Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Thanks for participating in the 7DRL and putting an entry together as ambitious as this! I really enjoyed the battle card approach in this game! I did find the difficulty level on the harder side, but take that with a grain of salt; I love roguelikes but I'm terrible at beating them. :) I encourage you to keep working on this! Hope you had fun and thanks again for participating!
• Deduction Quest is a card battler roguelite based around what is arguably the purest form of metaprogression: figuring out which character defeats which from past experience alone. Neither the monster names nor their images have any real relation to their combat prowess. In fact, they are generally not even related to each other, and same goes for your roster of heroes - "Trigger-Happy Eliza" can be a swordsman with a shield and no ranged weapon, to give just one example. That is no flaw with graphics, or even a flaw at all: everything looks nice and well-styled, as well as accompanied by SFX, and the absurd mismatches only teach you not to trust names/appearances faster. Thus, weak-sounding creatures can often be the hardest and vice versa: there's no way to know until you try and the only way you are beating any battle on first try is through pure luck, since while monsters remain in place after they beat someone from your group, your victorious fighter is taken out of rotation alongside the monster, forcing you to use someone else and meaning that strongest fighters are wasted if the monster is weaker, as then someone else in the party would have to fight a creature only they could have beaten. Failing reduces global HP and brings you closer to the end of the run, when you stop being able to afford continues. It's not too complex in the first battle, where there are just three combatants on either side. These numbers go up by one in the subsequent rounds, progressively increasing complexity. Luckily, you are also offered perks after each cleared round that make things a lot easier: while you might resort to writing who beats what on paper in earlier rounds, you'll eventually get either the perk showing that on mouse hover, or the ability to know your fighters' levels from the start, which is of great aid when you also learn the level of the defeated enemies. I played this game several times, and have never lost. Yet, I came close at times, and the game's premise is surprisingly good at maintaining suspense: you might have defeated all but the last monster, but if it turns out it's stronger than you thought, that immediately triggers a scramble to figure out which particular fighter you matched with an overly weak enemy before, so you can rarely feel too safe in your position. Definitely worth a try.
• The game looks nice, sounds nice, and has some nice card animations. I'm not sure how this would be considered a roguelike, aside from procedurally generated names and character levels. It's simply a game of memorization with nothing persisting to the next round. It feels like a mechanic that should be part of a larger game.