| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Completeness | #47 | 2.758 | 3.083 |
| Overall | #54 | 2.559 | 2.861 |
| Quality | #55 | 2.534 | 2.833 |
| Innovation | #59 | 2.385 | 2.667 |
Ranked from12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Great game! I love how you made the main menu, I also really like the investigation mode/deduction mode mechanics, they work really well and feel pretty good
The cases are a bit on the hard side but the fact that deduction mode exists helped me understand exactly what happened
Kind of hard at first but then i did the tutorial again and got the hang of it, really like the feel of a really old board game but in a nokia, good job ^^
I think the concept is soso cool and intruiging!
It was kinda like playing pen and paper the whole scenerie builed itself in my mind which is really smart if you have such a small resolution that a great background is basically impossible to draw. It is very well written and you chose cool places. I think the idea is very cool because on really is a detective! But it is so hard! There is almost no information especially the second one with all the names it is so difficult to figure out anything. I really tried for at least 30 minutes and i solved not one case. Sometimes I think I know what happens but the screen doesnt lock and there are so many combinations of words but with so little context i can only guess. Maybe im just stupid. Its sad because I was really exited to give your game a second and a third try because I like the mood so much but it was too difficult for me. If it was easier I would LOVE it. I think this would be a very cool tool to learn a new language because it has such a focus on grammar.
Hi, that's some high praise, thanks!
I was afraid the difficulty would be out of whack: we finished writing the cases late in the night just before the deadline, so we had no time for human testing.
I would like to return to the game after the jam ends; I will definitely need some distance to see problems. I actually thought it might be too easy, because, you know, the cases I wrote were clear to me ;-). The first one (the mansion) was meant to be mostly an extended tutorial, so if you want to try again, I would recommend that one. I wrote the last one (power plant) with a specific goal to be hard, even making sure there's a red herring solution that's gramatically correct.
We had some ideas how to make the game more playable. One of the more important was to split the word list to several categories (verbs, nouns, adverbs) and allow selection of the right one only: this should cut the confusion and make the UI more pleasant. I am also considering getting rid of the 84x48px resolution, just to allow using a more legible font. We aimed for maximum information density, but the trade-off is we just didn't have enough pixels to draw nice glyphs.
I am really happy to hear the descriptions are good. We both are playing pen-and-paper RPGs as game masters, it seems the years did pay off :-).
If you want spoilers, the GitHub repository linked at the game page contains complete source code, including the solutions. Open the
the-grind-2025/scenario/<name>.py
directory and search for DeductionScreen - each one defines a list of words (in the correct order) that are the solution.
Phew... it was hard to figure out how it works, but once I did, it was fun!
Took me a minute to figure out what to do - but then it made sense :)
Fun word solving challenge - some screens with more combinations of words to deduce where they go would be even more fun :)
