Finsternis

by jo-bettaque

co-authored: @bober, @alexcl, @immi, @letmebeme, @sheaksadi

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.15

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.82

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.77

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.52

Audio★★★★★★★★★★4.40

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.26

Mood★★★★★★★★★★4.23

We dared to programm a game about signal Towers, as it feels like all of you... Finsternis, you start in darkness and illuminate the world with signal towers. There are dangers lurking in the dark, Towers to be built, ruins to be explored and a Beam Tower to activate. How are you going to play? Disconnected shooting through the world or defensive always connected?

You are stranded on a planet that appears in complete darkness - luckily you are a robot rover equipped with state of the art (tm) sonar sensor equipment.

Controls:

- W,A,S,D to move
- Left Click to shoot
- Right Click to open Build/Upgrade
- C cheat menu (if you wanna just mess around after playing)

Tools

- Bevy
- Claude Code
- Ableton Live
- Gimp
- Audacity
- A literal Saw :3

  We hope you Enjoy our game and all the little animations and details we put a lot of time into. We are opting out of the graphics category as we did use Claude Code to create a lot of the visuals and this feels like it violates the 90% Rule.

Tools: Ableton Live, Audacity, Claude, GIMP

Comments43

Arada21 Apr 2026, 02:28

The atmosphere is captivating, and the art style is great!

Exio421 Apr 2026, 03:14

This game is awesome, resource gathering, exploration, funky sci-fi mechanics in the darkness of space with weird trees that live in darkness, funky concept but I love it

... and I feel bad playing this for free! I only stopped playing because it's midnight, I'll be replaying this tomorrow :D I hope I can get a copy when you release it on Steam!

Cyclone21 Apr 2026, 08:37

The overall style is really nice!I liked exploring in the darkness and searching for connections,that's a really interesting idea.The music atmosphere is also very captivating!

Ilya Kr21 Apr 2026, 08:58

The game's atmosphere is superb. The sounds, graphics, and UI are all excellent, especially within the context of a jam. It lacks a bit of consistency, but overall, the flow is very good.

Stepanoff21 Apr 2026, 10:16

Excellent execution (unusual graphics, excellent music) and many activities - you can get immersed for a long time.

Awwwz21 Apr 2026, 11:25

completely shocked by the excellent smooth animations.....incredible for a 72h work! the whole liner structural visual style is such a solid system, every feedbacks details are perfect(etc. the wave will bounce back when hitting an item!and the mouse click effect!) the white lines makes me think of spider webs somehow(in a good way!)....all 5 stars definitely!

omi21 Apr 2026, 11:41

Very nice looking game! The art style and UI is out of this world! And the atmosphere is relaxing. Super polished. But for me it felt like that there could be more to do.

LDJam user 41156721 Apr 2026, 11:44

@omi Did you finish the game? and did you see my ZergMama? You can upgrade your rover as well and how did you upgrade your towers?

CrimsonTrouper21 Apr 2026, 12:18

game is extremely fun to play and have a pretty cool artstyle. Though I have no problems with normal play being long kinda wanted jam mode to get to cool things just a bit faster. Overall that's a great game!

LDJam user 42463221 Apr 2026, 13:00

Wow, this game is really cool! I stormed a Zerg nest with a ton of turrets, which caused some minor lag and audio glitches, but overall, the game handles a lot of rendering quite well. Best of luck!

Roboolet21 Apr 2026, 13:16

Amazing entry! Definitely coming back to play the long version sometime. There's a few minor inconveniences (like the UI going out of frame sometimes), but the whole package is just really well made. Good job! Also whoever made the music, I like it

Jo Bettaqueauthor21 Apr 2026, 13:28

Thank you guys for the very kind words! We will definitely be making a post-jam version that addresses some of the rough spots. Thanks for playing! :)

Someday Not Today21 Apr 2026, 17:43

wow, art style is fantastic, very polished. respect for bevy

Rhookx21 Apr 2026, 18:32

amazing ambiance, you nailed the concept, which wasn't easy with what you went for, the music is on point, the voice is such a nice touch aswell, I only have good thing to say, even the jam mode is a nice touch, although I didn't had the time to go all the way to the end. I'll come back to it tho, for sure ! Amazing work guys

Alexander Stepanov21 Apr 2026, 18:41

Atmosphere, style and audio is great! But the game is boring(

RushB21 Apr 2026, 19:23

Glad to see very nice finished product! The game is really good polished! Great job!

Alex de la Cour21 Apr 2026, 20:46

Very cool - the whole thing was super polished and balanced for a jam game. I really liked the progression throughout the play, the humour was nice and subtle and the audio and music fit the mood perfectly.

Pentagrammal22 Apr 2026, 01:28

I didn't encounter any enemies for the first 10 minutes, so I decided to restart, drove in a different direction, and immediately found them) The visuals are cool, and the controls are enjoyable

LDJam user 23605522 Apr 2026, 07:40

one of the most polished games I've seen so far here! fun game with great visuals, sound effects and music!

LDJam user 41156722 Apr 2026, 07:53

@pentagrammal thanks for the important feedback. Yeah the spawning system needs some more balancing / testing. We are working on Multiplayer though ^^

woona22 Apr 2026, 08:07

Great job! I played until getting the hive core in jam mode.

I loved exploring the world and collecting resources. The world feels huge and there are so many interactable objects everywhere it's a wonder how it even works. 😁 Very impressive! I really liked visual style, audio design and little interactions with Marvin. It always feels like something is going on because of the radars, the things go visible and then fade, so the game feels more dynamic.

After a while the game got a little repetitive. There are almost no enemies anywhere until you find the hive so the game is mostly just driving around and placing structures everywhere. I couldn't find use for most resources, I was mostly limited by stone and time.

LDJam user 41156722 Apr 2026, 08:14

@woona thanks for playing! yea it seems our protection zone might be too big or unevenly placed : /

noneegy22 Apr 2026, 14:36

Pretty cool 1 bit graphics. It was an interesting game, the sounds are nice too. This feels pretty polished overall. Well done!

Alex Mulkerrin22 Apr 2026, 14:49

The artstyle is nice and I enjoyed the story from the AI assistant. Sadly on the browser based version I was getting a weird bug where the sound would stop playing when using wasd only to start up again but crackling when you stop pressing the keys.

vikingx8423 Apr 2026, 06:01

It's amazing, the atmosphere, graphics and music are instantly addictive. You can feel a very high technical level, it's cool. At first, I turned on the jam mod, but after 5 minutes I restarted it in the standard mode to enjoy the game for an hour and a half.

Mekuire23 Apr 2026, 09:40

An interesting and exceptionally well-made game. The visuals are excellent.

Lenny Rudeberg23 Apr 2026, 09:40

Bravo! You got me hooked on this one, I could play this game for hours. GG!

Jo Bettaqueauthor23 Apr 2026, 10:24

We pushed a post-jam update, you can find it at the List :)

It addresses some of the gameplay related issues with understandably enemy spawning etc.

Hope you enjoy!

LDJam user 41156723 Apr 2026, 17:38

@alex-mulkerrin Thanks for playing and taking the time!
ah interesting we had not experienced that can you, if you want, tell us what browser you used?

LDJam user 23456723 Apr 2026, 19:11

A game where you find yourself spending time without even realising it.

I love the visual style. The music really suits the atmosphere.

Congratulation :thumbsup:

lloydlobo24 Apr 2026, 13:04

I spent more time than I expected. This was a lot of fun! Love the Factorio-meets-signal genre and admire the amount of polish that went into it. I couldn’t find the end of the game, maybe the hive? I spent most of my time building things and figuring out the mechanics, lol. Good job!

LDJam user 41156724 Apr 2026, 14:23

@lloydlobo Thanks for playing! Which version did you play? and I guess you played in normal mode?
did you have the compass upgrade? the compass arrow should lead you to the final signal tower. You can use the cheat menu otherwise. if it was buggy.

LDJam user 37402824 Apr 2026, 20:32

I played the original web version for a while until I got bored. I didn't manage to find no nest, so I just cheated in the ending. The map is too large I must say. This was a very ambitious game, unfortunately it gets repetitive.

unfavorable_enhancer25 Apr 2026, 20:15

Really well executed art style. Gameplay has a lot of details which is impressive for an 72 hour game. Only major issue is audio lagging in web version, but I've played first version release, so maybe it was already fixed in newer version.

Zathnic26 Apr 2026, 01:19

Great atmosphere! Everything feels very cohesive and visually consistent. There were maybe a bit too many voice lines at once at the very beginning. But I was impressed to see those ruins pop up, it's cool that you can build something so complex with just simple lines

Bobap27 Apr 2026, 07:53

Absolutely incredible work to get all of this together during the jam. This is the most complete game I've reviewed so far. I ran into a bug toward the end after defeating the hive and couldn't get the waypoint arrow to the final tower to show up. Couldn't manage to get the arrow to appear at all again even with the cheat menu. It's like the indicator had just been removed entirely from the game. My only gripe would be that clicking the upgrade buttons was a little finicky and would sometimes require 2-6 clicks to register. Might be due to the lag from playing on the web build. Also most of the time the drone depot upgrade menu would extend off the bottom of the screen, making it difficult to buy the Network Connection or Crystal Focus options. Overall, excellent job. I had a great time.

lloydlobo28 Apr 2026, 05:17

@letmebeme I rechecked the original jam version and I did play in jam mode.

While playing, I remember there was a compass/pointer guiding me to the next objective. I’ll have to revisit the updated version to give a better comparison on the compass upgrade since I only played for about an hour or so before stopping.

Also after reaching a certain point, I saved the game and started to fiddle with controls and found the cheat menu. That was awesome. I’ll probably steal that idea for a future jam!!

LDJam user 41156728 Apr 2026, 11:25

@alexander-stepanov I can see where you are coming from. You saw no enemies i imagine? In the jam version our spawning system had some major flaws. You can try the postjam version to get some action if that was it. Hope you had fun!

metalim30 Apr 2026, 18:10

does saving work? Tried to save game both from jam and normal mode, and in both jam version and 1.1 version. But Load shows "no saves found"

SirRed4 May 2026, 16:39

Great entry, I really enjoyed going around and finding the various structures. I am not sure what I was supposed to do with the ancient artifacts, I stopped after I beat the hive as the compass did not show anywhere to go at that point. I would have liked more enemies, but I think you already fixed that in the post jam version. A lot of depth and fun

LDJam user 4115674 May 2026, 22:48

@metalim In the web version it does not work, afaik. I tested it in the windows version there it worked.

VenomousMouse7 May 2026, 08:21

The game is well done. Great mechanic, nice looking, with good sound. A bit less chit-chat from the assistant would be nice, but it's my personal preference.

CreeperXD7 May 2026, 11:33

I really like the core gameplay idea of surviving until finding help. Shame that the enemy spawning has some issues, which would have made exploring uncharted areas a lot more risky.

I have 2 complaints on the build and upgrade menus:
1) Its location is based on the cursor, often leading to some options being inaccessible unless I trigger the menu with my cursor on the top half of the screen. This is especially acute for the harvest building, where I need to trigger the upgrade menu near the top of the screen to even access the network relay and crystal focus upgrades. 2) The buttons sometimes take multiple presses to register, which happens more often when deep in a run.

Although the jam version has a lot of flaws, I think with some fine-tuning and more content before finding the signal spire, this has potential to be a very replayable game.

Other games by @jo-bettaque

★3.65

★3.33

★3.96