Reentry
Reentry is a Space Survival game built for the Luanti 2024 Game Jam.
Compatibility
Built for minetest 5.9, also compatible with luanti 5.10. Should work for minetest 5.8 as well, and possibly earlier.
The bugs in 5.10 have been fixed so you can now play without jitter!
My Review
The game was overall good, here are some of my thoughts on it:
The Breathing noise was a bit loud
The parkour was good
The ending was a bit odd
The decoration around the ship was great
It was a short, yet good game. That concludes my review.
Travel around and do stuff
The HUD system does a decent job of telling you what to do, but at a certain point it seems to fall on it's face leaving me very unsure of what the next step is, preventing me from completing the game.
Generic space accident
I almost feel like I played this game before in previous game jams which also featured space stations. Sure, it's not exactly the same, but not very innovative. :-(
The story, sorry, just feels lackluster. You wake up in a space station and try to figure out what happened. You basically run from area to area to do some thing in a simple quest system. The graphics are okayish. The audio is … ugh. The heavy breathing makes me nervous. I know the breathing is intentional but still.
I did not really have fun playing it, playing it once was more than enough.
I think the reason is the game just failed to set the right mood/atmosphere to me, there is not really a sense of danger. And the story was not really capturing to me. Sorry. :-(
Small experience but not so entertaining
Being a jam, I think the author played smart by making a small game: both in game length (around 5 minutes) and in map size (you're in a spaceship). They also tried to add some elements as to grant immersions, i.e. the breathing, the text telling you a story and the interactions with the environment (e.g. PCs telling you that can't be turned on). They were also able to create some suspence here and there, which I appreciated.
Unfortunately the overall experience doesn't really stand out, turning the game in basically a "go from point A to B" and a risky parkour. I think the basic concepts for making a game are there, just, the author needs to work on the game experience (in general; I'd invite them to see this attempt as a closed chapter and experiment with something new). Last but not least, I wasn't sure if at the end I had glitched the game or if I had actually finished it (until the HUD popped up)
Interesting Idea, but no hints
Edit: rewrote comment because first version was kind of unfair. I just mistook the successful ending as failure because starting the thrusters looked as if the ship exploded.
Bad side first: game is way too short and too easy, except for the space parcours. That was cool. But the initial inside part feels like an interactive intro scene. Nothing to think about, no puzzle.
Otherwise, the atmosphere and scenery are wonderful. You get curious in the beginning, and get scared when outside, performing the parcours under pressure.
You just had too little time. Make this game a full-blown adventure with puzzles, characters and maybe interactive scenes à la Halflife and we will love you :)
A short parkour which happens to have some dialogue
I don't recommend this for its story, but in case you would like to play a short parkour course that needs in-air control. It also features computers that run Manjaro.
The atmosphere is pretty decent, with the breathing sounds and walking sounds. The story idea is in the middle ground: not completely flawed, but very rushed. It's hard to make something interesting when it's this short. There's also no real point to taking the side paths, and in fact I was more inclined to go that way than be led down the garden path. I'm not saying it's a problem to have non-linearity, but it does feel unsatisfying to be able to go straight to the end.
The mechanics I mostly found frustrating. It's not too bad when you're inside the ship to get a modal dialogue pop up. A place in the UI to re-read them would have made sense, at least in a longer game or one with more of a puzzle. But what really annoyed me was getting a pop-up that stops me dead in my tracks when I'm half out of oxygen, to make me read a paragraph, and in a parkour section without an immediately obvious foward path and no valid backwards escape. In fact if you are too eager with the parkour, you might get stopped mid-air and fall as a result. I also really would have appreciated if the doors closed themselves on a short timer. You have to keep the oxygen in you see.. well.. if there were any.
Another thing that takes away from the experience is that it was clearly intended to be played in one sitting, and doesn't distinguish reloading a world from first entering the world. I'm not saying don't let the game begin again if it was finished, but if I had to go reconfigure something (like accidentally enabling creative mode), I probably shouldn't be made to start again. This is a common problem in Jam games.
I don't want to seem overly harsh or nit-picky. But my experience was mostly spent having a hard time with the parkour.
Interesting short playthrough, but leaves a lot of questions!
This game reminded me a bit of The secret story of Spacetravel by NathanS, a 2022 Game Jam entry. It's a spaceship-themed game where you have to find the cause of some issues in the spaceship, but ultimately, finding the cause and fixing the spaceship ends up being pretty easy and there isn't a whole lot of exploration to do. The best part is a small parkour near the end (with a few tough jumps!) to get to the final room. However, there is not much of a plot yet: I still don't know anything about myself, the spaceship's purpose, or my crewmates, before the game ends. There's also no purpose to fixing the spaceship because the game immediately ends, so I can't find out more things about the spaceship after fixing the engine, and I'm still not sure how I got in this spaceship!
Overall, it's just too short, it only took me about 8 minutes to solve. Because I wasn't in the game too long, the breathing sound didn't annoy me, it actually added to the ambience, but I could imagine it would after a while. A longer playing time and a more developed plot would be better, and perhaps, in the theme of SSS, using carefully positioned hints in the map instead of pop-up dialogues to make the experience more realistic and mysterious to the user.
Not Interesting Enough to Solve
It's kind of obvious what might have happened to the spaceship, but getting it back in proper condition is confusing. All the rooms and hallways look basically the same, so that does not aid in figuring out where you are at, or need to go. Ultimately, I lost interest. The breathing sound gets irritating pretty quickly, too.