Greetings to all!

So while browsing games to rate have you ever noticed that zero option?

A present icon? It's as if even the person who added it to the menu wasn't paying much attention. But anyway, it's for games that have received "zero" or very few ratings. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that it's full of just bad games, some people can get unlucky or _forget to rate people on the first day and get buried as a consequence.

So I'm going to write a series of posts this month to help promote games that unfortunately wound up somewhere they don't deserve.

To kick things off let's start with Arden's Artisan Artefacts:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/ardens-artisan-artefacts

A very bizarre take on the theme but a very unique game in its own right.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with @blinry , (personally I myself wasn't) but he and his "team" have made some very good games even in past jams so I'd highly advice you to check them out:

https://ldjam.com/users/blinry/games

They use a rather obscure tool called the LÖVE engine which requires you to download it's runner from the website, which by the way is cross-platform. So I can't really get mad at that. It has a flash-esque feel to it which is personally something I don't mind in the slightest.

The idea is to build "Sacrifice Statues" for "various occasions!", be it for banishing demons or appeasing the tooth fairy. Intentional or not AAA has this very "flash game" feel to it gameplay wise as well. I first thought what I was getting into was a simple dress-up variant but only a few seconds in I realized just how wrong I was. The"sacrifice totems" you build are barely about design, since these customers all have very specific requests you're given varying constraints:

Take for example the first order you'll receive:

On the right side is a shelve full of items to choose from, but I had to cut it out of the image because of the website deeming the image size too large. So I took a couple of mops and made this:

Other categories beside weight include: - cuteness - hardness - shininess - and even shape!

I'll reiterate it's not a game about designing what you want, it's about designing it as the customers want but while taking quite a few "artistic liberties".

The main issue I had is that from the image you'll notice that there's a base for this one, but in later levels you'll have to hang them down a chain for instance. That wasn't a big problem, what was though was the way pieces attach to each other. You can't move the base or chains so if you want to tear something apart you have to start from the very edges, and even then you might run out of shelve space. And yet for the most part I was having too much fun to complain about it, I'll just assume they can fix this post jam.

There's minimal writing but they take every opportunity they get to squeeze in some golden humor.

So I'd recommend checking out this game to all of you who've noticed this post and giving them a rating. I don't think they appear in zero anymore because I kind of "rescued" them before writing this but still they deserve all the attention they can get! Thank you for your attention and have a great day (^_^)