Kintsugi

Kintsugi is a speedrun of all the storybeat portraying games where you are trying to revive a tree, which you may have heard of from somewhere. With the power of magical glowing gold of unknown origin at your side, you are able to do this as well as platform by grappling, create leaves on walls to hold onto as leverage, and rebuild structures in order to maneuver to places to complete your task all in under 20 minutes, for free.

Kintsugi promised a 10-20 minute experience and it was exactly that. Not too challenging of gameplay, but certainly relaxing and enjoyable. The art is vivid and unique—in particular I like how petals and leaves are drawn. Like ink blots or light strokes of a brush. The sound effects are also quite nice, especially the sound of the double jump. The music made a great accompaniment to everything, as well. The only complaints I have are that it's not long enough! The students who made this game should consider extending it into a full game. I also used to have a complaint about not being sure what exactly the Golden is, but after playing through it a second time (enough to collect all the achievements and form opinions) I had my inferences: [spoiler]I believe that the Golden is a form of corruption to humans, but of reconstruction to nature. We start off the game planting and instead of being corrupted by the Golden we seem to be chosen by it. Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with golden, silver, or platinum lacquer in order to highlight the imperfections instead of hide them. I believe that in the game [i]Kintsugi[/i] we are repairing a broken or damaged ecosystem. Maybe the game is a commentary on how humans are messing up nature? Can't be sure, but that's how I took it. And it was up to us to repair nature due to our clear love for it. The only counter to this claim is that we also end up repairing some broken man-made items which, while beautiful, is inconsistent with my theory.[/spoiler] Anyway, great job for a student project!!! Would recommend setting aside 10-20 minutes to get through this game! And I definitely recommend to the team that the game be extended with perhaps a more deep story. I could see this game being on par with Gris. After all, it reminds me very much so of Gris and Neva and seems to me like it may have even been inspired by them.