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Visually it's...kind of a lot.  I think I'd consider simplifying some of the icons.

On the other hand, it might be nice if a rock that's in the water changed a little to visually distinguish it.  Grayer?  Bluer?

Nice!  A few quick notes about typos: "apparatus"; "coalesce"; and there was one "their" spelled as "thier".  But I mention these things because the game was so much fun that I'd hate to have anything wrong with it. :-)

It is cute (plus, cake!).

The main frustration was that I went to the laser area last and, because I didn't destroy all the blocks before going down, a block was sitting there keeping me from getting back up.  The only thing I could do at that point was hit myself with a laser, which started me from the beginning, which, ugh.  Still worth playing though.

Oh, right, language barrier!  It's funny, because when I put "lunch box" into an image search I get exactly the thing you describe.  And maybe that's what younger people in the US picture?  For those of us raised in the 70s-80s in the US, a lunch box is a rectangular metal (or sometimes plastic) box with a handle, for carrying lunch.  (Do an image search for "1980s lunch box" to get a sense of it.)  It's not a thing you'd put into a picnic basket...but the thing you describe totally is.

Well, and now we both know! :-)

Is the crossword just a guessing game?  I had S_L_ and there seemed to be no way to tell that the word was sell as opposed to solo or sale or sole...

Small note: the radio transcript has "Kruger Industries" at the top.  (If I had to guess, I'd suspect that was its name until you didn't want it on the same card as Kreutz?)

Anyway, that aside, this is very well done.  It was a lot of fun to piece things together (sometimes literally!), and I loved the chains of inferences necessary to answer the questions.  (I did somehow get the first two cameras swapped, so my inferences weren't perfect.  There's also a weird little inconsistency there about whether they were carrying a picnic basket or lunch boxes?)

Excited to see how it ends up if you keep working on it!

This was incredibly charming.  It's a cool take on a familiar genre, with really good aesthetics all around.  Love it!

In the errands puzzle, the mail is doing the wrong thing in the bottom row: the shaded square should be the center right, not the center.

It's cute, but it's practically pure luck.  It's impossible to strategize, and you only get to make two choices: "right or down" (for which you have no information) and spending money in the store.

I'm glad you got something working in 1k, but there's kind of not much there.

If Alkaline is at the edge of a platform, he gets (permanently) stuck, which isn't great.

I can see how it's a rough draft, but it's a really good rough draft, and the mechanics are really interesting!  I hope you can come back to it like you plan to!

Yeah, Knightmare is pretty bad, isn't it? :-)

I was going to complain that the main game is basically "find a zero, use it to find more zeroes, until you're done", but I have to admit there's kind of more to the (pardon the term) endgame than that.  What seemed like it ought to be obvious ended up pretty darned engaging!

Hey, mods--

Sorry to post in public, but I don't know how to contact someone directly on itch.io and also this happens to hit one of my hot buttons.

https://boredreaper.itch.io/flow-of-the-lost-beacons looks great.  The thing is, it looked even better when it was https://johngabrieluk.itch.io/amaya-maiden-of-the-storm a year ago, before "boredreaper" changed the names of a couple of characters and added "flow" to the description.  Pretty sure that violates some rule or another of the competition?

It's a little weird that there's not a unique solution to each level.  At first I noticed this when the last two markers I was placing weren't determined (it could be row A / col B and row C / col D, or row A / col D and row C / col B).  By later levels it meant that I could just click and hope for the best without really having to logic through things, and it would mostly work (which is not a thing that works in a usual Star Battles).

OK, I kept forgetting which color was which ("there we go, now I can jump over this tr--oh dear god am I dead.  Red.  I wanted red."), but that's on me.

I'm not big on Giger's aesthetic myself, but I think you've got a good version of it, and more importantly I'm definitely intrigued by the mechanics.

Oddly, I hadn't, but also oddly, I'm no longer getting that error, so whatever you pushed seems to have fixed it.  (If it comes back I'll give a more detailed description!)

EDIT: Wait, I take that back!  I hadn't recognized the name, but I did in fact play it ages ago, so there was almost certainly some sort of old (I guess pre-druid?) save information in there.  Well, that totally explains that.

When I try to run it, I'm getting a key error because "druid" isn't in the dictionary.  Is it just me?

Usually I object to a metroidvania that doesn't have a map.  Metroidvanias should have maps.

But what this lacks in maps, it makes up for in a really big frickin' gun.  Love it.  Nice level design, too.

Witness-like games are hard to make (it's so easy to be unclear in your rules), but this one nails it.  Terrific!

You realize that not all dice, or apples, are the same size, right?

The "discard" thing is particularly important in the endgame; twice now I've had 3/4 of a castle built and had my game end because my hand was six (unplaceable) mills.

I think something has gone very wrong on level 3.

Somehow every time I get a mill, the game thinks it's a new discovery.  (This pushed its way past "annoying" and into "quirky and charming".)  A small issue with what's otherwise quite enjoyable.

At the risk of being all "I just started and I'm stuck"...

What I seem to have open right now are three red dead ends and a blue dead end, and half of "Green Letters".  (But the hints on "Green Letters" only apply to the half of it I've solved.)  What am I missing that would help me progress?

EDIT: never mind; I had the right answer, but was typing it in the wrong format.  (Which feels a little guessing-game-like, not to accept the right answer in a different format, but.)

Really enjoying this.  I do have a problem where some of my boxes are getting stuck when going into the merger, and then deleting the merger leaves behind the stuck block, which becomes a permanent obstacle.  Guess it's just an increased challenge?

It's kind of cool, but it does have a uniqueness problem: when the game was expecting MATCH, it didn't accept BATCH (which was also formable).

Also it recognized LNR as a word?  (Which it didn't define.)  Sometimes the challenge is finding three letters in a row that it won't call a word.

Yeah, but...it defines "ate" as performing oral sex.  Which is...not totally wrong, but....also kind of not right?  Maybe a little more curation of which definition gets used is in order.

Wow.  "Not Minesweeper" sells this incredibly short, because it's so, so much more than what it isn't.  More than once I nearly stopped to leave a comment saying "This isn't possible, I think you broke something--" and of course I was wrong.  So glad I stuck with it.  Thank you for sharing this!

OK, I get how the code works, but--how does the writing work?  I can select the quill, I can choose an ink, and then...what are you supposed to do next?  (I can hover over the word "secret", but clicking it doesn't do anything....)

I love the varying aesthetics of the different levels!  And I think "the seven deadly sins" is a great theme to built around.

A few of the levels had a trap that a lot of platformer games fall into, which is that it's not always easy to tell what's a platform and what's scenery.  (I fell a lot in Wrath, I think because there were ceilings; I recall in Gluttony that I was surprised that a windowsill wasn't a platform but a candelabra was.)  Like I said, an incredibly common issue with games like this, but it's a thing to be aware of.

I don't know what the students' next steps are; if having put together a (very successful!) demo, they're moving on to another project, or if they're going to develop this more.  If it's the latter, I know that I was thinking about ways the levels could differ that would tie into the theme (in Sloth, you move more slowly, or you can't double-jump; something with the gems in Greed...).

At any rate, kudos to everyone for a well-done project.

That was a lot of fun!

There's an inconsistency that doesn't seem to count as a lie: Sebastian says that he found the girl this morning because the maid was late with breakfast; the case files say she was found dead in the evening, after finishing the day's work.

(I'm stopping to leave the comment because I think the premise here is really interesting!)
 

I was doing great until I hit fn-F2 a couple of times to turn down the volume, and it killed me.  I kind of like the game, but it might be nice if it didn't respond to non-alphabetic keypresses.

Something seems to be wrong with your wordlist, because it's labeling things that are clearly adjectives as "adverb".  (In fact it's never labeling anything as "adjective", which was a shock when I bought something that gave me a bonus for adjectives.)

So I got the moving left and right, and the jumping, but...is there something else?  They don't seem to do anything.

Cute robot: check.

A surprising amount of puzzle elements: check.

Fun, well-designed levels: also check.

My only actual complaint is the speed: I felt like the robot was walking through molasses, especially when I needed to get from one side of the level to the other.  But in terms of gameplay and mechanics and puzzle content, absolutely solid.

Well, I was enjoying it...until the first level.  How do you get past the monsters?  I couldn't seem to trigger a fall and then get away in time--is it just really, really careful timing, or is there a technique I'm missing?