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Pocket Hole's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #209 | 3.392 | 4.091 |
| Audio | #227 | 2.940 | 3.545 |
| Overall | #328 | 2.864 | 3.455 |
| Fun | #333 | 2.789 | 3.364 |
| Innovation | #351 | 2.638 | 3.182 |
| Game Design | #380 | 2.714 | 3.273 |
| Graphics | #384 | 2.714 | 3.273 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Nice take on Pokémon! I enjoyed seeing the different types of holes and their abilities. The writing is good, the ending made me chuckle. The music is good, too.
Criticisms:
There's no tutorial, and luckily I read some other comments before playing so I wasn't completely lost.
There's a lot of waiting in the battle scenes, which I wouldn't mind that much if there were progress bars showing when my next turn would be up.
The biggest issue was this bug: Some abilities get locked on and I was only able to use those abilities (though I could use them constantly without breaks). The ash ability lock made it impossible to beat the first boss, and it stayed stuck after respawning at a checkpoint and removing lava hole from party. Teeth was another ability that got locked.
Hahaha, I came back with that new knowledge in hand and the game is so much more fun! Like genuinely awesome. I loved the different bosses, the puns and even the once slow encounters. There was still time that I was just waiting for something to do, but it wasn't a huge deal. I loved when I arrived at the final boss, and after heaps of pushovers, they beat one of my dudes in one hit. Awesome stuff, not sure that you intended that, but it was a great way of saying they mean business. Then the ending... Nice.
Sorry bout the misunderstanding with the mechanics, the extra slots in the party definitely needs to be more obvious, and once I knew, the game was a blast!
Those fights... they're painfully slow. I'm sorry, with all the awesome writing, I wanted to play further, but the fights are inconsistent, hard and a bit of a slog. You only ever had two choices of what attack to use, which wasn't enough choice to consistently overcome the opponent. Death meant a restart, which hurt the most. I'm afraid that I barely turned the first corner before giving up... (sorry)
There is still positive to report tho, the writing was awesome. Make more writing like that, it was really engaging. With all the time I spent waiting in battle, I also came to appreciate the music, which is really nice. The difficulty probably isn't even that bad, if you were to just speed up battles, then it would be easier to find strategies, and the game would be so much more fun to play
Thanks for trying out the game! I really appreciate the feedback, and from all the comments this is the one consistent criticism that's been hammered- although it might not be the one you think. I'm assuming you didn't know you could equip up to 4 characters at once, including the donut, which is what you're supposed to do to be able to win the fights. Same for fore-wording dialogue- most people struggled finding the key for it. It's really useful to know for future releases, and it's nice knowing people liked the writing.
I like your concept of an RPG where the characters are holes. Your writing is hilarious. Unfortunately, I think your battling system is very slow. I think you're trying to go for an ATB type system, but there's no visualization of when I can take my next turn. I just have to wait for things to pop-up. I also thought the battling was too hard. Especially when fighting more than one hole at once. Anytime that happened, I was guaranteed to lose. Overall good creativity, poor execution of gameplay.
Nice game! The music is great! Like what others have commented, you should add more hints for reading dialogue and adding new party members. I didn't realise that you could add multiple party members until later. Also, you should add a control that speeds up combat.
good one :D
Laughed out loud a couple times at the writing. Good stuff. The graphics were simple but clean and cohesive. The combat felt good as far as JRPG style combat goes, which I’ve never gotten into. Altogether really fun game!
You should have added a hint on how to get to the next dialogue because i was just pressing every key to find it out. :D
Well done! Lovely style!
Loved the dialogue, loved the comedy, loved the gameplay... Really good game, I enjoyed it thoroughly! Congrats! :'D
It is working now so updated review, the only thing I would suggest is less dialogue at the beginning. That was a lot of reading before i could even move the player and was losing interest. Well done though, nice little JRPG style game with good feel to it.
Thanks for giving it a try even after not working initially! I definitely agree the beginning dragged on too long, I was pretty bad at trying to create a set up.
I think the build might be broken, it just loads up a text window saying WAIT... and never does anything with the player standing in the grass. I relaunched a few times. Will mark the rating low for now but if you get it fixed let me know and i will come back to try and update it for you. Also there is no mentions of controls anywhere so just in case its not broken i tried mashing all the keys to be sure but nothing is happening.
I've re-installed it and it seems to work properly for me. In case it's the controls "Z" is used to carry on dialogue. Prehaps you might've not pressed that, I'll put it in the page to make sure people know.
Will try again and let you know