Great concept, and not a half-bad execution. I think the sound design, and overall presentation are great, however there’s a few things that feel a bit off when playing.
There’s a certain sense of non-responsiveness to the actions and the fact you can very freely fill the bar with the same action puts this game into a bit of an uncomfortable situation, where players may be inclined to stop after every challenge and fill up the whole track with “pick-up” item action which won’t affect their movement.
Speaking of movement, it feels floaty and slidy. With a game where your controls are already under arrest, they should be a lot tighter. So here are some suggestions (I know some of them clash with the current design):
- A button to reset your current track. While this fights with your idea of the player gradually making life harder for themselves it prevents players from doing a similar thing by just being more cautious and slow (thus designing fun out of their playthrough)
- When you input a control it will only trigger whenever the next beat happens (I’m sure you’re aware of this), this makes controls feel not too great so I suggest focusing on preparedness by making actions only trigger on the next run of the track.
- Don’t use the mouse for controls. There’s really no reason for the mouse, other than to further abstract the control scheme. There’s no precise aiming and this everything can be on a keyboard/controller.