Buying drones reduces your larvae count, but you can buy more drones than you have larvae. It just sets your larva count to 0. You should probably have to have enough larvae to buy the number of drones you want.
Not all the levels appear to have one unique solution. I believe level 9, for example, could be solved more than one way. This makes losing a life for choosing the wrong spot unfair.
I dug the game’s atmosphere but felt the good plot didn’t fit well in the gameplay. *spoil* Consider the shine in the drain: To solve the puzzle, a nun must have a religious experience, to reach a window & access a pipe. What’s the player's perceived goal at that point? How does getting a thing in a drain accomplish this goal? Even accepting the shine as a clue, how am I meant to connect the nun to it, when the pipe is found only after the nun leaves? Even guessing that, how do I deduce that music box is the solution to the abstract problem of a nun finding herself in an existential crisis? In most p&c games, randomly combining things is a frustrating failure state. Yet, in most of the meat of the game there is no clear goal or direction. It’s all more tragic that the best moments (rabbits and last scene) are during nearly uninteractive parts. It’s Good Storytelling, but it’s not Good Interactive Storytelling. I hope in later parts you’ll merge gameplay and plot. Still very promising!
An enjoyable game, but I dislike the core mechanic where every try counts towards the progression of the game. Grind is often a part of these games, but having a fixed grind you have to do to complete the game feels off. Hitting the ground is just really pause in the gameplay where you buy upgrades; the game itself is a continuous progression that is only partially interactive. The fact that so much of the perceived challenge is to stay in the air, and there is no reward for doing that, lessens the feeling of accomplishment in the game. Consider: if I had the ability to fly for 1 minute before falling, and you had the ability to do it for 2, we'd both progress at the same speed. I'd make two runs taking 2 minutes, and you'd make one. I understand the mentality of trying to reduce the sting of failure, but take that to its extreme, and you aren't really making a game anymore.
Great game! The puzzles are good, but usually not too hard, the music is nice, and the art design is both fitting and very evocative. The only time I got unreasonably stuck is on a level where I needed to use the large fellow's roll and I didn't realize he rolled. I thought he just broke blocks.
I thought it was just going to be a silly sprite-swap of a space top-down shooter, but you've really made something nice here. The mechanic of having three teammates with different skills and hitboxes was really inventive, and I especially like how you emphasized this when one of them died, or was turned into a pig, and the player had to adapt to a different strategy. 5/5 and I really like where you're going with it. I hope you make a longer version!
What I learned about the human body: with perseverance, and appropriate facial hair, a person can learn to fly. Thanks Museum of Science and Industry Chicago!
Considering Santa Claus is a character well known to have a method of flying, this version of well-trod "jump high" games is surprisingly difficult to gain altitude in. The grind is all about microscopic advances, and the goals are both relatively boring ("make X jumps" is literally just a time wasting mechanic) and incredibly repetitive. Not going to try finishing this one.
There is a lot of good to the design of this game, but I think the gameplay falls a bit short, which is a pity. Theoretically, it seems it is meant as a point-and-click adventure, but the puzzles of that variety are both far too simple, and completely linear. There is no thought involved: you figure out how and where to use the torch because it is marked, not because you have to think creatively. So really, the point-and-click adventure part is just a very nicely made framework for 3 more traditional, non-story puzzles, one of which is astoundingly easy, another is difficult only if you don't allow yourself to use pencil and paper, and the last really quite hard. One hard puzzle isn't enough, I'm afraid. It needs more meat.
I like the story and artwork for this, but I think it fails in the gameplay, because it doesn't understand the games it is replicating. Balloon in a Wasteland and the zombie copy of it both had action choices that allowed for multiple ways to reach a long-term goal. You might hunker down and build defenses, or work on escaping right away, or some middle point between the two. The freedom that entailed was the underlying charm of the game. >spoiler warning< But if you rush to freeing the tree and winning this game, you get slaughtered by the tree. Which means this is just another flat upgrades game, where you are pretty much just guessing what the author thought the best strategy was. The games this is based on showed you some rules and a goal and let you strategize. This game breaks the rules it establishes at the beginning, ruining that.
Slight bug: high score list isn't a high score list, but list of scores that were highest. So if you score 4 5 10, the list will be 10 5 4. Then if you score 6, it won't be entered.
I played this game a year or two ago, and just revisited it today because of the badge. What a gem. Great, subtle story with likeable characters you never really meet but get to know via proxy, and a gameplay that is both fun and challenging, and suits the story well. Exploit is rare internet gold.
Really neat little idea, drawn out to full effect. Not a long game but I appreciate the originality quite a lot, and I think I'd get frustrated if Normal mode lasted longer.
The keys got stuck once or twice, so I was continually going in one direction, but pressing in that direction cleared the problem. It also might do to allow mouse control, for finer positioning of the focus point.
This is a really expertly put together game, which I'm compelled to score highly, but I have to say that I think there's far too much of a focus on wasting the player's time.
I understand the "missions" are not achievements, but there is no real feel of questing. They feel exactly like achievements, except with narrow timeframes in which they can be caught. Some of them are just terrible. The "Three perfect launches" would be great as a regular achievement, but is just plain evil if its only offered later on, after the player may have bought the upgrade that makes perfect launches *harder to get*. Missions which are dead easy but require you to have bought a particular upgrade are just filling up space. Finally, there is a real lack of sense of accomplishment when an mission giving you $10,000 requires an upgrade that costs upwards of $300,000.
The game starts out brilliantly then trips over its own upgrades and missions, and flounders into dull repetitiveness. 4/5
It feels like any skill has been playtested out of this. I don't see any appreciable speed change to: bouncing on heads instead of running, grabbing red bull "boosts" or getting the max combo thing. They happen, but I don't seem to go further or faster when they do. So mostly its just randomly getting points for a long time, then a further period when things are slow enough that I can control myself, but no significant distance is added because I'm going so slow. It's a flashy grind, nothing more. Nerdook's games are usually much more inventive and thought-provoking.
I very much like the idea; gamifying something that is usually a chore in other games. It makes a lot of sense, considering how much of this people do in RPGs. But for all its ingenuity, this game needs more polish. Objects don't seem to snap from one square cleanly to the next. You can move an object with the cursor staying within one square, and it'll sometimes pop one step to the left or right early. Also, combining items is tortuously difficult. It's not simple drag and drop; I'm not sure exactly why, but putting your cursor over something doesn't seem to be enough. For stars, there's a bug where if you drag a star over one object, to a second, you can't combine them. You have to drop the star and try again. Finally, the benefits of each object needs to be a bit clearer. I like how having a full crossbow is good, having a full crossbow with an extra pouch of ammo is better, and a pouch of ammo without a crossbow is useless. But why does a small potion only add to magic sometimes?
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 "Creatively Complicated"){kind=icon}
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Hehe, yes, I think most kids will do well to play it with their parents - kind of what we hoped would happen ;)