This game is just amazing.

it made my hand hurt but it was amazing and simple

Pretty fun arcade action! Felt like it made a really good first impression with it's amusing story and dialogue, and I found the general gameplay loop of trying to build up combos with low-tier items to build enough higher tier items to then combo to build higher tier items and so on, all while managing their looming expiration and other stage hazards, quite engaging and addictive, especially due to the satisfying special effects for it all.

However, after a bit of time with the game, it started to lose its luster.

The rooms just started to be the same thing over and over and while it tried to introduce obstacles like enemies, the difficulty/placement was all over the place, which made the sense of progression lack: instead of rooms slowly having more and more hazards and new rules to contend with, they would go back and forth between hard and suddenly easy. The enemies never shook things up in any considerable or fun way either: they'd usually be a non-issue or too annoying.

With the enemies and rooms all being the same, I at least hoped the game would drop some nuggets of funny story and intrigue to keep me engaged, but no, once you rescue your first reindeer, all of the other ones go in silence.

I found the design of the game quite questionable as well. The fact that the room score thresholds were based off of total score over the entire game, instead of score within that room, meant you could cheese them by stockpiling from previous rooms: felt it would work better if each room was its own level with self-contained rules and challenges, like time-limits or objectives. Maybe it's just trying to help but allowing you to have an easier time in future if you SSS-rank previous rooms: I guess that makes sense and maybe I'm just too stiff to accept that design.

I also thought level skips were a very strange power-up. I mean, if the game is so repetitive that even the developer seems to realize that by having room skips as a power-up, I think the solution should be to make rooms more interesting or just make the game shorter instead so it makes the amount of content better, haha! Again, I guess it's trying to help since you get them from SSS-ranking rooms, so again, maybe I'm just looking at it from an unfavorable light, but it's just strange and I wanted to give my first impression.

Having said all these gripes, though, I did still find the game quite fun: perhaps it just might've worked better as a shorter, sweeter adventure, instead of being stretched too thin that the length doesn't match the amount of variation on offer. It is repetitive, and I'm not sure if any amount of rethinking more positively about the whole level skip/scoring will help. but I'll probably give it another go with a fresh mind!

EDIT: I did give it another go and did feel better about it as long as I thought about the level skips like a cool 'nuke' powerup that I got for doing a room so well: funny how just changing the name like that completely recontextualized it for me and made it fun! Brains can be silly sometimes.

I really like the concept and the gameplay, but man it gets really repetitive after 10 or so basically identical rooms. I quit after 15.

dope Af real fun adventure
fk satan
the snowman was my favorite enemy
more games should be simple n fun like this.