Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• One the one hand, Pataro is a basic roguelike. On the other hand, basic roguelikes are awesome, so I had a good time. There are also some nice quality of life features, like fading text, simple controls, and clear, simply levels. I would like to had more mosnters to fight and more items to use, but what was there was quality. There were a few things that are very unusual-- the first is that monsters can attack sideways, but the player cannot. This is interesting conceptually, but in practice there are times when you can't help but take a hit when you are trying to get adjacent to them. Without a wait key, you can use a potion or scroll to take a turn when you are in a line with the monster at least. The other thing was that monsters move in cardinal directions when moving around corners, which means that you gain a tile of space on them. It is not a huge deal, but is a little inconsistant. I kind of like that it tracks your actions in a file as well. Requiring the mouse to use items is inconsistant as well, and makes you move you hand, which is slightly annoying. Definitely fulfills my criteria for being a roguelike. Overall, a simple but solid experience to build on.
• This submission claims to be made on "a modern C++ roguelike game engine" from the developer. In fact, it is so "modern" that it does not execute at all until you download the missing .dll file for it. Once you do that, you discover the game itself is identical to the first floor of the infamous roguelike Python tutorial. You simply bump into orcs and trolls to kill them in perfectly deterministic combat, chugging frequent health potions to restore HP and casting fireballs or lightning bolts at trolls if you find them in time. Once the floor is completely cleared, there is nothing else to do, so you close the window and move on. The only good thing to say here is that the game looks clean and easily readable thanks to tutorial's default ASCII, but there wasn't even an attempt to extend that with sound. Altogether, there's zero reason to play it; most of the "incomplete" submissions to this contest are more developed than this one.
• This is the basis for a roguelike game engine. A good start to a traditional ascii engine. Keep with it and expand on this next year!