soooo silly, it even made me a silly man.
Reviews for "JOKE, PLEASE"
not bad, my dad got a few laughs.
Took me a while to figure out the game... it's really enjoyable.
Huh, quite the interesting game! It kind of throws you in the deep end and can be a bit tricky to figure out what you're doing, but eventually I got the gist of it, being that you need to dig up certain information on each client you're processing by checking their logs and then accurately process them, akin to other document-checking games like Papers Please, the challenge being that you need to be efficient in what logs you pick based on the facts needed.
It's definitely quite the novel experience and I had a good amount of fun once I got my feet under me, but the game was a bit confusing and rough in certain areas:
*I don't feel like the game delivered on the whole 'joke' experience, as it never even once seemed like the generated joke worked off of the information we gathered, and I don't see how or why it even exists in-universe in the first place. To be honest, it felt like you just made a document-checking game and then crowbarred in the whole joke aspect last minute to replace a more standard accept/reject process: I personally wouldn't give it many points at all for meeting the game jam theme.
*Game's difficulty was pretty wild: first couple of times I played it, it seemed incredibly demanding for just the first day, failing my nearly perfect run due to a minor mistake. But then upon revisit later on, the first day now seemed to be rather easy due to randomly lowered requirements. Not sure what was going on there.
*As said, the whole joke theme and story aspect felt very confusing and not well-defined. I was disappointed that the game ended so quickly instead of continuing to evolve, and the ending just felt unclear what was happening.
*Game is also riddled with strange bugs: for example, I had a lot of logs for people containing repeated facts, or facts bleeding into each other.
Definitely seems like a fun concept, but the execution does waver significantly, most likely due to the game jam limits. It's cool enough that I can see the potential past the bugs and would want a more fleshed-out version of it, though, so that's a good jam result.
Frogrammer responds:
hey, thank you! always appreciate the honest dive-in
you are very much right it has absolutely nothing to do with jokes mechanically and we knew that from the start, I really hate the theme, and after losing the first 16~ hours just trying to come up with a mechanic that would actually incorporate the theme we just decided to ball. i haven't seen a single game that would incorporate the theme well either, most of them are just "funny"
so yes the game is about reading and remembering with a touch of manual management
about the difficulty: originally I uploaded a harder version of the game but after noticing the struggle of players I re-uploaded a version with lower quotas so that might be what happened
thanks again!
Heavy papers please vibes, simple yet gets you to think. Good job!