Part1 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2193013382
Part2 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2193163328
Your characters are wonderful and your writing is great. It hits precisely the "videogame style." Graphics in the 'illustrated' scenes are sweet. The game flow felt professional.
In terms of game-play, I was disappointed. From the first battles and the game title, I started with the impression that this is a kinda fun approach to turn-based RPG combat. And I really think it has huge potential. But increasingly it became clear in the game that the only party you will ever control are these 3 characters, with their 2 special moves each and that is it. In any sort of monster-collector type game, or at least Darkest Dungeons type, I would be hyped about AG’s combat system. But the outlook of using this one fixed party through the whole game is rather dreadfully boring tbh desu.
I’ve collected these other notes on game-play:
- Imho you should either have multi-tiered perks, and everything cost just 1 point, or nothing but singleton perks, that may come in different costs. Your mixture of different costs + different amount of tiers is annoying.
- Idk why special moves are 2 clicks away. There is enough space to list them straight-up.
- First time I visit a store, I leave, come back, inventory has changed. Also when I bought something and left and came back, the inventory was restocked. If these are intended, the restock should just happen immediately.
- 3v1 situations are boring to finish off, many RPGs have an "Autofight" button for this. Imho in your setting it would be fitting for the remaining enemy to just give up / run away.
- Enemy positions are very irrelevant, right? So the character movement is just a glorified recharge bar? [Flavour-wise, this running back and forth makes no sense.] Maybe combat could be better/deeper, if everything was much related to position. Idk.
- In many RPGs, you largely fight weaker enemies. You may even grind them as long as you like for XP, "make you own difficulty" as Horbror put it. In AG, every battle is decisive. But the battles are in teams, and there is terrain-supplied RNG. That means you can die to the enemy getting lucky, and the AI choosing (randomly, I guess) to focus down one of your chars.
- I missed the trinkets for a while it seems. Don’t know if I missed an explanation. I saw a message "new trinkets unlocked" briefly, but needed another 30 minutes until I understood what that meant.
- Very surprised that losing a battle is just game over. After all the talk about the eternal afterlife tournaments and all.
Eventually, my savegame was bricked by a bad item. First, some shopkeeper wouldn’t sell to me (angry reaction) though I had one slot open; afterwards when I clicked Items in battle, the game would segfault. I can give you the savefile and coredumps if needed. Find me in the Hypercoven discord. ;)
Cheers