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Unfortunately that's the absolute loudest the voice lines can be  without causing clipping artifacts. I'd like to hire an audio engineer to find a workaround to address this, but won't be able to unless secure funding. We are a small team funded entirely out of pocket so we're operating under a lot of limitations.

I'm glad you appreciate it; this story is pretty special to me even though it's just a short game.

Oh, it definitely has an intentional message! Thanks for playing.

My best combo was 100,000!

And glad to hear it--of course no one has time to fiddle with balance during the jam, that's totally a post-jam thing.

Tightly designed mechanics, plays very well. Could stand to up the difficulty a ton though, I mean...

It's my friends' question, not mine, but I'm sure they will appreciate your answer.

Thank you! Yeah, those old books were a big influence. And thank you for the video, I will share it!

Some of my friends are asking whether the no paid games rule applies to a) Pay What You Want games and b) games released free during the jam but changed to paid later.

Friend of the Forge Kamataya becomes the first to try out our new demo release!

Very appealing art and I enjoyed getting to know the characters! Could use a copy edit to catch the typos, though.

So much suggested by a few short words! Great job!

I'm glad you went back and fixed that bug! (Centimane, messing with your game build, what a dick.) I went back and gave it another try and I liked it--piecing together the different rituals is fun, and you did a good job of building up a tense atmosphere. I couldn't figure out what "burn the saints to embers" was supposed to mean, though.

You're gonna love the full version: The paintings are all going to be real analog artworks in different media (oil, watercolor, and egg tempera). I'm hoping to commission different artists for exactly the reason you mention--to give each character a distinctive art style.

About the roots of Surradia: I'm drawing pretty closely from the women associated with surrealism, especially the whole muse thing (and pushback against it) and the interest in magic and alchemy. We'll definitely dive more into that in later rooms!

If you are interested in this topic you'll love reading about the three real artists that my fictional artists are based on: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Leonor Fini. They all lived absolutely fascinating lives.

Thanks for your thoughts, and for being such a champ and playing all the entries in the entire jam!

It's real tough entering a coop game into a jam--I finished all the other entries in less time than it took to corral another player and find a time when we could both sit down and play this. (I do a lot of my jam playing in the middle of the night.)

The networking worked perfectly, though, and I know how tricky that is. In fact all the implementation was very smooth and polished. But when we actually did get together and play, our experience was:

Match 1: Died 10 seconds in. Neither of us is sure which one of us got killed, or by what.

Match 2: Wandered around looking for things until the timer ran out. Didn't manage to find anything except the music box.

And yeah, that's probably just us being dumbasses--maybe if we played Minecraft, we'd be more used to this type of game and we'd be less bad at it--but that was our experience.

I found the puzzles here interesting, and the time skip mechanic is used effectively. Short but engaging.

Ah, OK.

The reason it felt like an error is that presumably the paper and the notecard both also have ink on them, and so it seems like the effect should be caused by submerging them in the bucket.

Well, not the music. But everything else.

You wrote that whole thing in a day? Daaaaaaang!

The mystery here is super meticulously designed, and the deductions are incredibly challenging. In particular it was interesting working out the order that things happened in and who went in and out of the various rooms in what order. The prose, though, needs a serious haircut--it could be solidly 1/3 the length for the same experience. Its tone was kinda patronizing too, particularly how it kept trying to convince me that I'd really have more fun playing on easy mode. (In fact I found Purist mode easier, because the clues weren't buried in so much text.)

But hey--it's only a first draft! Trim some weight, trust your players to handle the deductions on our own, and a good time will be had by all.

So I was playing the games in submission order and I gotta confess, I kept being tempted to jump the queue and play this one early. And it was just as great as I hoped. The absolute most complex and tricky deductions in the jam and a very generous number of them. I really enjoyed the puzzles to work out which horse goes in which stall and the guard schedules. Plus, after playing a good 50 hardboiled detective games in a row, the setting was a nice change of pace. (One suggestion: It might be nice to have a puzzle that matches names to sigils as an intermediate step to the stable puzzle.) 

You did such a great job on this. When I say I want more Case of the Golden Idol-likes, this is exactly what I want. Although it also made me think of Aviary Attorney, for obvious reasons. Great little mystery with such a classic Agatha Christie feel, especially the cast. I hope we'll see more in this birdie world!

Certainly the premiere goblin foot fetish game of the jam.

I like this as a setup. It's a very sensitive portrayal of the experience of being homeless and how it makes people treat you differently. The animation and the radical 80s colors are great looking. Sorry you caught COVID, hope you'll feel better and have a chance to finish it soon.

Well, this is certainly the best-looking and best-implemented 3D game of the jam. You did a nice job communicating the atmosphere and how cold it is, and I liked how the screen gradually freezes. THe power lines and stuff do a nice job of guiding the player through the play area. I would have liked the deduction to be a bigger part of it, though.

Nice little single substitution cipher implementation, the puzzles of course are just a few minutes to solve, but it's fun.

I think I may have run into a bug, tell me if I'm wrong. I tried putting the paper into the bucket before solving the code on the computer. The paper disappeared from my inventory but it showed me the "invisible ink" message, the same one you get from cracking the computer code. Subsequently clicking on the bucket says "But what's that at the bottom?" but no longer shows the close-up. Is that how the puzzle is supposed to work, or am I doing something wrong?

Brilliant. As all good deduction games should, you start with what seems like not nearly enough information and gradually go from grasping at straws to confidently piecing it all together. Some of the clues are so clever! I liked your diverse student body, and that it sometimes challenges assumptions like that siblings will look similar to each other. The implementation is smooth as silk, too, and I appreciated quality-of-life features like letting you skip verified photos. Really excellent game.

Just about my only suggestion is that you should have a note somewhere saying how many photos have to be correct before it matches a set (not everyone is going to know you're doing it the same way as Obra Dinn).

I am inordinately pleased to get my first Rot13 comment. Pages: this is a good idea, I'll add it in the next revision. (I was going to put the buttons by the sides of the pages but Godot was not cooperating.)

Gur pyhr gung vg'f Znk'f fghqvb vf gur abgr jvgu gur xrl. Znk vf gur bar jub bjaf n qbt, naq ur'f nyfb gur bar jub'f bhg bs gbja naq jbhyq arrq fbzrbar gb purpx ba uvf cynpr.

Nznln qvq gur qvivangvba orpnhfr fur'f gur bayl bar jub qbrfa'g nccrne ryfrjurer va gur 48 ubhef arrqrq gb cresbez gur fcryy. Ure orvat nccerurafvir vf whfg sebz gur abgr fur jebgr va gur obbx bs flzobyf. Vg'f abg eryngrq gb Znk (ur yrsg gur qnl orsber fur fgnegrq pnfgvat vg)

Sounds like you've thoroughly thought through the main issues here. And there may not be one solution that addresses every issue--I'll be interested in seeing the final design that you come up with.

AH. I'm being a dumbass, I should have tried that. (What messed with me is that you still can drag the words and they highlight the blanks, they just don't go in.)

Who doesn't need a little more child sacrifice in their life?

I liked the spookiness, and I thought it was a very interesting mechanic. But it did feel like it was in an early stage of playtesting--my instinct was to highlight all the words and try them all, so I quickly ended up with hundreds of cards. And since a lot of responses contain the word that triggered them, it's easy to go in circles, multiplying the words every time. 

My suggestion: Forego the highlighting (it's well implemented, I just don't think this is the right place for that mechanic) and put all the keywords directly into your inventory (you can still have cards that don't get a response--just have it not generate cards for words like "a" and "the".) Then have the card get eaten permanently, whether it gets a response or not. Also, have words you've already tried not get added to your deck again--I had trouble remembering what I words I had and hadn't used.

This is really polished--it looks nice and it plays nice. I'm really impressed that you had time to create fully-implemented minigames and everything. While I admit that I am very weary of DnD-inspired settings (does it really add anything that some minor character is a half-orc?), it seems like a well put together story, and the chicken sidekick is delightful. 

Unfortunately I couldn't get the inner lock to work--I double-checked the combination and tried several times, plus variations like trying them in different orders, trying them the opposite direction, trying full rotations instead of notches, etc, but nothing worked. So I haven't quite gotten to the end of this one.

I had the same problem, haha. One question and then time's up! But maybe the detective is just THAT good!

The information here is so intricate. I was definitely taking a lot of notes. The premise is super interesting and well-designed, but I do think it's not really winnable as-is and could use a lot of balance work. The issue is that when you spot a contradiction, there are a whopping twelve different possible explanations, two of which are usually correct at once, so it could take a good dozen cards to sort out even one discrepancy--and that's assuming you got the cards you needed.

I think this game is trying to incorporate too many elements at once. If I were you, I'd remove or simplify a lot of the roles, or simplify something else, like telling us the order of the cars.

Loving this interface; it's so unique and clever. I loved how much story you were able to put into just two documents. Spotting the contradictions was very interesting! It looks nice, too. I did think there were some leaps of logic in the story, though--for instance, you could deduce that Andrew took the papers, but I don't think you can reasonably conclude that he intended to give them to Byron based on just these documents.

Nooooooo, I need more!

For real, this is just pitch-perfect. Gorgeous art, good story, and the whole thing is so super slick and polished. Such a fantastic holistic look--the shadows and colors, the halftone screens, the fonts. I'm also really impressed by the tutorialization at the beginning. The puzzle was also really fun and not too difficult (got it on the first try).

Please tell me this is going to be the first in a series and this isn't all there is!

Yeah, I think that would be great. Totally understand the motivation of wanting to keep it simple and solvable for the jam (that's also why I made mine so easy to brute force). But I would love a tough mode, the structure of the game is so well-suited for it!