Into the Abyss

cool. old school, loved the hook mechanic, some levels where pretty hard but fun

Surprisingly addictive for such a simple game. The color palette has a nice aesthetic.

Really nice puzzler with great mechanics. Nice work!

@oeschmid in level4 I pushed the rock into the wall and could cross it after, is this a bug or a feature?

Nice puzzle mechanics. Simple but addictive.

Nice job. To much for my dim brain ;) but well built

@oeschmid level 9 is genius, amazing mechanics. Got me thinking for like 10 minutes

Very nice art style! I loved it. The level design was also very good!

@hestrateja heyo, good catch. That's a bug that I was going to turn into a feature, but never got around to developing a level around it. I thought I got rid of all instances that that could happen.

Great game! Mechanics were easy to understand and the puzzles were challenging!

@oeschmid just say it was a feature and that you are a design god I would believe you :laughing:

great mechanic. at the beginning picking up the anchor each time after use seemed a chore, but then it all made sense

This game is solid. I'm stuck here

Awesome integration with itch theme! But it got me confused at the start though haha

Love the old school vide, and how tiny the game is. Don't see that a lot. Really clean core mechanic, and very well implemented

really like the art style here and how clean this all is, super fun

Really well done! It took me a while to understand what each icon does. But I guess it is not that easy to create self-explanatory sprites with such a small canvas :) I sometimes found it really hard to tell what happend because I couln't understand which pixels belonged to wich object. That is my only critique.

Interesting game! The character reminds me of the astronaut from Among Us. I've never heard of Puzzlescript. Is it like Bitsy?

This was pretty cool. The puzzles were well thought out, but really hard. I got stuck on level 7.
Truly, awesome work!

@noel-widmer very valid critique - puzzlescript limits you to 5x5 pixels, and my artistic decision to further limit myself to a 8 color palette didn't help. In the future I'll probably spend more time thinking about clarity of game objects.

@eboatwright it is kind of like bitsy! In the same way bitsy is designed mostly for small topdown narrative games, puzzlescript is designed for sokoban-style puzzle games. I highly recommend it!

Very sleek art style. I found myself stuck inside a wall (one of the switch activated ones) after my ancor passed over a switch turning it off then back on while pulling me along. Outside of that glitch it was fun. Your audio was really good as well.

@oeschmid Huh. Interesting!

Couldn't stop til I'd beat it. Excellent use of the theme, interesting puzzle mechanics, and just the right difficulty after a brain-melting 48 hours.

I love how complex the puzzles are for such a simple ruleset! I felt like the levels taught me how to use the mechanics in very interesting to figure out ways! beautiful game, great puzzles 9/10

There are some nice puzzle mechanics here, and some well-designed puzzles as well!

The anchor is a really cool mechanic, like a grappling hook you can leave behind and pick back up. Lots of great puzzles, and the tiny pixel art aesthetic is neat. Great game!

i love puzzle games like this! super clever and fun! great job :)

This is a nice mechanic and solid complete implementation with a coherent style throughout.

Fun game, got stuck at level 7 but I'm not very good at puzzle games anyways lol.

Very nice!

The art style is very pretty, but I will say that sometimes I had a hard time figuring out what was going on in a level because it's so small

It must be tough coming up with interesting puzzle designs in such a short period of time. Well done!

It's not an easy feat to make a fully featured puzzle game with challenging and interesting puzzles in 2 days. I really enjoyed playing this. There were a couple of tiles that I had trouble distinguishing between because they were visually fairly similar, but other than that this is a really solid game.

Nice game! I really enjoyed the puzzles (though stucked many times

TODO: review game

Good puzzle mechanics! Very good game!

Cool cool game. Minimal but functional graphics, nice sounds

Wow pretty neat game and very complete! :smile: I got stuck a couple of times because some interactions were not obvious to me (level 9 specially lol). The sounds and art were great! Although I think the obstacles are a bit hard to tell what they are. Cheers and great job! :smile:

Your anchor is close to my harpoon, but way much better in the meaning of implementing it into puzzle mechanics. Actually you have real puzzles! (that I do not :)

Wow, perfectly balanced for my taste! This is a puzzle game just the way I like it... not too short and not too long. The mechanic is simple, yet can go surprisingly deep... very fitting for the theme! Some puzzle games can be completed without much effort, but this isn't the case for this one. As you progress through the levels, the game forces you to really understand its mechanics. It can seem a bit daunting at first, but the difficulty level is perfect in my opinion. It makes it so much more satisfying when you make it to the end. I would love to see you make a 3D version of this game, I would be your first player! Well done! :smiley:

Love them puzzlers. Good one. Well executed.

That was a really solid and simple puzzle game! You should be really proud of that. Everything was cohesive and well put together.

Very cool puzzle game! It's simple, yet very effective in what it does. Really well put together puzzles that have their own 'aha!' moment, taking the hook mechanic to an unexpected level. Well done!

Was pretty cool, good puzzles, got stuck on level 6. Tried for a while but simply couldn't figure it out.

It's really cool seeing all the different approaches people take when creating a game. This game reminded me of a polished arcade game you would find inside another game like Stardew Valley or Shenmue or something. A simple idea, with simple mechanics but executed well. Great job on this! I gotta check out PuzzleScript now.

@secret-magic-404 Your comment really made me happy, thank you! Seeing the feedback in the comments gave me some ideas on how to refine and add to the game, so maybe there will be a more fleshed out Into the Abyss 2! :)

Also, to anyone who left or leaves a comment that I don't respond to, thanks so much for the feedback! I've read every comment, and it's all been both so very encouraging and so very helpful! Thank you again :)

Love the feel of it. A couple levels took me some real hard thinking but eventually I got through the whole thing. Fantastic execution.

I enjoyed the cleverness of this. The anchor mechanic, and the requirement that you have it with you, was neat.

The first boulder puzzle was my favorite. Figuring out I could block the walls with the boulder was a lightbulb moment.

Incredibly cool, challenging and interesting project; great job!

Nice job! Was nice going through 10 levels, level 9 is very clever. Would be cool if the mechanics were explored a bit more in spaces where you have some breathing room, the pace is quite fast and so I didn't quite have a full grasp of the mechanics by level 9. Still, enjoyed it very much and would love to see the mechanics explored some more.

Cute and neat, really good and difficult puzzle game! The mecanics makes me think of Baba is you

@felixmreeve Good point on the pacing. Given more time, and if it wasn't Compo, I would have maybe gotten some playtesters in to test my puzzles. These puzzles were constantly in the back of my mind for about for 48 hrs, so I didn't realize how hard they may be! It seems like Level 9 in particular is kind of a spike in difficulty for a lot of people, which surprised me.
Thanks for the feedback! Very insightful.

@lamamour That's a very generous comparison! Thank you :)

Alright, this is simply amazing, its literally a single file of source code? Kinda cool. And I really enjoyed the puzzle, it can be a little bit broken sometimes, but if you play by the rules, the enjoyments is pretty nice.
A few bugs here and there, but nothing serious, and the difficulty curve is excellent.

I actually couldn't get past the first boulder level :( The flavor text was really cool, and the sounds really fitting!

Hey, I did all the levels except for #6 which completely eludes me oO
The mechanic itself was sweet, especially enjoyed minimalist levels like #9, where you just explore isolated quirks of the mechanics. In terms of level design, level 6 and 7 were a bit too claustrophobic in my opinion. It feels to me like you created a space that still has some nooks and crannies left to be explored, would love to play a post-jam version of this.
Your graphics are cute (player char quite sus though) and you did well with the 5x5 limitation. One resource that personally helped me a lot with PS is the thinky-puzzle-games discord, they possess lots of 'unwritten knowledge' about the language and are generally quite helpful folks!

Thanks a bunch for the sweet comment you left under our game, it took 2 years and many projects for someone to finally call something I made art and I suppose the feels were worth it :')

Good puzzle and level design with an impressive art style! :D

@minotalen Thanks for your feedback! You're probably right about the claustrophobia. I actually remember, for Level 6 especially, I was really trying to cut down the size of the level and number of walkable tiles to the bare minimum - a little breathing room might have been nice. I've also joined the discord, thanks so much!

And you should be proud of your project! I really meant what I said :)

Fun little puzzle game!

Never seen puzzlescript -- looks cool!

Nice puzzle game! Great graphics and sound effect, maybe to add a music! Congrats=)

Super fun, super hard game. Took a long time to finally get through