What a cool premise! In most RPGs, the enemies progress slightly faster than your party, but in this one, I see that the enemies mostly remain the same power while you go back to a point where you were weaker. Normally, you'd learn how to fight enemies, use that knowledge for a bit, and then discard it as you get powerful enough to steamroll that particular encounter. But in this game, it's important to pay attention to the behaviours of easy enemies you're steamrolling because they're relevant in your future instead of your past.
Interestingly, I've felt like most of these jam games have an inverse difficulty curve where you start out having to ration every resource, but in the endgame you have enough characters and resources to spam strong attacks and heals as much as you want. That makes the difficulty curve of this particular entry feel like an oddly good fit for this jam since the "early-game" is near the end instead of the beginning. Since you start in the "final boss fight", it's not instantly clear what your characters roles are or how to use, which turns a fight that would be fairly straightforward for a real final boss into a test of adaptation and thinking on your feet.
After doing some of the hard and resource-stingy combat-focused entries, this one felt like a nice, chill break.
The way information was conveyed to the player was excellent. It starts out intentionally confusing, but slowly reveals how everything got to that point in a satisfying way. Narratively, the story also does a good job of ramping down the tension as you go along to match the tension the story should have at that point in time. The music switches went a long way towards making this work. Two of the puzzles seem like guessing games at first, but provide clever ways to solve them.
There's a lot going on here! The main premise is obviously a cool idea, the way the story is structured is smart and even when moving backwards in time it feels like new info is revealed in a natural way that builds toward the ending in a satisfying way where everything really comes together. The end is nice and I got a kick out of one particular bit of it.
At first the high encounter rate seemed intimidating, especially coming off a bunch of low-resource management focused games, but I eventually realized that stats and items are generous enough to encourage being fast and aggressive with magic and attacks, and the escape rate is pretty consistent if you get stuck, at the cost of not getting any money. So that definitely streamlines things and lets you feel cool and powerful while doing them, while not quite slipping into it just feeling free. You did a good job making those later bosses feel more tense despite them technically taking place "earlier" in the timeline (which in a way makes sense since the characters have less experience - why wouldn't it be harder?)
All in all you made a very cool thing and I'm so glad you pushed through and got something in for the jam!!!
Oh my gosh this is probably the most high-effort feedback I've gotten on anything I can remember doing ever, thanks tons first and foremost! :D
I'd love to go through my entire creative process but the main thing is that I'm so very glad the story reached you. A writer's biggest fear is trying something weird and different without knowing if it will hit the mark or not. Glad the storytelling worked in the strange way I approached it.
Also very glad to hear the combat worked out. I did not set out to make a game with a lot of aggressive battles, but as the nonlinear story began to click with me, it seemed the way to get the feeling I wanted.
Thanks again and again, this overall fell so short of what I imagined in my head that it means a lot to know things did work in their own ways. I mostly just want to make another game and your honest words will help a lot!
Cool little game! I did notice that if you use the teleport spell when inside the ghost slime puzzle house, it gives you the option to teleport to outside the tower, which I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to be able to access during that part of the story.
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What a cool premise! In most RPGs, the enemies progress slightly faster than your party, but in this one, I see that the enemies mostly remain the same power while you go back to a point where you were weaker. Normally, you'd learn how to fight enemies, use that knowledge for a bit, and then discard it as you get powerful enough to steamroll that particular encounter. But in this game, it's important to pay attention to the behaviours of easy enemies you're steamrolling because they're relevant in your future instead of your past.
Interestingly, I've felt like most of these jam games have an inverse difficulty curve where you start out having to ration every resource, but in the endgame you have enough characters and resources to spam strong attacks and heals as much as you want. That makes the difficulty curve of this particular entry feel like an oddly good fit for this jam since the "early-game" is near the end instead of the beginning. Since you start in the "final boss fight", it's not instantly clear what your characters roles are or how to use, which turns a fight that would be fairly straightforward for a real final boss into a test of adaptation and thinking on your feet.
After doing some of the hard and resource-stingy combat-focused entries, this one felt like a nice, chill break.
The way information was conveyed to the player was excellent. It starts out intentionally confusing, but slowly reveals how everything got to that point in a satisfying way. Narratively, the story also does a good job of ramping down the tension as you go along to match the tension the story should have at that point in time. The music switches went a long way towards making this work. Two of the puzzles seem like guessing games at first, but provide clever ways to solve them.
Overall, thanks for making this! :)
There's a lot going on here! The main premise is obviously a cool idea, the way the story is structured is smart and even when moving backwards in time it feels like new info is revealed in a natural way that builds toward the ending in a satisfying way where everything really comes together. The end is nice and I got a kick out of one particular bit of it.
At first the high encounter rate seemed intimidating, especially coming off a bunch of low-resource management focused games, but I eventually realized that stats and items are generous enough to encourage being fast and aggressive with magic and attacks, and the escape rate is pretty consistent if you get stuck, at the cost of not getting any money. So that definitely streamlines things and lets you feel cool and powerful while doing them, while not quite slipping into it just feeling free. You did a good job making those later bosses feel more tense despite them technically taking place "earlier" in the timeline (which in a way makes sense since the characters have less experience - why wouldn't it be harder?)
All in all you made a very cool thing and I'm so glad you pushed through and got something in for the jam!!!
Oh my gosh this is probably the most high-effort feedback I've gotten on anything I can remember doing ever, thanks tons first and foremost! :D
I'd love to go through my entire creative process but the main thing is that I'm so very glad the story reached you. A writer's biggest fear is trying something weird and different without knowing if it will hit the mark or not. Glad the storytelling worked in the strange way I approached it.
Also very glad to hear the combat worked out. I did not set out to make a game with a lot of aggressive battles, but as the nonlinear story began to click with me, it seemed the way to get the feeling I wanted.
Thanks again and again, this overall fell so short of what I imagined in my head that it means a lot to know things did work in their own ways. I mostly just want to make another game and your honest words will help a lot!
Cool little game! I did notice that if you use the teleport spell when inside the ghost slime puzzle house, it gives you the option to teleport to outside the tower, which I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to be able to access during that part of the story.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I did try to correct that but I still may not have implemented the skill properly.
Hopefully, any players who find themselves in that situation simply return to the world map, which should then put them back on the right track.
Thanks again for leaving some encouraging words and for trying my first attempt at an RPG Maker game. :)
"You'll soon soon"?
That typo is embarrassing for me, thanks for pointing it out.