Hell R Us by CaptainDreamcast
It happens to all of us. It might be happening to you right now! You don't watch your step or karma, and wham, you fall into one of those eastern hells with their oni and yama and everything. This might come as a bit of a shock, but that's EXACTLY what happened to Dante, a knife-wielding barista with antisocial tendencies (most words in his description hopefully unrelated). Will he make it out of the depths of hell? Will he recognize the depths of his fellow humans? Will there be demon cat girls with suspiciously cat-shaped cleavage? There is only one way to find out... IN HELL R US!
The two things that came to my mind for the theme were some fairytales about visiting hell (Dante, Orpheus and the ancient Jomon folktale known as "Touhou 11"), and exploring "depth of personality". So the logical conclusion was to put a hipster in hell. What hindered it a bit was that I'm still experimenting with cutting the fat of my LD games' story, which really did not mesh well with this theme, but let's jot that one down as an experiment(TM) even if it didn't quite stick the landing. I had fun drawing and voicing the characters, Kasha a cute, I'll make a mental note for future Ludum dares that more cat ears might improve character designs. Gameplay was a pretty meh again, I had plans to make it deeper (heh), but couldn't really hash it out. Next time, next time.
Thanks a lot if you give it a try!
Ratings
| Overall | 115th | 3.567⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 60th | 3.667⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 249th | 2.741⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 186th | 3.383⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 106th | 3.683⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 26th | 3.963⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 2th | 4.448⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 102th | 3.643⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 39🗨️ |
I had a good time with your game, and mad props for releasing a game for the Dreamcast. Multi-platform anything in 48 hours sounds like a kind of hell in itself, but you made it through and back. :v:
Anyway, this was awesome! The takes within takes on the theme were hilarious, I loved how all the characters had hidden (off-screen) depths in the depths of hell. The ending screens were really fun too!
The gameplay was a bit bare-bones this time, but I did appreciate how all enemies had different behaviours, with Kashsa moving a lot, Broni dealing a lot of damage & [REDACTED] spamming bullets. I tried speedrunning it a few times, but after accidentally skipping the result twice by spamming A & Enter I gave up :(
Overall, I enjoyed it! Great entry!
It's a subtle detail, but I love how the game opens with you spinning as you fall, then landing at a funny angle. A stellar opening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j963WrMTG_A
Had fun with this one. The tongue-in-cheek jokes got a chuckle out of me and the "Hell or Hell" graphics and animation also made me laugh. Here is my speedrun attempt results.
- control scheme is a little bit weird, i would replace Enter with space bar and also replace A by space bar
- fighting can be cheesed quite easily by just spamming A next to the enemy
But overall i see nice work here, so keep it up!
That was hilarious.
the hit boxes are a bit too small, hard to predict. I am usually terrible at this kind of game, but managed to win by just running into the ennemy and spamming A..
The double A/enter control for skipping text / menu is strange.
Speedrun world record maybe? (ouch my hands, the "a" and "enter" mashing through dialogue strategy)
Also running on Flycast:
Like others, I find the combat to be the weakest part, I don't think I was hit once by an enemy by just mashing the A key right next to them ^^
But the dialogs were fun, I wasn't prepared to hear them all voiced. And all that in 48h is quite impressive, congrats!
