Hello! Welcome to Dark Feedback Quest 7! My name's Hythrain and I'm one of the dark hosts and one of the dark streamers for this dark event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your dark game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the dark VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any dark game in these dark events is simple: I get the dark game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the dark game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
I love me some dark dungeon crawling. I also like me a dark thesaurus. Just sayin'.
There were a few things that did bug me with this, though, that I felt I should bring up.
1. The first song is way too much noise. I showed on the stream how it was constantly peaking on my end. It was pretty painful to listen to. There are times when that kind of a song can work, but the start of a dungeon crawling adventure isn't really one of them.
2. The delay in being able to execute another action after a big attack feels too big. I cannot describe how many times I would start to do a big attack only for the enemy to ALSO start a big attack just after me, yet I'm never able to get my block off. This started to get infuriating with the skeletons of the second floor, who I found would constantly do big attacks right after me and I couldn't block them. Speaking of blocking...
3. Blocking should last a bit longer than it does right now. It doesn't need to be much, but generally if I'm attempting to block and I'm in the general right time frame, I shouldn't be punished for being half a second too early.
4. I would recommend a change to showing when to time attacks. Since enemies can do both slow and fast attacks, what I think would work better if a system that tells you immediately if it'll be slow or fast.
5. One thing missing from this dungeon crawling experience is treasure! Get some chests in there for the player to find. If you don't know what to put in chests, I'll throw a list of ideas together at the end.
6. Try and scale the damage and health of enemies better on floors. When I feel like I should keep starting on floor one simply because I can one-shot enemies and get more dust that way because the enemies on the second floor are just too powerful, there's a problem. And no, I'm not joking. It was more efficient for me to always start on floor 1, because at least I could get a bunch of dust with no problem.
7. Do a pass on the dialogue again for various writing errors. I saw a lot in that intro. I won't detail them all.
8. After the player dies and returns to the camp, instead of giving the options to upgrade or sleep, why not just put both upgrade options in front of the player along with a sleep option? This would be far more preferable to the current system where the player has to choose that they want to upgrade something, choose that specific upgrade and then choose AGAIN that they want to upgrade something if they have enough dust to do another upgrade. The best option would even be that if the player can't afford an upgrade, they can only choose to sleep.
There could be more things that I thought of during my playthrough, but honestly my memory can be bad. I'll just leave it at this. I hope to see more!