Reviews

Review by elias all reviews by elias

It's well executed for just 72 hours. I suck at memory games but managed to clear the board eventually.

Getting it to run on Linux was not too complicated - I downloaded Godot into the same folder and ran it and I suppose Godot has a feature that if a game project is in the current directory it just runs the game :D

It would have been nice to have more fable cards of course and I'd have loved to see those dialogs.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

I loved this game, it's the most memorable from this TINS for me. All the strange art that I would absolutely believe was really created by cats (or else by some weird AI). And then actual puzzles to solve! I'm just sad there was only 3 rooms/puzzles. I could see this developed into a complete game that I would buy to play on a long flight or train ride.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Awsome entry. Really well made for 72 hours. There's a scrolling title screen with music, a game over text, and little details like the animation when the snake is out of paint.

All the rules are also implemented, snake&fox fable, the foxes and the snake can talk in speech bubbles, lots of iridescence and the color chart you can view in the center is essential to the game.

I couldn't figure out a way to stop the foxes (at some point a few of them turned brown instead of grey but I'm not sure why). So while I was laboring a lot to spray paint everywhere eventually they always made it all gray...

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Crystal Commune is a complete city building game, very impressive for 72 hours. All the rules are implemented:

- There's animal characters (especially a yellow elephant!!!) and I think it's a fable about the downfall of capitalism or something?

- Iridescence is present on the iridescent crystals as well as on the lights of the space ship.

- There is little speech bubbles up all the time since all the animals are always hungry and sleepy.

- And there's two charts, albeit not very useful ones since money just goes from 20,000 to zero and population just oscillates between 2 and 8. In all the 20 or so games I played.

One challenging thing in the beginning is the icons - they all look too similar. It would have been helpful to display the letter you have to press (like M for mine) instead of the 5 icons. There's also a mouse cursor icon and a destruction icon but I could not figure out the purpose of either. You can't click any structures or animals so why would you ever be in the cursor mode? And when you destroy something no money is returned so why would you ever do it?

It would be useful to have more information about what's going on. Why is the mine not doing anything? Is it close enough to the crystals? Why is the animal rather eating and sleeping (I mean, can't blame them) instead of working? Does each animal need their own house? How many animals can a cafe serve at once? How many employees does a mine have?

The biggest issue I had is that something with money seems to be wrong in my version. When I watched closely for a while it looks like an animal that enters the mine works 3 times to make $300. Then it goes to a cafe and rapidly spends $300 (it buys 6 items for $50 each - in my mind that money should go to me but I actually lose it - for example miners in Ohio used to be paid in mine store tokens instead of money and therefore forced to buy in the overpriced mine store so the mine made extra money off all the miners it employed...). Anyway, on top of losing the exact amount the worker made, there's $150 upkeep for the mine and $100 for the cafe. So each worker that works is losing me $250 and there is no way to ever get positive income.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 4

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by elias all reviews by elias

I liked this game a lot. Managed to complete the entire song. It's well made for 72 hours, even if some of the rules are missing. I assume the song has something to do with a fable or another rule but I could not find a readme or logs so not sure.

I was intimidated at first since I don't know much about music and matching visually seemed impossible at first - but then I remembered that the weird squiggly symbols are usually at the beginning and so placed the four beginning tiles correctly (at that point also realized they turn blue when in the right position). Then I noticed that some squares have a vertical line to the right and - those fit at the ends!

By then I had noticed that clicking a piece would play its notes and they all sounded different, the ones that sounded similar (high/low/whatever the music term is for that) went to the same row!

Btw. some of the provided DLLs were missing dependencies but I could copy the missing DLLs over from another entry and then it would run.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 2 Technical 4 Genre 2