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ESCAPING 4 EVER's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Audience's Choice - Game Design | #8 | 2.040 | 2.179 |
Audience's Choice - Asset Implementation | #9 | 2.136 | 2.282 |
Audience's Choice - Player Experience | #10 | 1.632 | 1.744 |
Ranked from 39 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Bit of a spoiler ahead, to anyone reading this:
At first, the game was relatively simple. There isn't really much way you can innovate and iterate on being able to move only four tiles, and the sound you make when "hopping" along is honestly kind of grating after a while. The biggest screw-you to the player is not giving us any sort of indication that you were going to implement unmarked teleporters into your levels. If you had put Level 7 (the three-tiered level) before Level 6 (the impossibly large grid level), I think it would've been fine. Then at least the player has knowledge of what to expect later... but just throwing us to the wolves like that without any sort of explanation in a level that otherwise looks impossible—especially after one where I have to take a certain number of steps to make the goal chest even appear, giving me a false notion of my actual objective and making me think my movements will make the real chest maybe appear somewhere more accessible—is just a massive gut punch. And then the game basically ends three levels later, leaving me wholly unsatisfied.
I’m not sure if there was a pattern to catch or not, but I managed to guess a few rooms correctly the first time and still got a dopamine hit from that lol
I think if there were checkpoints instead of restarting on failure, you could have more elaborate puzzles without it being too frustrating.
CAUTION: SPOILERS BELOW
Summary:
An interesting concept for a puzzle/memorisation game with gameboy-esque graphics, set in a limbo-purgatory. The bound player needs to solve each level to continue to the next. Each level only allows 4 moves, exceeding which resets the game, and the later ones play on the motif of them appearing impossible whilst still actually being solvable.
My Experience:
The gameplay is simple and relatively short, offset by having to repeat levels several times. Failure resets the player back to the beginning of the game, including rereading all the text. This was the most annoying part; where some levels are quite unfair, they often require the player to simply guess the correct direction with no hints. I think even something as small as not repeating the opening text and teasing the player with almost-but-not-quite manageable routes could be an interesting way to play with the deliberately induced frustration, but as the game stands, it ends up being tedious. The art is cute, but due to the gameplay, it ends up a little too small to fully appreciate, which is a shame. Overall, I had fun and really thought the idea had a lot of merit, though it needs some reworking to reach its potential.
Theme Fit:
The player sprite is bound and as part of the theme, the player is "trapped" in a loop, with the restriction on jumps . Beyond that, it doesn't seem overly like the bondage is integral to the gameplay, and is mostly there for appearance.
What Could Be Improved:
neat idea with puzzle elements, though had difficulties with the 5th level and having to travel to the beginning just to try again and fail several times.
Reminds me a bit of The Impossible Quiz but without the humor. It feels less like a puzzle game and more like a series of "How can we make the player quit" instances. Good idea but lacking in execution. This title would likely work better taking inspiration from Helltaker where the challenge comes from planning out the moves and seeing where things can go wrong instead of random chance to figure it out. I wouldn't say restarting from the beginning each time is necessarily a bad thing, but it just compounds with the less than ideal level design.