Illustrious Escape

Loved the art and the atmosphere. Really nice puzzles, even an idiot like me could complete them yet feel like a rocket scientist while doing so. Took me a moment to realize what the f I was supposed to do tho. Didn't face any bugs. The restart animation was really nice. Cool story with an extra icy twist at the end :D

10 points for unique idea (atleast I haven't come across anything like this).

It took me a little while to understand the basics, but once I understood in particular that I could only teleport in front of a light, it was super fun.

The puzzles were good and original, the nearest thing to which I could compare is The Talos Principle. From playing Talos, I realize level design is not easy with this sort of 3D puzzles. Removing the ability to walk was a bold idea that 100% paid off, both for pure gameplay and for making it easier to design levels. The only issue I had was that the instant teleportation could be disorienting at times: making the camera quickly slide to the target instead would have helped.

Graphics and sound are also a great strength here, with the character model and animations in particular being top notch (nice finger snap :P). This all gives a good atmosphere, with my only wish being for the levels to look less repetitive. Dropping random models around, like skeletons or furniture would have been nice, but more importantly the similar texture between walls and floor make things feel a bit prototypey. Simply differenciating the textures & color better between the two would have helped a lot.

Still excellent entry overall!

Nice puzzles, realy liked it

Great little puzzle game! I'm retarded so i couldn't make it past the third or fourth level but it's genuinely a great game. I love the graphical effects and and sound effects. Music gets a bit repetetive but i understand the time limitations.

I got stuck I think at the 3rd or 4th floor and took me a while to understand the game mechanic, but after that but I enjoyed the game!
I love the little touch on the reset button, the snap of fingers and the fade.
Puzzles seems to be well designed and the overall feeling of the game is good.
Well done! :)

Well done! At first I didn't get that you could only teleport to lit spots, so I didn't know what to do and even restarted once. After I understood the mechanics, the game was really fun and interesting. The music gives a nice dungeonie feeling. The graphics get a bit repetetive, but the animations are great!

All in all one of the better entrys I have tried this game jam.

This is a great game. I think you managed scope pretty well and the puzzles felt really nice and polished!

This one puzzled me for a while. The pasage with multiple doors really got me.

Nice music, nice art, clever mouse-only controls.

I'm curious, what made you choose to for go WASD / walking around and only use teleport mechanics? I found it not always obvious where the next teleport place was going.
Game looks and sounds nice. In particular the hand and holding the fire look very polished and sophisticated.

Haven't finished, but really liked it. Great example of good low poly graphics, and simple but addictive puzzle

Cool concept, the puzzle are nice, the overall mood of the game works well.

The models are nice. The animation, effects and sfx are a bit unequal.
The warp could be improved visually, especially since it's the action you do the most in the game. Its sfx could be reworked too, it kinda sounded like a digital fart which was a bit unsettling.
Whereas the fireball and finger snap look, sound and feel very good.

The music is nice and although it gets a bit repetitive it remains enjoyable.

I don't have much more to say because overall the game works really well and feels pretty polished.

Thanks for the feedback y'all! I (we?) really appreciate it!

@maartene:
I think there are three main reasons for our decision to leave out walking (apart from the obvious one: someone proposed it semi-jokingly and the others were like "alright, let's do it!")

• Scope: I think the most important aspect in making a jam game is scoping properly. Removing the player's ability to walk around drastically reduced the features we needed to implement and the content we needed to create. We only had to care about the fixed points where the player can stand instead of every inch of every level.
• Level design: We thought not allowing the player to walk around would let us to create interesting puzzles. All of the puzzles you see in the game are revolving around this idea of using the same resource (fire) to move around and burn down doors. So stripped down to very basics, the game is about managing your finite resources. I mean, it would be a totally different game with totally different puzzles if you could walk around. :) From the puzzle design point of view, it was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, coming up with proper puzzles with such minimalistic mechanics was tricky. On the other hand, implementing the puzzles was very straightforward. So more drawing stuff on paper and less fooling around in the level editor.
• Theme: Simply put, casting a spell to move fits the theme better than walking around.

Also, I think it's a cool gameplay mechanic that enables mouse-only controls. :)

@juutis thank you for your extensive explanation. Your decision and explanation makes a lot of sense to me. Cheers!

MY LEGS!!

This is one of my favorites on this jam. It's super polished and the puzzles are just great. Fire and teleport mechanics worked very nice togeter. The only one downside was the start: I was just clicking arround until the teleporting mechanic worked. The blue line sort of confused me a little because i through i could teleport anywere, maybe a fixed line on the torches instead of one that moved with the mouse would work better.

Enjoying this, though not completed it yet. I love the finger snap when restarting. To echo the other comments above it is easy to become disoriented, maybe more textures on the walls would have helped.

A first person, teleport and light based puzzle, very novel! Amazing even, but VR titles have done first person teleportation to death due to necessity so one point reduced there.

Thematically strong. Spellcasting is used for everything yet it feels to me like something is missing. The enviroment isn't very magical and doesn't affect the spellcasting at all. Not that I can think of any suggestions at the moment… Hmm, I'll report back if anything comes up.

The puzzle mechanics are also great, but I'll drop one point due to bugs. A few times I could not retake a fire from a torch, and once the fire went through a wall. Both issues happened in the second to last level and forced a restart, snap!

The second to last level also took me the most time to solve as the last torch before the staircase is very hard to see. I'd suggest adding in a slight glow (or hud element) to each torch in view when holding a fireball. Looking for near invisible torches in the darkness isn't great user interface design when interactivity is about deductive logic, not pixel hunting or such.

The crosshair icon could change when targeting a door. I did accidentally burn a few doors when trying to light a torch instead.

Greatness once again in the graphics department. Similarly to the themematic rating, the environment lacks little something something.. colorful? Tapestries on the walls, maybe? Fitting background music and sound effects finish up the package.

Great work! A bit more polish and this would be amazing.

Overall: Great (8.0)
Graphics: Great (8.0)
Audio: Good (7.0)
Gameplay: Good (7.0)
Originality: Great (8.0)
Theme: Great (8.0)

Brilliant stuff! The use of torches for both movement and opening doors is very clever: do more with less. The line-of-sight principle reminds me of The Talos Principle. The first few puzzles do a good job of teaching the mechanics, so afterwards, I had a good grasp on what I could and couldn't do. The teleport mechanic makes this particularly suitable for VR.

The puzzle design is pretty good, although it's possible to get stuck so that you have to reset. This is less than elegant, but understandable in such a short time frame.

Graphics may not be flashy, but consistent and effective. The music is bland but alright in and of itself; however, it goes completely against the rest of the atmosphere. Sound effects are subtle but get the job done.

This may be my favourite game so far.

Simple and fun game with charming music.
Easy enough to understand.

This is awesome! Loved everything in it, and the final reveal was just the cherry on top <3 Also, that restart snap feels really good :D Amazing job!