I actually enjoyed this game more than I thought I would from the other reviews.
I want to preface the rest of the review with that because I'm gonna now talk in quite a lot of depth about what I did and didn't like, and while there's a lot here that I did like I think there's a couple things in this game which are borderline inexcusable.
So, I enjoyed the combat - even if the way TP worked meant that it was very prescriptive and essentially implemented cooldowns. There is never a need to use "slash" because by the time you're on the wolfman floor you are only fighting single targets for the rest of the game.
I also enjoyed the repetitious nature of the dungeon and thought it was clever that you changed up the visuals to indicate process - even if I'd have apprecaited a single on-map mechanic to differentiate the two loops. I thought that had conceptual legs, even if you didn't go all-in on it to make this concept work, it has a neat little 60 Second Hero vibe to it that could be clever if expanded out to a full game.
I also enjoyed how unpretentious it was. You fought bats, goblins, wolfmen, then a knight, then the game ends. Cool. Done.
What I didn't like though I think is what's going to be useful to you in terms of feedback:
- The game has no narrative, as such I am forced to give the game one star in that area. I don't even mean "the narrative is explained in the manual" - you're just in a dungeon and you go do stuff. This'd be fine, if there were something revealed to you about what was happening, but the game ends as abruptly as it starts and with no characterisation whatsoever.
- The Jam Requisites are all shoehorned in at the last second. You open an island map, include Harold and say the line (Bart). Davina is just there. It doesn't feel like a particularly creative use of the source material, or of the Jam's constraints.
- Two loops was just long enough for me to not get sick of how repetitious it is, but your encounter rate is really high - I only enjoyed it because I'm an old man who was raised on that kind of design, but for broader audiences this will be very offputting. Especially as the dungeon loops.
- Your level design is kind of outdated - it reminded me a lot of Wizardry 1, a game whose plot is "a man has built a deliberately annoying labyrinth below the town!" I liked that it harkened back to that, but the environment was so stark, and the levels so linear that there's nothing to do in the game. Also, the fact that it reminded me of something which was narratively contrived to justify being annoying and archaic probably isn't a great sign.
- You kind of don't appeal to anyone - people who like exploring have nothing to explore, and the game is so easy that people who like the achievement of compelling combat also have nothing to enjoy. At one point I had to use a potion to outheal the Knight, but that's the only non-prescribed action I took in the whole game. "Get TP, use move". That's the whole game.
I guess if I had to sum it up I'd say: Look at who you want your audience to be and design something for them. Right now you have the building blocks of a very basic, inside-the-lines, normal RPG. For those of us who like that, fine - but I'd have been just as entertained by someone combining the default RPG maker maps into a game and saying "here you go, content you enjoy" and just playing that instead.
The game needed a hook, or a reason to want to continue playing - and if the game had not finished where it did I may well have put it down never to pick it back up.
2/5 - I like this kind of thing, but I don't know many other people who would. Kinda carried from being 1/5 by the standard RPG-maker combat, which I am known to enjoy.