that you had to make, and you could end up locking yourself out/restarting an entire section if you made the wrong choice (or simply didn't think to bring a seemingly unneeded block with you through the level). Adding a little bit of signposting for the player (maybe a trail of collectibles, maybe removing "fake" paths, etc) could also help smooth those out, but I think these puzzles would feel so much better to solve if you could plan your entire route out through each screen! :)


I also ran into some weird issues with the enemy AI that made certain parts of the game harder than perhaps intended - For example, in the last screen of the level, instead of taking the (presumably intended) path where you could jump up on the right, I had to take a circuitous route involving several dashes to get around this enemy whose patrol put it right in my way during the jumping climb. It was a fun route, but it didn't feel intended, because you had that nice staircase of 3-block-high jumps to the right


I also kept running into a strange bug if I landed directly after dashing where I couldn't jump again unless I tried to mine first - It seemed like somehow the game didn't realize I had landed back on the ground when a dash ended directly on a tile.

Overall though, please don't take this feedback as me disliking the game! There's a clear vision on display here, and because of that, I was able to develop a lot of thoughts as I played through!

@koolruz wow, thanks for playing and beating the game! Based on our impressions, and ESPECIALLY after the difficulty feedback from most comments, we figured it'd likely go unbeaten because we made the levels way too tough. Adding in a couple of programming bugs that were really hard to squash on top of it and it's certainly (and understandably) not a game many will put the time to get all the way through in the rating process, so it's really appreciated!

100% agree with the zoom out. The levels were built being able to see the whole thing, so I think that really skewed what challenges were put in and why, without the player's experience in mind. And I think just having a zoom out function would have been something completely manageable, easy to implement fast, and a huge fix! I wish I would have thought of that :cry: - but there's only so much you can do in the time given, and I was in panic mode the entire last day haha. Also the collectibles idea makes a lot of sense to fix this issue, both great points for future designs!

Was there an issue with dropping dirt on that enemy from where you're standing? Any time you drop dirt, it should drop from the air to the first ground tile it sees, and any enemy in the dirt dropping path should get squashed. You can then fall on and re-pick-up the dirt tile you dropped. I realize that there's so much crammed into the first part of the first level, that this might not seem like knowledge the average player will be familiar enough with for where it was implemented.

Right. In the final hour before the deadline, there was a huge issue where you wouldn't get the appropriate number of air dashes. I had to change the grounded check state like 20 times before coming up with something that would actually prevent the counter from not resetting, and it likely messed up some other jump-allowed state condition. Super weird, we didn't run into that one but it's certainly worth looking into!

Thanks for the solid feedback all around and for playing the game all the way through. It's very appreciated!

@koolruz Yeah, thanks for playing all the way to the end! We'll definitely take all this feedback to heart, and by take it to heart I mean I'll repeat it ad nauseum to the other guy.

That part with the patrolling beetle blocking your path - actually he WAS supposed to block your path! We conceived of 2 possible ways for you to get out of there. The first is, if you creep in reeeeally carefully you can crush him with a block by standing in front of him in such a way that the dropped block doesn't block your path, like so:


Then we were like, but you can still solve it if you crush him and accidentally block your path, in this fashion:


And that is by strategically disassembling the dirt pillars you hopped up to reach that point, and going up the right edge of the level:


Judging from how you dismantled the pillar of dirt on the left of the enemy, you found a third way that we didn't even think of! That's pretty cool.

So thanks for taking the time and giving us this great intel.

@t-c Yep, I was able to drop dirt on the beetle from up there, it was just getting up there that seemed like it was an unexpected route :)

@jackofcups I see, good to know! :) I didn't realize there was still a route forward when I locked myself out after dumping dirt on the beetle! I had locked myself out several times in earlier levels by placing dirt in my path, so after being burned by it so many times, I had been conditioned to assume that whenever I was blocking off my own path, it was a sign that I had messed up 😅

Similarly, because the other puzzles were about being in the right position with the right number of blocks and didn't involve tight timing whenever you had to take out the enemies, I had assumed that killing the enemy without blocking myself off must not have been the intended solution, because the timing involved would have just been too tight

This game was super fun. I like the puzzle platforming and restricted movement mechanics. My favourite part of this game is the level design. In the condensed time-frame of a game jam, it's hard to make levels with interesting puzzles, never-mind having multiple branching pathways through those levels like you've managed to do. That is impressive! I could see myself playing way more of this game with some fleshed out mechanics, graphics, and depth. Great work!

At first I was really confused about the first dash ability at the start. Took me a while to find out, that I had to place a blog underneath it to dig throug the blocks upwards. I think this section should be build different, so that you only have the choice to do that at the beginning, so you can introduce this mechanic to everyone.

But when I found out about this mechanic I had a lot of fun playing this game. The dash, digging up and creating your own path game loop was a cool combination. I like hard plattformers, but mid-checkpoints would be appreciated, because it can get frustrating, especially when you die near the end of a level. ;)

It's nice, that you can kill enemies by placing a block above them. The level design was overall very good and I like the design of the main character. Very cool, that you put in some upgrades, which provided a change in the gameplay. :)

skill issue i guess but it was pretty hard to understand so i ended up not getting very far at all, the art is cute though

This is a very interesting concept, and had some fun elements, I agree that it was pretty hard. Having to go back to the beginning of the level was pretty frustrating.

I liked this one! Thought, I kept having to restart because I would place a block and get pushed backwards out of a square; that was a bummer.

Really good game with unique gameplay great job!