Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• There's a lot to like here. Beautiful pixel art, simple intuitive controls, cool dynamic music system. It's satisfying to sneak up behind a goblin and knock them out, and the stealth system is clean and easy to understand.
  

  Unfortunately, I think a lot of the fine work that went into implementing the pieces of this game didn't quite add up to a super cohesive whole. You can reliably beat a majority of levels just by holding the right arrow key to run to the end - enemies can't hit you if you keep running, since their attacks have a startup time. Combined with the fact that hearts and smoke bombs replenish on each level, this means that a lot of things end up not mattering, so the stealth mechanics somewhat go to waste.

  I think this is one of those games with huge potential that didn't quite get fully fleshed out in the 7-day development period. With some tweaks and more diverse mechanics, I can see it being an addictive game.

• If you walk left and bump into the mountain then you'll be stuck until you reset.  You can't swing your weapon while moving and it's not obvious that you can use it from cover.  Traps spawn in weird places sometimes where it seems impossible to avoid damage, like a trap plate in the same place as a wall locking you into the "climb over wall" animation when you trigger it.  The movement keys sometimes get stuck causing your character to wander into the enemies vision.
  

  It was fun to lure enemies into traps, but it was too bad that they often triggered the traps themselves without player intervention.
  

• Another really excellent gem discovered in this 7DRL "competition". This was a lot of sneaky fun with a great look and feel. I've never heard of the TIC-80 project before, but I've bookmarked it after playing this submission.

  The aesthetic works really well, with the sprites, art, sound and music styles all fitting together very nicely. This is definitely a more innovative project, which does kind of skirt around the borders of "traditional" roguelikes, but in the name of "fun". For example, I suspect the gameplay feel wouldn't be the same if this was turn-based. 

  I think it was to the game's "betterment" (opposite of detriment?), that the AI was....goblin-like. You could usually get through some of the challenging sections by waiting for the goblin to trigger their own trap. 

  An excellent submission that my kids and I really enjoyed. Well done!