Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Tourette Quest sets out to model the experience of sufferers of Tourette syndrom and Narcolepsy and succeeds at opening an interesting and clever window into that world while simultaneously providing (literally) compelling gameplay.  This is done via introducing a 'stress' resource which exacerbates various negative effects and is increased and decreased through various actions.

  COMPLETENESS
  Seems fairly complete.  No bugs encountered.

  AESTHETICS
  The monochrome mixture of MSPaint and photos is not the most attractive graphical style, but does its job.  Controls and menus are clear and easy to understand.

  FUN
  The game succeeds in blending its message into entertaining gameplay with the various symptoms having interesting effects and requiring you to manage stress to mitigate their effects.  The main negative is that engaging with these systems isn't really necessary to win the game - as all the enemies move randomly it's easier to dodge them all and simply escape to the exit.

  INNOVATION
  Games which explore autobiographical mental health issues are pretty rare (the only other example I can think of is Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia). The various symptoms of Tourettes and Narcolepsy are expressed as game mechanics in a novel and interesting way.

  SCOPE
  A reasonable scope for a 7DRL, with a number of different effects and item types.

  ROGUELIKE
  Has many ingredients of a roguelike, though the combat system is modal and menu-based more alike a JRPG and consequently the gameplay is very different to a standard roguelike.

• This is a great example of “show don’t tell” being used successfully in a game. I enjoyed the strategy of having to choose between the action that I wanted and the action that I was compelled to choose - but I really enjoyed knowing that this decision factored into a larger experience that the developer was trying to convey.

  Graphically very clean and effective. I think the art for the enemies was great. The battle screen vs the F-150 is screenshot worthy.

  I ultimately won by avoiding as many enemies as possible, which is fairly interesting because it’s literally stress/trigger avoidance as a game mechanic.

  Interesting premise, supported by relevant mechanics with a substantial amount of polish. This is a solid entry for sure.

• The "tic" mechanic is an interesting take on the "hunger clock". I enjoyed that, and the clean aesthetic of the game. I liked the "content" cues at the entrance of each room. Enemy AI and map generation would would probably have benefitted from longer than a week of development -- they're distractingly simple.