Fantastic visual style, obviously. Archibald has done an amazing job and makes me want to hire him.
The sound is pretty good and works well with the art to set an excellent atmosphere, but there's no music.
On the forums, there was a lot (a lot!) of hype regarding this game, because it looked so beautiful. I think experience and time were the big factors that made it fall short for this demo. Perhaps the biggest problem is still ongoing. The game design is for a simple, standard platformer. There is nothing that makes the game nearly as special as the graphics, and we all know that graphics aren't everything. In fact, in the indie community, graphics are often not much of anything. Indie games depend on innovative gameplay or at least some fun from the game being a little different than the usual.
The story is introduced via static text on a static screen. It's not a particularly interesting story, but the presentation makes a big difference too. I think what would work well would be a slowly scrolling view of the town in the rain with a voice-over instead of text.
The thing is, go ahead and make a Pong clone or a simple platformer to get it out of your system, but please do not make it the most beautiful Pong ever unless you are creating gameplay that goes above and beyond what is expected for Pong! For Rainy Day, maybe something like creating small wind gusts with the umbrella to push enemies or objects would improve the concept, or maybe if you had to put down the suitcase to take care of business (like solving a puzzle) and collect it again later would be enough to do something unique.
The game, as submitted, is a single screen level. There are little icons to collect for points and a couple of bad guys to beat. That's all, but it does show that everything works right. I just hope that glimpse of the game is not what the whole game will feel like. It is just too plain of a game for such beautiful art. It earned last place because it is not much of a game right now and the outlook on intended gameplay is a let down. A set of beautiful images should not win a game dev competition.
