Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I really like this entry. I played half a dozen times, never making it past level 4 or 5, but having a good experience each attempt. The central mechanic, of having individual rooms that overlap in space and are dynamically connected by mobile door objects, is just a lot of fun to play with. Not only that, but the designs of the different spaces -- from their names to their colors to their layouts to their features -- are all really satisfying. It seems that’s where the author spent a good chunk of time, and the result is great.

  My love for the portal mechanic aside, I will say that this entry feels like it wanted about 20% more game. That is, there’s armor and injuries…but no clear readout of your health, or of the damage various enemies do. There’s a mostly developed temperature system, with hot and cold items, that seems to lack one or two more applications to be really great. Finally, wands are alluded to in the instructions but I never found one…which left my only interaction with monsters to be shoving and running. There is a strategic pleasure to this for a while, but on later playthroughs, as I made it to lower levels, I was desperate for, say, a sword. All in all, this feels like it could be the very satisfying foundation for a very cool roguelike with just a little more programming work. That, or, this portal mechanic is going to make a killer feature in the author’s next game.

• So many assorted thoughts about this awesome game. Here's a selection of them in no particular order:

  • The aesthetic is beautiful traditional ASCII all the way and I love seeing that.
  • The portal concept is cool and implemented well. There's a part of me that's of two minds about it, because it sometimes just made things confusing in a not necessarily fun way and I'd sometimes end up going through a slightly tedious process of just hoarding regions in one place to try to make sense of the map. But the very fact that this game involves such a thing as "hoarding regions" makes all this a net win for me.
  • I like that you can only push enemies - it gives a good sort of balance in which you can handle one enemy at a time fairly well but still find enemies to be a real danger. It does get a little tedious repeatedly pushing enemies away until they move the correct number of squares.
  • It's cool that there are enemies like the giant snail that are heavier and so get pushed zero or one tiles instead of one or two. (And they move slowly, so you end up using the strategy of outrunning them rather than pushing them.)
  • It was really cool to be able to lure a swarm of enemies into a cold room and let them all freeze to death. It's awesome how a cold or hot room is effectively a weapon that you can carry around for this purpose.
  • The randomly generated character names are cool and frequently hilarious. (Constassccassara, Beatasha...) Ditto the region names. In my first game, I started in "The Bad Hall" - quite an inauspicious start.
  • The existence of the various different biomes is cool, and they're pretty well differentiated, with different sorts of plants/terrain, different kinds of shapes, etc. Even things like creeping vines, which keep growing - just a lot of cool attention to detail where you might not expect it.
  • I'm ashamed to say that in my hour of play I didn't manage to finish the game. In my best run, I got as far as level 6 before burning to death. I suspect there's still plenty that I have yet to see (that run was the first one in which I saw someone shoot me with a projectile, for instance), so I'll definitely be returning to this game when I have more time.
  • I don't want to spoil it in case anyone reads this before playing, but there's a certain pair of enemies that's hilarious.

• The pacing is slow, the early dungeon levels are less interesting once you've revisited them multiple times.  I made it pretty far but I wasn't able to finish the game.  It would have been easier to review if the dungeon was more compressed.
  

  You can't examine the rooms behind a portal, and portals will sometimes orient in weird directions like both ends landing on the north walls facing south.  It's also hard to place a portal in a specific direction in a narrow corridor.
  

  Opening a portal to the duck dimension was very memorable moment.