Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This game is a short stealth dungeon crawler with the main mechanical innovation being a real-time fixed interval in between turns. It's very tightly done, with simple controls, simple goals, and an easy to understand interface. This is helped by the small scope - there's not a lot to figure out, in the three small levels, with only movement and one interaction key. The mechanic is interesting, like a fixed-beat necrodancer, but it does feel kind of slow to play when the only thing you want to do is walk across the platform. The turns still play out fully when there are no enemies on screen, which makes simple navigation feel slower than it needs to be. It does make it quite tense when you've alerted an enemy and must quickly think of how to escape, and I did die a couple of times to basically being too slow to respond. It definitely gives the game a different feel! The enemies and map appear to be static between the 3 levels - I couldn't really tell any difference between the first and last levels. Likewise there's not a ton of different enemies available. I think that there's a good idea in there. It would feel better if there the real-time elements were modal - for example, they only applied once an enemy was on screen - or if there were some other way to make "I want to walk from A to B while under zero thread" less slow. It would also definitely benefit from more content, but 7 days is pretty harsh on that aspect.
• Mainframe: Hacker Adventures is a turn-based rhythm game set in a Shadowrun-style matrix world. The game is turn-based but if you don't act fast enough you will lose your turn, and conversely you can only act once per "turn", timewise. The game felt a little rough on the edges as far as mechanics and features go, but I did not encounter any noticeable bugs. The art style was very clean, but some of the mechanics -- such as combat, or even the 3-shape terminal puzzles -- were not very intuitive at first. The rhythm aspect of the game made moving through corridors and empty rooms a tedious endeavor, but it did require fast thinking to navigate rooms that are busy with enemy activity. Despite that, I do think I'd have preferred a true turn-based format to solve these rooms. The game's levels, enemies, and interactions lacked the variety to keep me interested through multiple levels and playthroughs. The rhythm-based nature firmly pushes this game out of the traditional roguelike category, but it still maintains the spirit of the roguelike genre.