The concept is really cool, you did a great job with the music and sound design to set the atmosphere. Feels like an old school game. With a bit of polish and balancing this could have a lot of potential for a larger scope project. The game description also does a great job of setting the mood.
Love and hate certain aspects of this. Because of the atmosphere, I had to play through to the end. I spent 40 minutes to do so. Would've just given up in frustration if the mood wasn't so interesting.
First 10 minutes were fun, I almost won my first run. I thought I had softlocked myself because I blew up all the items and needed one more key. Then I discovered the secret of attacking a colony to farm them for keys. Sadly I died, and spent the next several runs in frustration as I got more and more impatient. When I finally got a winning run, it was a lucky seed and I got it in probably less than 2 minutes.
A lot of the same sentiment as below re: combat
- I'm okay with having a ton of bullets fly at me, but having to do that and also not shoot the items is a huge pain in the ass. I think if we want to maintain breakable collectables, something more tactical/puzzle like would fare better than bullet hell where I have to watch where I'm moving and where I'm shooting at the same time
- On the flip side, if the collectibles are indestructible, you could probably lean more into the bullet hell aspect, and make it harder
- The braking is cool, but feels very unintuitive because it's an instant full stop. Might've balanced better with the acceleration by having a decellaration
Overall really great concept. Love the encounter area/exploration, but absolutely hate the item hostage bullet spam portions.