There was this spaceship cockpit type game, in which you relied entirely on the ship's dials and devices to move and survive. It was a fairly recent indie game, may have been a IGF entrant and I'm quite certain it was featured on the Indiegames blog. I did a quick drawing of what I remember it looking like:

So a simple/alien kind of interface, with pastel colours.

Spaceteam?

Crediting the composers would be nice.

Moving between screens is awkward. If I'm holding a direction while transitioning, I need to release that key and press it again in the new screen.

Got stuck in a wall swim here


Edit: Got the red gem. The game's growing on me.

[except]

I like the art and music!

Gameplay was confusing at first. The first few runs, like Stib, I had convinced myself that clicking caused me to jump and didn't know how to pass the first obstacle. It also took a while to learn that the player character only turns around when on the ground, not when hitting a wall in midair.

The art design is generally good at providing enough clues to the game object functions in retrospect -- shimmering on interactive objects, flat edges where platforms can expand, crystalline-looking platforms that can shatter -- except when the player character can jump, like eyeliner says. It's not always obvious whether the player character will jump at the edge of a platform, something that could be made clearer with an explicit visual element.

The mechanics aren't bad, but the level design requires a ton of trial and error. Platforms you need to extend or destroy just as they enter the screen. Paths through levels that aren't immediately obvious. Levels with enough discrete, modular steps that start to wear me down after the nth repetition just to reach the part I don't yet know how to solve. I quit sometime after the third delivery.

I'm looking for a minimalist shmup where in each new wave of enemies, there's a ghost of your own performance during the previous wave. The game should be at least 5-6 years old. Any idea?

Kenta Cho's DefeatMe.

Bahaha, nice visual gag.

I liked the silliness of the difficulty selection progression.

Game itself is nothing I haven't played before. I fell quickly into the boring pattern of mashing fire while jiggling left and right. Won, but didn't see the end screen because I was still mashing fire.

That is a really trippy effect when you hit a flat stretch and it looks like you're not moving but the layers above are.

Collision is a bit glitchy. I warped to some higher areas while jumping a few times.

The yellow bar doesn't read as dangerous to me. Could use some visual clarity, effects upon dying.

The tower setup is interesting. Sometimes it might be useful to fall down and gain a bit of wiggle room by repeating an earlier segment than trying to squeeze past the current one.

I died on level 2 after getting really confused by the ladders and where to go. Is there a way to start from there or do I need to play the whole level 1 again?

I like the monster art. Gameplay didn't grab me.

Took a few plays to figure out what was going on. Very overwhelming initial moments! From what I can figure: monsters come from the top of the screen. The game is over if any one of them touches a crystal. You can click to spawn reapers to kill enemies so long as you have coffins. Reapers disappear when they hit an orange house. Couldn't figure out how to get coffins back, since that UI element was far from where my eyes were focusing most of the time.

Left/right click to choose direction makes more sense to me than making such a simple game into a two-hander. I'm guessing that would be a swipe on mobile?

Scores are highly dependent on the luck of the random level generation, which creates natural paths for enemies to take and reapers to follow. I got 190 souls in one configuration where the only crystal the enemies could even reach was on the very bottom left corner, leaving me bored with only one place to spawn reapers.

That was really cute!

Engine was a bit rough, but I liked the real time aspects of being able to see the whole house at once. The cursor kept changing back to "use" every time I examined something. Since examining inventory items doesn't do anything, I was a little annoyed at having to switch back to "use" whenever I wanted to select one.

I liked the puzzle, a few steps were a little iffy. I thought it would make more sense if you wet the bed before turning the lights on, so he notices the wetness when he wakes up. I can mentally justify either way working, but the game only recognizes one. And I was stumped for a brief time since the game didn't even acknowledge what I was trying to do when I tried putting the jack-o-lantern in the window before turning on the lights. If the game were a little longer, I would have started getting annoyed at repeating the setup steps (refilling the glass, turning off the hot water/lights) multiple times. It also didn't make much sense that he doesn't react to the screaming alone without the creepy face.

Nice modeling work! I like how the reset button on the in-game NES resets the game itself.

Not bad! Puzzles were nice and logical and well telegraphed. I liked the art and voice acting (although the guild member sounded like he had a much worse quality mic than the others). Some good slapstick animations.

I was expecting it to be harder to convince the player character to remove his cursed ring!

[Don't read this before playing or taking the survey]

Pretty fun! That one piece where you have to bounce off the screen was a big stumbling block. You might want to tell the players the controls before throwing them into a match. The survey took a while to fill out: long delays between submitting a page of answers and seeing the next page.

Don't read this before playing or taking the survey: I'm serious. Don't do it. Academic integrity may be at stake!
Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm not playing against a live player, but instead against an AI, a static replay stored on the server, or a procedural replay stitched together piecemeal from multiple player sessions. It connects way too fast to another player for a small game with 4 comments here and 64 plays on Kongregate. I notice you ask for a player name, but never display the opponent's. The survey questions focused on my relationship with the "other" also seem to be leading to analysis of that sort, how the illusion of competition affects a player's mentality towards an unseen opponent, videogames and aggression, etc. More fun than Craig Anderson's TCRTs, for sure.

Made it to level 4.

Your font's "v" looks like a "u." It was also weird how the key further to the right makes me jump a shorter distance to the right.

Main problem I had is the combination of precise timing puzzles and indirect controls. Most of the challenge I experienced comes from the timing needed to land on a spinning block, but the jumps were long enough that I never quite internalized exactly how long a jump takes in relation to a block spin. Might help if everything was synced to an audible beat: like, jumping makes you land on the next beat, blocks always spin for a beat, then rest a beat or something. The timing might also feel friendlier if you gave a little leeway around the edges: let the player land sooner, jump later than the visuals might imply.

Level design got annoying. Eventually quit when I got tired of repeating the same first few challenges in a level over and over again to get to a part where I had difficulty with timing. The challenges themselves are neatly segmented by shield blocks: why not use them as checkpoints? Dying would still hurt the player's score, but waste less of the player's time.

I also didn't appreciate how you threw in new block types that instantly killed an unaware player partway through a level. Some of them -- the bounce back one particularly -- aren't immediately obvious from their iconography. The black face block screams death, but I was able to safely rest on them in levels 3+4.

Good game feel for a first game! I played until I reached the red skulls (around 27 points).

It's very easy to accidentally skip the post-game score screen, since that action uses the same keys as standard play, and death may surprise the player.

I also was surprised when the grey enemy shot a speedy projectile at me the first time. Sprite doesn't read "shooter" and I faced off against enough of them that I had pegged their behavior as random bouncing. Otherwise you're good at conveying enemy behavior and state changes visually (like the angry face on the green things).

First impressions after a 30-40 minute session:

- The whole thing gives off a great late 90s shareware/advergame vibe, with the slightly off lo-fi aesthetics and constant pushing of the posters.

- Not digging the level design: long hallways, labyrinthine architecture, everything an order of magnitude larger than it perhaps needs to be. Entire game of fetch quests/navigation challenges so far. Areas have distinct color sets, but it's a chore to find your way around when most of the time you don't even know where you *want* to be going. I do appreciate the signs, but it's occasionally inconsistent where they're placed.

- I played until I reached the mosquito, but couldn't find the brain he told me to eat. (The notepad says it's on the second floor, but I think I searched everywhere? There's a specimen room on the first floor that I haven't been able to reach yet.)

- Combat. Janitors and basic ghosts are easy enough to fight, but I can't fight the machete doctors and larger orderlies without taking tons of hits unless I can pit them against passing ghosts. I love the disguise. Haven't figured out how to get hypnosis to do anything. Respawning enemies gets irritating fast, and the whole game is long enough that limited lives is an odd, antagonistic choice.