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THE STARS ARE TOO HIGH's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fan Favorite | #107 | 1.179 | 1.667 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Please see Teal's play-through video, as well as her review of the game in the video description:
I can sort of see the Binding of Isaac sort of style you were going for here, but in practice unfortunately it doesn't really work because of the lack of story, genericness of the maze and lack of decent item spread.
It seems that the only reliable source of healing items is battles, but you take damage from the battles that makes you need to use the items, so it ends up being a zero-sum game where you're not really gaining anything you can use later. The "boss" battles seem tuned too high as well.
The "reset run" keeping previous progress would have made it worth doing multiple times, but the lighting effects and images slowed my laptop to a crawl so half the time my screen was either frozen or going at too low an FPS to be easily playable. Given that issue, it wasn't worth going through everything more than twice. I got to the capitalism dungeon but then the first enemy killed me.
With some work, less oppressive lighting effects and a map to help you track where you've been and where you're going (something Binding of Isaac does very well), this could be a better game.
Don't forget to save progress in the elevator, I forgor to actually put a message specifying this in.
There is some really cool stuff in this game, but the dungeons and battles are kind of annoying and not too fun. The "Capitalism Dungeon" had an enemy that one-shotted me as well. Not sure if there was some kind of trick to it or what. The lack of a storyline made the barebones dungeon even more of a grind, all to realize it's just repeating over and over. It's a shame because it looked like a lot of effort went into this, but the weird looping dungeons combined with off-balance enemies (that are either one-shot and they die or one shot and I die) killed the enjoyment of all the "flashy stuff" you put in here (custom art, 3D segments, etc).
I really wanted to make a game like The Binding of Issac where the trick to the game is that you retry runs until you get good items and items are randomised between runs, although it looks like the items are always either underpowered or overpowered with no inbetween.
It seems there's no easy way for me to fix this.
Thanks for the feedback.
I think if the dungeon layout also changed, or it was at least more visually interesting, there would be a compelling reason to replay the same dungeon over and over until you got the right loot, but because the layout is static, it's jut not that compelling. Also, and I'm not sure why this is, but I learned that the loot changes and that better loot makes the boss fight easier, but once I got to the next level, that knowledge escaped me again when I ran headfirst into an enemy that one-shotted me. I'm not sure if there's any way to telegraph to the player that you need the loot before you take on any fights, but it really didn't stick in my head when I played it. I actually think you have a pretty promising base for a game, that could be tweaked a bit to be pretty compelling.
I've been working on making the fights less hard but way more complex, and dungeon design I don't know if this will fix it but it looks pretty promising so far.
I think the game needs to be more based on skill rather than RNG.
Thanks again.
I'll add the telegraphing how the loot works to the list.