Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I am a big fan of games that have a consistent and coherent style, and Devour has that. The art is really nice, the style is atmospheric, and I like the living feeling of having nice oily particle effects here and there. The shadows go a long way to make the game feel like a physical space. The art has a Darkwood feel. Doing all of this development and art in a week is impressive. This idea could become a full game for sure, with a dark, dirty, visceral feel and perhaps more complex combat mechanics to present more options, potentially taking ideas from deckbuilder games. The game currently does have bugs and balance issues. The biggest balance issue for me was that it felt that the bodyparts were pretty evenly distributed, such that I actually rarely replaced anything. I may have missed something, but it didn't feel that I was progressing as I went down through levels. The other largest issue is that the movement is much much too slow-- movement in roguelikes should generally be instantaneous. Overall a very nice submission.
• The game lacks some basics: Movement is sluggish. There's no feedback on enemies health during fights. No escape mechanisms (that I could find). The devour mechanic is interesting, but needs more to make it into a game. I liked the graphics and dark atmosphere.
• Both a promising game, and an unfortunate example of graphics intruding upon gameplay. Devour's black-and-white-and-red artstyle isn't exactly unique nowadays, but it is still relatively rare in general and done well here in particular. Moreover, the core mechanic of limb replacement results in your character genuinely changing visually to reflect that every time as well. However, it appears that the fire and shadow effects this game uses cause it to stutter noticeably far too often: especially the case if you are trying to move fast in any direction. This may get optimized in the future, but we have to access what is available now. The controls are also lacking. Right now, combat is only possible with the mouse: while you can select the limb abilities with hotkeys, they still require clicking to activate. At the same time, click to move is impractical since it does not work outside of the immediate vicinity. Worst of all, getting to the next level requires finding a portal (a purple oval that occupies six tiles) positioning the character at the right spot within it, and then clicking on them. This seems to bug out at times, and it's unclear why simply moving into the portal would not have sufficed. The combat system itself is surprisingly extensive, given the timeframe involved. You always have four ways to attack (right and left arms, a foreleg, and your mouth) and while you can only strike with one at a time, they all have differing cooldowns, requiring you to alternate between them. There's quite a lot they can do: while all of them can just do pure, instantaneous damage, all can trade weaker hits to stack damage over time, whether up close (sharp fangs and blade arms for bleed, tentacles for poison) or at range (tentacle legs can strike two tiles, but poison and fire breath straight-up reaches 4 tiles.) Some melee attacks also have the Absorb effect which drains HP. There are also the non-combat body parts (body, head above the mouth, eye, horn), which just provide different stat boosts when swapped. Since your enemies are the same sort of creature you are, they play by the exact same rules, and you need to have a superior build to triumph. Pretty much all the body grades tend to be sidegrades rather than pure upgrades, too, which should make it challenging. In practice, however, the game becomes a lot easier if you are lucky enough to start with at least one limb capable of stuns. That effect is surprisingly hard to find from enemy drops, but it is by far the most helpful one: while cooldowns will prevent stunlocks, just having a free turn to hit without worrying about incoming attacks every few turns makes the most difference, especially if you use it to stack some DOT effects. It becomes truly easy once you manage to optimize your build to get high defence and HP regeneration values. A good combination of both prevents you from taking any meaningful damage in 1-v-1s with your brethren. In all, this is a promising game with a cool look and solid underlying system, but which now requires a lot of optimization and balancing.