Hi there!
I'm one of the 6 judges for this RPG Maker Game Jam 2025. I was one of the 2 judges assigned to your game, and we have been assigned to rate your games according to each metric highlighted on the game's main jam page, and submit these ratings to the organisers, who will then appropriate what happens with that. Please contact them in the Q&A if you have any further questions about the judging process. The judges will work on different time schedules, so even if I may have finished playing your game, the entire process might not be finished as of yet. Many of these reviews I am posting while still judging.
All that aside, I'd like to share my VOD of me playing your game, which contains up to an hour of gameplay, and some final thoughts at the end! Depending on whether I stopped the VOD early or not, it will also contain many of the thoughts that I say to you below, which may cause repetition. So just be aware of that.
I will also attach a review below this VOD. I will not disclose my ratings for each category as of yet, but those will be revealed in due time. Not all judges are required to post a review or VOD to each game, but many will do so even if it's optional, including myself.
Here's the VOD:
This was quite an interesting game! Its general vibe was quite hard to pin down... they were playful yet violent and they were hired and there was some sense of a conspiracy going on in the town... revealed through diaries and it's sort of non-linear. I liked the general aspects of it in theory. But maybe certain things I bounced off of a little? The way the tone was jumping around, and I think certain repetitive gameplay aspects might have hurt my experience of it. But I think there were also lots of redeeming qualities. Generally the strongest thing about it was that it created a unique vibe.
Several aspects of this were unexpected. The dreams, the hacking, the surreal qualities, the monsters under the houses... it's a very unexpected narrative. Promising battle structures including modes for ranged, melee and recovery modes had my hopes up but turns out the monsters are quite easy to kill and you can recover far faster than they can ever attack. Gameplay was easy for the whole game and finding monsters just turned out to be interacting with everything in a room. So sometimes the gameplay fell a bit flat for me and became repetitive. Just how it goes, I guess.The vibes were pretty fun, actually! The characters' designs add to the endearing nature of everything, and their bickering, while sometimes a little repetitive (in my stale opinion), did add character to the whole thing that kept it at least somewhat engaging. By the end, I feel like the final 20% had the information that I deemed the actual interesting parts, to help set up a unique premise. But that's how you "set it up". The idea of a person controlling an entire neighbourhood via security cameras and inviting people in seems to be a good set up to have an hour dedicated to exploring why, and stuff like that. But I felt like maybe it was just a little too vague for most of the game to keep me interested in the narrative.
The portraits are the standout. The cute faces and how they emote are very good. Well, actually, there are 3 standouts. The portraits, the monster battlers, and the music. The battlers are very well done and fit really well with the mood of the game. The music reminds me of Femtanyl. It's very very high energy and fun stuff. However, mapping, while serviceable, felt sometimes plain in the outdoor areas (rows of houses, etc.) and the biggest flaw in the sound design, I feel, is the message box sound effect which sounds like a big banging noise that annoyed me within the first minute, where I had to turn it down and it still felt quite intrusive. So yeah, that was annoying. But overall decently presented, with room for improvement.
So overall, I appreciate this work and I think that every game is a gift, so I encourage you to keep making more games. There certainly is a unique vibe going on here, and I think the world should see more of it. Refined in maybe some of the gameplay aspects, I think, when it comes to creating strategic or interesting decisions (in my admittedly subjective opinion), and I think you can start churning out some good ol' hits! (If you haven't already. Forgive me if you have! I haven't looked into your dev history hehehe)
Keep making games! Every game is a gift. <3