The Last Scholar
Explore substances, combine them, find recipes, talk to mighty deities, and more!
A mysterious fragment to aid you in your quest
You are the Last Scholar.
- Explore primary characteristics
- Combine substances
- Find recipes (22 items in total, can you find them all?)
- Talk to mighty deities
- And more!
Point 'n click / puzzle game.
Changelog
- Version 1 (created in 48 hours): The original Alakajam! submission.
- Version 2 (post-jam fix): The same game (no gameplay changes, same graphics, dialogue, music) with fixed performance – the lag spikes occurring when quests were update should no longer happen.
Comments (19)
very cool game! I love the exploration and gradual unlocking of strange and wonderful tools. I didn't study the chart above and I'm sure it could help, but I enjoyed the story and the crazy scenes nevertheless! poor Luna!
the graphics look nice, and there's a lot more than what you initially see! the effects are really cool, and the various instrument's activations are cool in that they require some input. can't imagine how you came up with this story though, that's some crazy stuff - love it!
the story, art and music creates an excellent theme as well!
This is incredible. I couldn't even draw one of those levels in 48 hours, let alone animate them and add controls and pathfinding and gameplay and and and… very, very impressive.
I did play it in a trial-and-error fashion though. Maybe there's a better way, but the journal (though very much in character) is too cumbersome to use. I didn't manage to finish, but I might try again later.
This is a nice game
The graphics are lovely, and it's clear that lot of thought and work has gone into the design. The tools, substances, and the background lore of the game are all great. Music is just-ok.
Throughout almost all of the game I felt rather impoverished with what little interractive power I had: And finding that the water rock, cart, and crystal didn't serve any further role, I came to realise how little actually remained to interract with: For most of the game it's the workbench with it's relatively small number of machines, and occasionally the telescope. But with no concrete guide as to which should be used for what purpose, I had to resort to trial and error for most things.
Unfortunately this trial and error approach is not much fun. Very few interractions would result in a reaction, which often made me feel I was making slow/no progress, and the cranking and pumping actions became a little tedious. Though the game kept me playing because I was genuinely curious where it would take me. I wanted to see progress and an ending.
Some of the interactions didn't make sense to me (producing the mercury, for instance) and the end of the game felt a little disappointing.
So while it has lovely graphics and lovely design, I feel it needs some refinements to really make it fun to play.
This took way longer than expected! I am seriously impressed with the amount of stuff you created in a 48h jam.
Since you enabled anonymous feedback, I'll keep the remaining sugar coating to myself and tell you my honest, unfiltered opinion about your creation.
Theme
This is great use of the theme. I don't know if that is any actual alchemic "knowledge" involved in all this, but it certainly feels that way. You either did a lot of research or faked it very well. Anyway, perfect use of theme.
Originality
It's mostly a point and click adventure, and works well as such. The alchemic way to combine things is pretty novel, but not groundbreaking.
Gameplay
The gameplay is mostly solidly implemented and works well. I have a few minor and one big complaint though. The small ones:
- I think there is a logic to which tools can be used with which substances, but I didn't really understand it. I understand that the tools can be used to add or remove some characteristics, but until the end I couldn't figure out if the substance already needed one of the characteristics or not. The journal was mostly useless in that regard. I was not sure how to read it and it was cumbersome to click through it to find the substance I was looking for. Maybe a popup or tooltip over the element would have been a better use of your development time.
- The screen moving back and forth while moving the mouse was annoying, but I got used to it in the end.
- The press. I hate you for making the press. But I forgive you.
The writing is great and kinda sorta made sense. I liked it, overall. The ending was rather unclear to me, but I guess you can out of time to finish it.
In the end I ended up using 100% trial and error to complete the game. Some more focus on conveying the logic to the player would improve it a lot.
Graphics
I don't think I need to say much about that. The graphics are stunning. All the items, the world layout, the design of Mars and Luna, simply brilliant. I won't waste any time here, as someone recently said, it's easy to point out flaws and hard to point out good things. I have seen no flaws in the graphics, so I continue on.
Btw, seriously great attention to details with the page flipping and page stack sizes and all that.
Audio
By far the weakest point in the game. I understand that this is due to the time limitations, but some simple sounds for walking, using the tools and such would have greatly improved the game. 10 minutes work with jfxr, tops. They don't have to be great, they just have to be there.
The music was nice to listen to for the first 5 minutes, then I had to turn it of because it was honestly pretty unnerving. Also, the bass drum sounded weird, I don't know if that was by design or if there's something wrong with my flash player, but it sounded to me like shorting the pins on a microphone or instrument input. That was not too pleasant.
Overall
All in all the positive aspects greatly outweigh the negative ones. The graphics are a solid 10, as is the theme. Accounting for the lack of audio, average Originality and smaller weaknesses in Gameplay, I'm going to give you an overall 8 Stars!
Flash?! Ugh… Point & click puzzle?! Ugh… This did not start well.
The graphics are excellent, audio passable. The alchemy system is solid, but the p&c interface severely hamstrung my enjoyment of the interactivity. There's too much clicking to get anything done, walk around, slowly browse the journal, wait for animations to pass; a cumbersome experience.
Needless to say I couldn't solve even half of the puzzle. I fixed the magnet and the looking glass, but then got stuck trying to make mercury or a hydraulic fluid. Tried everything, but nothing worked. I might have missed a new substance somewhere, but what can I do.
O 6, G 10, A 5, G 3, O 5, T 8
Wow, i am deeply impressed on what you managed to get done in just 48 hours. It's not like you created just a beautiful game (graphics, sound all top notch), but also some great puzzles and everything works! The pixel art is super nice and the soundtrack adds a nice atmosphere. You could have added some sound effects here and there (like a rewarding "click" or "swooosh" when some tool was fixed, but given the time constraint i am still rendered to be amazed.
The art is wonderful. It's unbelievable you made all the map, substance design, puzzles, all kinds of descriptions, mechanics and effects in 48 hours!
I love the way of interaction, though the camera movement along mouse seems too much, making me a bit dizzy. It would be better if camera moved only when the mouse pointer left a certain area.
The puzzle is kinda complicated to me, so sorry I couldn't finish the game. But well done!
Okay, so I played most of this twice, and I'm not sure my thoughts. I'm not huge on point-and-click types but I've not letting that bias anything and gave it a serious attempt. I managed 19? items and got the stone, so I won.
But the gameplay was rather trial and error without thought, something I initially thought there would be. I definitely fell into the camp that was just going from item to item attempting to broot force through it and that didn't feel so fun to me, even when items were created it didn't get rewarding. I assume this resembles a bit the experience of a true alchemist, mixing randomly to see if things happen and what those may be. But there was a time, for 15-20 minutes and I almost quit, where I tried every combination, many of them many times, including attempting to go back to Mars with the Looking Glass, but it continued to claim everything was dark and murky or such.
So I continued random combinations in lab and elsewhere, I had NOT created another item, just banging my head around, and went back to the Looking Glass where suddenly it allowed me to go to Mars. This was overly frustrating. I only guess that there must have been something with the lunar calendar but even that I'm not sure of. What I know is there was a very long time where I couldn't do anything and then I could and it didn't appear to be anything I did. Perhaps a bug that resolved itself somehow, or some other hidden thing?
Anyway, I did manage to beat it, that is a lot of stuff to have created in 48 hours! Nice job!
This was an interesting, and very nice looking game.
I liked how you gradually expand your capabilities by gradually repairing and unlocking new equipment. The combination-mechanic felt rather trial and error though, since it was not always clear which properties the various objects had. The journal was a nice idea, but for most of the time it did not seem very useful, except as a "open tasks tracker". Gradually filling it up with diagrams and transformations did add a lot to the mood though!
The music set a nice underlying mood (and the musical variation between the locations was a nice touch), but the main theme suffers a bit from the "distorted"-sounding bass, which sounds almost like a sound glitch.
Visually, the game is simply stunning! The areas and interactive objects are detailed, and the places visited through the looking glass are fittingly weird looking. I especially liked the character design for Mars, but the look of the various game elements is consistently great, as are the world-transitions and the page-turning effect. It is impressive that you managed all that in only 48 hours!
It seems that most of the story is told at the very end. Spreading it out across the game might give it more direction, and function as an additional "hook" to motivate the player towards completing the game.
As the last scholar,
I shall unveil the secrets!
…must fix equipment…
Incredibly good looking game, im just another generic person impressed by what you managed to create in 48 hours! I mean really, even animations are smooth, no corner cutting. I like point&click adventure games but it isn't so popular genre, for some players it might be hard to jump into, especially if at first game seems text heavy (yeah i know it part of the genre but modern gamers are not very tolerable towards lengthy texts). It might be a good idea to let player solve first very easy puzzle by almost holding his hand and telling him what to do, you know just to let him/her get grasp on the game. I realize it's game jam and time was limited but im pointing in out just for future reference and because i don't really can't complain about much in this game. Ah i also liked humorous texts in games and music also was pretty neat and sets nice tone to the game. In general this game is pretty great!
Impressive work for 48 hours, you certainly embraced the theme, pixel art is well done, music is pretty good apart from a slightly annoying percussion sound which slightly spoils it for me. I found it overall pretty atmospheric. For the gameplay, I was intrigued enough to play for a while randomly trying to combine things to see what happened but did not complete it yet.
This was great, nice clean feel, dialog system was well presented, character pathing seemed not too linear either! Had the feel of a proper clicker game feel to it. Personally I find those games a bit of a chore - always get impatient and try all combinations when it isn't obvious what to do, but that doesn't mean you've done your game badly! That's my own player preference. You've exectute very well, I'm impressed.
Lovely graphics! I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games entered in the Alakajam #1, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/QBXJYhpSjpA
I haven't been able to finish this game yet, and there is a little bit of "rub x on y", as per classic adventure games, though I gather there's an underlying system to it all.
The only major blemish on this game is the fact that the audio hangs when loading a new bit of dialog.