Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I was immediately charmed by the art style of this piece. The blocky ninja avatar and brick walls are very well rendered (and a surprise, given the comic-book style silhouette on the title page).  In fact, both the art style and the mechanics reminded me of Tiny Heist, which is a nice game to be in a category with.

  The mechanics in this ended up pretty limited. I found that the vast majority of my time was spent waiting in shadows, killing guards in much the same way over and over again. I used the abilities to either heal or make a get out of jail free smoke cloud, both very rarely.  I also think there is some bug fixing and polishing to be done with the samurai's movement mechanics, I was never exactly sure what could trigger their ? status, or clear it. And often while waiting near one they would just 4-5 places in a single move. I also think it would have been strategic to shorten the length of this version of the game. Eleven levels is a LOT when the mechanics don't change as you progress. This would have made a very tight 6 level game IMHO.

  I think the idea of a stealth-roguelike is super sound, and has a lot of design space, but I think this would have benefited from a) really nailing down the central search, alert mechanic of the samurai, and b) adding in more variety (in enemies? in abilities?) over the progression of levels.

• Nice little game. Probably a bit too easy, but that's better than too difficult. The game is playable, can be won and lost.  Mechanics is simple, but working. I was mostly exploiting AI stupidity, but otherwise it would be impossible. Stealth mechanics tied to lightness was explored before, nothing new here. I can't call it a true roguelike, there is nothing in terms of character development or customization, so replayability is very low.