itch.io

So, played a tiny amount (did abandoned house, visited town stuff, went into mountains a bit, then back). A lot of these critiques are based on modern design sensibilities, so it'll vary if you're going for intentional jank or not if you care about most of them.

The jar version definitely has a ton of issues, but none of them seem to prevent play. ASCI display resources seem to not be included, or more likely, there's a different path to them than you'd expect since they're in a JAR (this is a dumb Java resource loader thing). It prints an exception and "FML" instead (although the world map doesn't print an exception and just curses). Saving does not work out of box- but this is only because it can't properly create a file, which might be a permission thing on my end. Creating the saves folder and the file it was trying to save to mid-game allowed me to save with no issues.

The printing speed is on the border of annoying and thematic- sometimes it feels sluggish, other times it feels appropriate. I am a very fast reader though, so I don't think I'll be able to appreciate the intent that well anyway. It feels almost like a balancing factor to make exploring take longer.

I did not encounter most tutorials until after I had figured out the mechanic on my own, or at least learned the mechanic existed and very vague guesses at how it worked. For example, the inventory, I had read that quests was "q" which cued me in that some of the letters opened menus. I wanted to open my inventory (after the Mythic Dragon encounter), but had not learned how, but I was able to successfully guess it was 'i' because thankfully that's standard and I play a lot of games.

I still have no idea how Power or Luck work. I only know Power exists because I tried to use PowerStrike and it told me I couldn't.

I would have exited without saving (because there was a save prompt at the start of the game; and after seeing no options to save, I thought it might have been automatic) had I not gone back to try to heal at the Inn.

I STILL don't know how to view my gold, or if gold is even a thing, outside of the innkeeper mentioning that I didn't have to pay it. Maybe it was in the character sheet or inventory and I missed it at first glance.

I think I was able to figure out how attacking worked on my own, but since I got attacked when I attempted some of the other options (Sense), I ended up forgoing experimentation and just smacking enemies repeatedly so I didn't die, rather than try to learn what stuff did.

I also mistakenly thought that if you didn't attack, you wouldn't get a strength roll and would take full damage, but after using potions a few times out of desperation I learned this was not the case.

Entering abilities and items feels excessively clunky. The main issue is that it requires you get the capitalization right- I actually tried to press '1' on my first fail and ended up attacking by accident because I thought it might have been an ordered list instead. I also see no reason items and abilities shouldn't be able to be used from the main attack screen, since you have to input their distinct names to activate them anyways.

It is also annoying that it includes the abilities/items you can't use, which don't even give you a description or anything, so they're only there to clutter your options- which makes the former point of not being able to use abilities from the main fight screen more glaring, since if this is the "Active Ability"/"Active Item" section, why are the passives/keys listed, and why do I have to type them in to learn that they're passives? (In my case, CriticalHit and checking to see what IronKey would do since it was listed.)

That said, it was interesting enough for me to keep going and I will return to it when I have time.

Teaching new players is always an arduous task, one that I struggle with myself.

I think the 'learn it yourself when needed' approach *almost* works here, but is defeated by the open nature of the game and map, increased by the tutorials not really being signposted as 'go here to learn' in advance.

I went straight to the town, got advice from the barkeep, cleared the entire abandoned house (running from the Dragon and leveling up ~4 times from that alone, which feels really weird when everything else gives pitiful amounts of xp), then actually talked to the old man but by then had learned most of it on my own. Then I went north, lowrolled in a fight a lot, returned to the town, learned saving wasn't automatic, quit, and typed this up.

The tutorials seem to work well enough when there's a discrete mechanic that you approach (like darkness increasing enemy encounter rate), but for global stuff like saving, power (still don't know if that's per battle, gain on attack, gain on kill, or what), ability and inventory use, it can get a little dicey.

I also hesitated to use potions- I can't tell if they're single use, permanent upgrades, battle only, or what- and I felt like I would lose resources if I experimented.

Oh, and I picked a Human Fighter.

TLDR: jar works well enough, I think the tutorials struggle because of the open-map nature of the game, and probably should have some way to figure out of the player missed them and say them anyways. This is the kind of game where I'll probably beat and still have no idea how half the mechanics work, but that feels inevitable