Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Completeness:

  Memorex is complete game with rough edges.
  

  Aesthetics:

  Minimalistic-retro-low-poly aesthetics with pseudo-isometric view. I like it! But UI is far from being polished, and font is not readable enough. 

  Fun:

  For me, Memorex is fun in small doses because of both: aesthetics and gameplay loop. Even after playing tutorial (rare thing for a 7DRL - even if it's a bit hard to follow, it's managable and gets work done) rules remains a bit vague (btw, I wish dev would include readme file - reading description on game page was helpful). I'm sure that cleaner UI would help a lot...

  Innovation:

  While game loops isn't something entirely new, Memorex explores interesting setting and focuses on unusual mechanics.

  Scope:

  Reasonable for 7DRL. Tutorial is a big plus here.

  Roguelikeness:
  

  During 7DRL reviewing process, I'm liberal about what is roguelike and what is not. Procedurally generated levels? Check. Grid based? Check. Turn based? Check. Permadeath? Check. Therefore, I call Memorex roguelike.
  

• The game is fun to play, but not fun to learn.  Programs are important but it's hardly explained anywhere what they do or how they're activated.  Encrypted enemy programs should have been saved for higher level enemies and your own programs shouldn't show as encrypted when targeting yourself.  The rules for how the execute and move programs use CPU were not explained well.  I sometimes get too excited when seeing an important program in a folder and then try to install it without checking my available memory first, destroying the program in the process which tends to be the opposite of what I wanted.
  

  The game seems to hang sometimes, requiring a restart.  There are aspects to the random generation and balance that can cause a run to end before it has started such as a combat enemy stun locking you near the start or starting with a fork near the start, one path to the exit, the other to a dead end, and the corruption plus your slow starting movement blocks your ability to backtrack when you take the wrong path.  There are also issues with text overlapping on lower resolutions.

  Queuing up actions and then running them separately was mostly useless, for nearly all your processes the best time to use them is immediately.  The only exception I noticed was the malware process which was more useful to trigger from a distance.  I think this gimmick would have worked better if there were more processes that were useful at a different time than when they're queued.  It would have been nice to queue the firewall triggers sometimes.
  

• Targeting specific enemy processes rather than enemies directly was fun, is a neat concept like a game within a game.
  Was unable to pass the squatter sprite in the tutorial, it seemed to block any attempt to be decrypted after hijacking. Maybe increasing the number of moves allowed would help speed up the pace. The guide works well, but the process targeting part of the game could be spelled out a bit more, it's a good mechanic.