Whoo boy, this is a meaty game. I'm at the Scavenger King atm and will continue playing later, but want to get some thoughts down while they're fresh. The art is very good and there is a ton of enemy variety already - the sound effect the machine frogs make is top notch. There's just a lot of overall polish all around so far, which is really cool to see in a gamejam game. The echo transposition ability is very cool for puzzle solving mechanics, and from what I saw of the Scavenger King so far, its tells are very well implemented and the fight seems very balanced and fair.
Some initial thoughts:
- The echo as a combat mechanic doesn't feel super great right now, or possibly I'm using it wrong. It feels kind of strange to dash away from enemies to damage them. With the shield enemies in particular, I felt very passive and cowardly the first several times I fought them. In the challenge room I finally figured out I could down bounce off of them which felt better, but right now I just never feel sure that I'm using the echo correctly (in this regard I was very surprised to see a purchasable item that interacted with your echo damaging enemies because up to that point it had seemed quite hard to use on the current enemy set).
- I think the short attack range is okay for the feel you're going for, and I like that you can up its range as a sort of risk reward mechanic, but it gets a bit troublesome when chasing down enemies paired with the character's fairly quick speed. I ended up making a lot of baby steps towards enemies that are walking away from me for fear that I'd run into them while trying to attack otherwise. I don't really know how to address that, was just something that stuck out to me.
- The healing mechanic is interesting, but it's a lot of set up for a relatively small amount of healing. It feels odd to have to charge up while an enemy approaches you, dash away from that enemy to create an echo, and then run back towards that enemy to get your heal. I like that it ties into the theme and is definitely unique, but I'm wondering if there is a smoother implementation.
Anyway, I'm enjoying my time with the game so far and will come back to it later today. It seems quite massive, Is there a way to know how much progress I've made?