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Soul Walker's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music? | #46 | 3.588 | 3.714 |
| Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme? | #58 | 3.174 | 3.286 |
| Overall | #103 | 3.091 | 3.200 |
| Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game? | #113 | 2.967 | 3.071 |
| Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing? | #123 | 3.243 | 3.357 |
| Gameplay - How fun is it to play? | #145 | 2.484 | 2.571 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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I completed the game by chance, after two entire turns around the last square area what seemed like another kobold blocked my way so I killed it and it turns out it was actually the Balor. It took me 4 retries I think, which feels fine, although loading spots could probably be checkpoints.
I didn't like the small steps especially since movement, if not slow, won't go as fast as you want either. I'm not sure how I feel about possessing body, withstanding damage that way is fun but just leaving the body every two steps to see what's going on then getting back into it feels like a weird mechanics, maybe the darkness thing is just not really for my taste, that's fine. I tried to fight a bit at first then did not see the point, which is not a problem in a horror game anyway. The dungeon is good enough, it's weird and scary both visually and mechanically, navigating in the middle of these giant dark knight is cool. Inventory looks somewhat cool and having some verticality is always a plus.
Thanks for sharing.
Wow, I'm actually surprised you played the game to completion since I haven't actually done that! Yeah the scale of the map relative to movement speed was a problem I didn't foresee when I designed my levels, however I am glad to see that the game is working as intended since you were able to complete it!
You are the first commenting person that played it more like a survival horror which was closer to the intent of the game, and yeah the way I handled the mechanic is not as well baked as I would like.
I should note there is instant movement in the options but I would still say the maps are still large anyways.
I'm still certain I didn't have a bad idea, but I certainly didn't utilize my mechanics well enough.
Thank you for the feedback!
Neat mechanic, and very nice atmosphere. However, the controls were killing me, lol. The levels are way too big for single press movement, in my opinion. I wouldn't mind seeing continuous movement. I managed to reach the area with the ramps and found 2 keys, but at this point I could start feeling my finger disagreeing with me playing this game so I stopped :(
Using ctrl is not wise for a browser game, due to the shortcut potential. I once had ctrl as crouch in a FPS jam game, and didn't realize that ctrl+w is bad news until right before the deadline :D so I recommend not using ctrl in the future for webGL games. Alt and esc are also problematic, the rest should be fine I think.
Another thing I found tedious is the unskippable scrolling text, which then has to disappear before you are able to continue, making it twice as bad lol. But that's something I personally dislike. It might fit the aesthetic but if this were a dialogue heavy game I would've quit way sooner.
So yeah, with some tweaks this could be a neat little atmospheric game! I really liked the mood it set and the body-as-a-resource mechanic has potential.
Honestly it was supposed to be a desktop game originally, but I made the main build run on the web in order to make it more accessible.
Ah yeah so I am definitely finding in common that flavor text is either received nicely or badly, but definitely needs to be skippable! It's okay! I also found it annoying while trying to test game functionality but that was right before I decided to turn it in because I decided I was not pulling an all-nighter to fix it...
Thank you for the feedback, and yeah it was my first time doing anything in Unity so I kind of figured out things either too late, or did not know of a decent way to do it.
I like the athmosphere of the game, its very fitting for the theme. Feels quite frightening to roam through the after-world.
I was a bit confused at start, until I found out I am supposed to walk through walls. Well makes sense I guess, since you are a spirit in the afterlife, haha. The music is nice too and underlines the moot well. The step-size is a bit too small, I have to press w constantly like its one one of these hit-the-key games. :P I had no problems with the monsters, they are quit dumb and you can walk around them often. The game felt a bit like Doom at times, finding
keycardskeys to progress further in the 3D-world. :DOverall a pretty nice game. :)
Ah I don't think it's really step-size being small as opposed to the maps being unnecessarily big, which is just a mistake of not enough time(tm) and not really matching the scale to my map sketches!
Although yes it's definitely influenced by DOOM, but more like DOOM64 where it's supposed to play more into the horror aspect.
Thank you for the feedback!
The elevation in this game felt great for a crawler, I wish the engine I came up with supported ramps.
The art and music melded together to make a rich and engaging atmosphere and I melted into the game. Great work!
I did find the game play a little difficult and required a few tries to make it through.
I truly enjoyed this entry thanks for sharing with us!
I'm glad the elevation seemed to be special enough to point out, I just wished I had a better way of making the levels outside of stacking 2D tilemaps (when you only have a day left to basically superman the levels it's not like I was thinking of anything else...)
Yeah other than the slightly uncomfortable control scheme, I really intended it to be more along "survival horror" and wanted to discourage fighting unless you really can't help it (honestly I think if I had time to do stealth, that would've been a nice addition.)
There was supposed to be more of a focus on exploration and using the two "modes" to travel through stuff. However I didn't really have enough time to design levels to properly make use of the mechanics.
I also liked the aesthetic. The world had a really good feeling to it. I was especially happy to learn I could go up ramps, I love elevation in games.
Inhabiting bodies is cool and I really like that you injected flavor text into the scenes at progress points. It really adds to the feeling of the world. Also solid 5 stars on audio, it really helped set the mood for me!
I think you might have "Generate MipMaps" turned on for the textures, some of their detail seems to abruptly stop at a certain distance which is what I've seen happens when you're point sampling from a blurry mip map.
Ah that is very possible... I forgot to change a lot of import settings for my textures.
I'm glad you liked the limited usage of elevation! Unfortunately it was also probably the thing that killed me on the time because I didn't use any assets for a 3D tilemap and kind of hacked together the world out of 2D tilemaps layered on top of each other. Biggest mistake of my life.
I totally dig the lofi horror aesthetic you’ve got going. Good stuff!
I feel the user interface made it unnecessarily difficult to get from starting the game and attacking with the sword. I died three times before I figured out all the steps - getting a body, getting the sword, going to the inventory and equipping it, and using ‘control’ to attack. Auto-equipping on pickup when you don’t have a weapon would probably saved me two of those deaths.
Yeah control as attack might be pretty polarizing...
Yeah in retrospect the inventory system is a bit more unwieldy than it had to be. Although I am glad to hear you did indeed die at least once as a consequence of your own actions and not through my own fault!
Controls/ Gameplay
Movement is very easy, although the attack key being the control key is a bit cumbersome. It also caused me to close the tab that the game was on due to it being a browser game. This caused me to stop playing the game after the third time it happened.
The idea of some walls being traversable is also quite an interesting idea.
Not being able to skip the dialogue is rather annoying when you’ve already seen it.
The AI can be a little confusing as it is a little difficult to work out where they are going.
There is a massive spike in terms of damage required to kill the lesser demons over the kobolds which was rather annoying.
Graphics
The graphics are very reminiscent of the 16 bit era and is clearly stylized this way.
The enemies are a little difficult to differentiate, but I only saw 2 enemies.
The sword attack animation is almost non existant. It really needs to swing more in my opinion.
Music
The music is very atmospheric and does a good job of setting up the atmosphere, although another track or two to mix things up would've been nice as the track does drone on after a little while.
Sound Effects
The sound effects, while generic, do fit the 16 bit graphics style.
Story
An interesting premise. Who doesn’t enjoy a good escape hell story?
Theme
The idea of possessing bodies is certainly an interesting take on the theme of the game jam
User Interface
The main menu works although being a web game, the return to desktop and quit buttons don’t really have much point.
Additional Notes
None
Yeah I suppose using Unix layout doesn't really do anyone many favors (Caps-lock as Ctrl lol), I am sorry that was your experience!
Anyways the enemy health spike is somewhat intentional as the intent is to encourage you to avoid fighting higher tier enemies whenever possible since you are supposed to be relatively feeble (like a souls-like but without the getting stronger part basically.) Had I more time I would've used it to add more tools to handle obstacles (it was supposed to be that higher tier enemies could only be incapacitated and not outright killed unless you met certain conditions or had certain weapons.), but I burned a lot of time just learning how to make Unity do stuff.
Although yeah there are a lot of balance problems and outside of making sure you could beat the game (passing level triggers and the boss fight working), I did not vet anything very much!
I admit, I had planned for something far more ambitious than I realized I had time for...
Thanks for the feedback though!
Your welcome, I certainly had fun despite the closing of the tab :)
Overall, that was really good. Very atmospheric.
This game is great, I love the possession mechanic! I was able to detect the hidden wall by the seams, not sure if that was intentional.
Ah if it's in level 1, that one is intentional. If it's anywhere else, probably not!
Trying to figure out Unity in one week for this was not my wisest idea.