Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A turn-based, modal roguelite which almost does not feel like it was made in 7 days. Whereas most 7DRLs can be figured out quite quickly, I spent several hours on this one before winning; granted, a lot of it is thanks to accumulated knowledge you simply cannot obtain on your first runs, like what the skills you have not picked do. This game is also a road you have to travel down for a while to truly appreciate what it is about. While the way you travel as if on rails is amusing, mouse-only controls are unfortunate, and it at first only offers you the usual JRPG combat against rather standard enemies, where the 4 abilities appear to barely differ from each other. As you start getting better and levelling up, you replace the most generic skills with their elemental equivalents and start facing more enemy types but it still feels rather standard...until you appreciate just how much decision-making is involved on the map and in deciding who to fight in the first place. It is the bonuses (and the occasional handicaps) you permanently obtain from fighting certain creatures that ultimately shape your run, and you have to think hard about those. The core factor of what makes The Road Less Traveled different is just how difficult the healing is. You do not get healed fully post-battle, or even at all; nor do you get healed when levelling up. Crossing from one screen to another does help, but to a limited extent, and trying to maximise that kind of healing comes with far too many risks in the long run. The other three ways to heal also have their own downsides. This forces you to carefully consider every encounter and make trade-offs: even if you can seemingly defeat every creature present on the map, powerful salamanders will keep being spawned from the edge of the screen to make sure you do not linger for too long. An even more unusual decision is that the only way to get cured of damage-over-time status effects (burning and toxin) is by consuming a semi-common enemy. You'll probably have a couple of these in an inventory by the time you start getting hit with these, but getting into unwise fights with powerful status users can easily result in your Hero gradually withering away during the subsequent battles. While the idea of a fire that never goes out on your character but only does damage to him on the combat screens is ridiculous and should likely be toned down, it does result in a calculus unlike anything else. A notable flaw is that the current way of unlocking combat skills is too rigid. On any given run, level 7 will always be Lava Punch, the next level-up Razor Leaf, etc. When combined with the complete lack of UI information about skill properties, and the requirement to drop old moves to learn new ones, the outcome is that you'll likely end up rejecting the majority of moves offered due to not fitting your playstyle at the time, and it does not help that some often feel like straight-up downgrades of your previous moves. A system where you are instead given a choice out of two-three skills drawn from a pool appropriate for your current level would help create more interesting runs. Even now, however, the spiralling interactions between over a dozen of passive traits and consumables you can obtain on the map and amplify, mostly through beating enemies (i.e. one defeated Turtle reduces enemy speed by 5%; 2 by 10%; etc.) more than make up for that. They are also the big reason for early, mid- and late-game feeling distinct not just in terms of graphics and music (although the shift from leisurely theme of intermediate area to the chanting in the third one hits hard), but also in terms of player experience - especially if you make a certain terrible mistake in the early-game which turns the late-game from a potential cakewalk into intense hell. A definite recommend, and I am looking forward to post-jam improvements - from typo fixes and better keyboard support to a revamp of the skill system.
• Nice game on the Pokemon genre. The art could benefit from some more polish while the music is perfect. The "fun vote" could also benefit from some more polish, in the first run i got shredded to pieces in the first screen by a farmer 8). In the level up screen, when you have to choose which skill to discard, there are no descriptions so i could not understand which skill where better/worse.
• This is really cool!