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Ironscape's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Roguelikeness | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Aesthetics | #8 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
Scope | #26 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Completeness | #27 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Overall | #57 | 3.111 | 3.111 |
Fun | #58 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
Innovation | #103 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
First off, I love the presentation of this game. The almost-mono chromatic color palette really worked for me, and the subtle use of color splashes was very effective. I also really liked the tiny hint of perspective in the room tiles. The whole thing feels very coherent. I think there might be some technical cropping problems...the pain rating on my weapons was always cut off, for instance, and the help text screen cuts off the end of lines. But, if I'm honest, the text and presentation of so much of this game had a fun otherworldly flavor to it that I didn't mind. The flavor, to be clear, is great. All the language is evocative. Drinking a healing potion has never been as wrenching as it was here. It reminds me of some very nice porpentine-style body horror writing. Cheers.
I played several times and had one run where I got quite far in the dungeon. I kept expecting to find a stair case (but never did), but did experience the enemies getting progressively harder, so maybe this dungeon is all on one floor? I did encounter a situation where a room was chock full of enemies too strong for me to handle...and there didn't seem to be much recourse to it besides just running away. I wasn't sure whether I'd EVER be strong enough to go back...which was a bit of a bummer. My one big design note would be that your (seemingly) most important mechanic is also the one I understood the least: Blitzing. At first I thought it was dangerous to Blitz, but I never figured out what was bad about fatigue...so it seems that you should basically be always Blitzing? This feels a little bad, as it's just clunky to hit the extra button, often getting an error message if you're too fatigued...but I wasn't sure what my fatigue limit was.
Final note the weapon/strength balancing against the enemies was well done, and the names and colors were great. With more time I could see an even more exciting array of items beyond armor/weapons/quaffs.
I liked the layout of the ui and the isometric map with floating characters.
The text on the help page for the combat section is a little odd. It looks like there are points where a new sentence was supposed to start, but it just ran together and some of the text is cutoff on the right. Other than that I didn't find any bugs.
I liked the blitz mechanic. As long as you play carefully and don't let yourself get surrounded you can keep from taking too much damage.
Overall this is a good standard roguelike and about what I expect from a 7drl.
Definitely brutal difficulty in here. On the first try I died to the first enemy! But using blitz really helped survival, as did studying the interface a little more to make sure I was using the best gear for the situation at hand. Other than that, though, there weren't many interesting choices to be made here as the procedural generated content made it feel like an overly complex game of rock, paper, scissor. I did like having an easy reference for all the previously encountered enemies, though overall the language got in the way of enjoying this one due to all the typos and grammar issues.
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