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Hey thanks for this big feedback and for your stream replay, its really cool to get a live feedback of your game, I can clearly see and understand the problems you encountered with our game !

(SPOIL)

At first, the mistery behind the goal and the mechanics of the game was a choice from us to leave the player dishoriented between the 8 bit and the normal phase. But we may have went to hard with this, and since its a maze, I can totally inderstand how it can turn from mystery to frustration. We will make sure to make the goals more clear in our next games ahah.

If anyone want some instructions on what you need to do to get to the goal, here is what you're suposed to do in the game :

(BIG SPOIL)

First you find the dagger, then you find the torch and then as you've said, the torch is supposed to help you to get througth the dark path, then you may end up finding the last power up (by following the blue torchs), a glitchy area that change your movement to a classic first person controller and give you the ability to go throught the holes in the walls. With this, you can get to the end of the game, where a cool plot await you. (Finding the end in the maze can get a bit hard, so I can give you a last hint, you may hear a new sound in this phase, which is highly spacialized toward the end).

We clearly went a bit too crazy with the difficulty, the eye can be fun when encountered alone but get unfair when they appair with other entities (especially because they make the closing of your eyes harder when you're already in trouble ahah). We need to work more on the balance of the mechanics, especially when they interact together for our next games.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback ! It was fun watching you reacting to our game :) 

Hey, thanks for your feedback and for streaming the game! It is indeed RNG driven when it comes to the eyes, but dealing with them is pretty easy once you figure out how to. What's not RNG driven but can be considered as such is the enemies's positions, as they're not reset upon respawning and you can't really predict where they'll be in your next spawn. So yeah, the game has some RNG-driven elements, but we thought dying wasn't too punishing since you don't really lose progress when dying and monsters don't respawn.

As for the frustrating part of not knowing where to go, it indeed can be annoying, and doesn't seem to fit the "gamejam game" type of gameplay where you boot a game and lose interest if you don't feel like making progress after a few minutes (not a criticism btw, I do exactly the same). The game does have an objective and an end tho, but it's true that not knowing it makes you unable to know if it's just another unfinished gamejam game or not.
We love exploration in games, and exploration games in general, and a lot of what this implies is not telling the player things he can discover. I now notice how unfitted for a gamejam it is to not even have a single message showing you have something to do.

We noticed after making friends test the game that it can be pretty frustratingly hard when you don't know what and how to search, as some of them took 20 minutes to finish the game when some couldn't after an hour of walking into corridors. But it's a hard thing to weight, wether to reward the player for finding something on its own or spoiling him what to do and have more people finish the game. We're still experimenting a lot in this field (and learning a lot too, our last gamejam game was 4h long and way more frustrating).

Strafing was removed intentionally, even though we knew it may feel a bit strange at first. We wanted to avoid players from just strafing away from danger and only allow them to look straight forward. We wanted to push anxiety a bit from not being able to look/move around easily. But yeah, it can be a bit uncomfortable.

Thanks a lot for your visual and sound feedback, we put a lot of heart in them and are very proud of the overall feeling of the game. Also thanks for playing the game on stream!