Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Get to the stairs. I won the first time it didn't crash mid game.

  Completeness 2
  Back/cancel shows a square, but is actually controlled by the Z key.
  Once the line of sight was screwed up so that I was moving underneath black space.
  Selecting some characters, going back, then starting again allows you to take more than one of each character class.
  Crashed in several of my games, giving the following message: 

  Aesthetics 2
  The tiles/font are very blocky, ugly and hard to read.
  Arrow key movement and X/Z for selection.

  Fun 2
  Easy, not much thinking needed.
  The animated dice rolling for combat is extremely slow (you can press enter and select "no dice" to not show the animations).
  Even with no dice animations, the delay during combat results and between turns is way too long.

  Innovation 2
  Attack dice use skulls and shields rather than numbers.
  Multiple controlled party members (rare for a roguelike but common for turn based tactics).

  Scope 3
  Several classes/enemies.

  Roguelikeness 4
  Turn/grid based
  Randomness
  Permafailure
  Abilities
  Not much tactics/strategy
  Multiple party members

• HeroQuestRL is, as far I can tell and as the names suggests, a straightforward adaptation of the board game Hero Quest into roguelike form. Even though I've always admired pico-8 games from a distance, this is the first one I"ve actually played. I love the art. The tiny sprites are great and the animation works well too.

  What doesn't work so well is the combat. You go up to monsters and attack them and dice resolve the combat for you. This seems interesting at first, but there doesn't seem to be any strategy. It's just rolling a bunch of dice. There are 4 different classes and you can bring all 4 in at once (which wasn't immediately obvious in my first play through). But none of them feel different. They have different stats, but I never saw how that could factor into decision making. Having to control 4 characters and then wait for the enemies to move and dice to roll was personally a bit frustrating (but perhaps take my feedback with a grain of salt as I'm not a big fan of such board games).

  There is effectively only one level because the game consistently (4 times in a row) crashes when getting all characters to the exit.

  This is an interesting board game adaption and seems to bring in a lot of stuff from Hero Quest. It's impressive how it all comes together, but I was really wishing there was more to the gameplay.