The River Nahuapil
Follow the River Nahuapil through the rainforest of South America and find out what's happening to the water.
In a tribal settlement surrounded by the dense rainforest of South America, a young girl discovers that the river that sustains her community is drying up. She embarks on a perilous journey to find the source of the problem and restore the river to its former glory, facing dangerous enemies and unexpected allies along the way.
Playing only works in fullscreen mode!
How to play: Place your characters in the front line, depending on the row you want to use. The objective is to guide all characters from the left side to the end on the right side of the battleground. Avoid the soldiers! Once you finish your placement, left-click on the tile where you want to move your character. Your characters have a special ability that can be activated by right-clicking on the character and can only be used once per battle. Note that no characters can be placed on rows with big obstacles. Some soldiers move, while others stand still. If you shoot a stationary soldier, their surrounding defenses will fall. Use this to your advantage to finish the battle, but most importantly, coordinate your characters to solve the challenges.
Update: now it is possible to skip text with spacebar.
Attacks:
Girl: Throws a stone downwards in a vertical line.
Hunter: Shoots a blowdart straight.
Warrior: Shoots an arrow straight and can hit multiple soldiers.
Diablo Huma: Uses magic in a diagonal line.
Comments (7)
Impressive playtime for a jam game! The graphics are cute and the puzzles are nice.
One thing that I desperately missed was a way to speed up the dialogue. There's so much story between the puzzles that the player spends the vast majority of the playing time just reading the dialogue. A button for speeding up the text or immediately showing the full text would work wonders here.
Very cool and colorful theme and very unique among the jam games that I've played so far.
I agree that the text/cutscenes were a bit much, especially in the beginning. And when playing a jam game, if the beginning takes too long to put me into the gameplay, I unfortunately tend to quit early.
Maybe the beginning of the story could have been told in 1-2 introduction levels? Seeing the girl grow up, maybe playing a game with other children that is similar to the actual gameplay later?
As far as level design: There was a level in the beginning that used the hunter and the girl with the stone. I think that was one of the levels where I really had to think about how to place the different characters, probably because their powers are so different. This is something that I missed in later levels, as the character powers are so similar. This was especially apparent once you get the girl with the bow. She is basically superior to the hunter in every way, as her arrow can knock out many enemies and obstacles in a row. This led to me looking for the row that has the most obstacles and immediately placing her there, often taking out like half the obstacles on the screen with her bow.
I think having 4 characters with very unique powers and puzzles that can incorporate ALL of them at the same time is a very ambitious goal and super hard to do in such a short amount of time. So maybe it would've been better to limit yourself to 2, maybe 3 but give them vastly different skills?
Gameplay wise, I think the puzzle-y levels where you had to completely clear a path worked best, as the few parts where you had to get past a guard patroling at the right time weren't as fun. If you wanted to keep them in though, maybe it would've been a cool idea to have a character that can slow down enemy movement, like slowing down time?
A small nitpick: To me it didn't really make sense that destroying an obstacle would also knock out a soldier and another obstacle next to it. I would've wished for a visual clue that taught me that, other than finding it out randomly. Maybe having soldiers carrying dynamite and having them explode when hit would've made this more clear? Just a random suggestion :)
The music was very pleasant and didn't get in the way of the game (except in the beginning maybe, because it went on for a bit too long)
I also liked the style of the cutscenes, with the almost comic-book look with characters popping out of the frame. I wonder how it would have looked with multiple panels on the screen at the same time, just having the inactive ones greyed out?
Ok that got quite long :D
I hope I don't sound tooo negative. I feel like with a little more polish, you have a cool little puzzle game here!
Thanks for making this :)
I really appreciate the battle mechanics even though the balance is a little unpolished. Also the story is very fleshed out which is very cool. The problem is that as others have mentioned the dialogue is unskippable. The result is that the player must have extraordinary patience to play through the game. Other than that, I enjoyed myself. The graphics are clearly made with love and thought. I especially love the flamboyant walk of Diablo Huma. What a character! Also another tip to improve a dialogue-heavy game like this (aside from the skip / speed button!) is that you could run the dialogue through a spell checker, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs (free). Not that mispelling a word is a serious offence but it is something that takes you out of the story every time you see it.
You managed to make a game that can be played to the end, has cutscenes and somewhat complex battle mechanics. That's quite an achievement!
Wow, this really feels like a complete game, with the cutscenes and super pretty and plentiful bespoke art for each of them. The character sprites are great, very distinct and full of character; Diablo Huma is my favourite, especially his walking animation.
There's a lot of dialogue and backstory, most of which makes sense. But the reveal that
As for the core gameplay, unfortunately I found it a bit shallow. Shallow because even the final battle didn't require a lot of thinking. The warrior is so powerful that you can just use her to blast a way through, using the hunter and Diablo Huma to mop up any remains as needed. The first two levels could even be solved without any fighting, just walk straight through.
There are also some bugs in the gameplay. You can use your abilities before placement is over, which is probably not intended. Sometimes you'll lose when walking over a dead soldier. And the click targets are a bit weird sometimes.
The music gets somewhat repetitive, but nothing too bad. But is it me, or is it slightly out of rhythm?
All in all, a flawed but still quite impressive entry!
Very cool concept, implementation could do with a little more user feedback when highlighting/selecting things I think but once I had that sorted out everything worked very well and I have fun playing. I also liked that the game had a full story, that's always nice to see.
My major complaint however is the inability to skip or speed up text. I found that really frustrating when I was playing since it took up a substantial amount of time. Definitely would recommend fixing that with a patch or something.
Thank you for your feedback, everyone! We're pleased to let you all know that we're already working on a patch to address some of the issues you've brought to our attention. Specifically, we're adding a skip/speed up function with spacebar for the text passages. We're also aware that some of the challenges may be too easy or can only be completed by exploiting bugs, and we're currently looking for a solution. We really appreciate your feedback on these points and will keep them in mind as we work on future projects.
Make sure to check back for future patches and improvements!
PS: I'll make sure to pass your comments on the art style and characters along to our art designer, who will be thrilled to hear that you enjoyed their work.
Spectacular game. Funny and simple for any user and a good message at the end.