Sorry, but I find you didn’t really explains anything. I understood how the list works. I understood that having a limited inventory is for “realism”. But if it was really realistic, then the inventory limit would be 2, because an elf has only 2 hands; so realism is not an excuse since 10 is already unrealistic anyway. And going down this hole, there shouldn’t be any elves: that’s so unrealistic!
Yes, I’m exaggating a bit, but the point still stands: I prefer having an “unrealistic” game than a tedious one. If the inventory limit doesn’t enhance the gameplay, the message, the feeling, or the game in general, it’s not necessary, especially when it renders the game tedious.
You repeat that once you know what to do, it’s OK, once you know what item you need, ignore the ones you don’t. But you still have to gather that knowledge, and it’s tedious. How was I supposed to know at the beginning that I don’t need to take the items I encounter?
You can ask about the materials, but you don’t need to if you don’t want to.
You can read all the topics, but you don’t need to unless you want to.
But the games suggests that you can ask or consult, so it’s natural to suppose you should do it or that’s important. I can’t magically guess that it’s not important.
It sounds like you made the mistake of asking for everything, whether you needed it or not.
We could argue that it’s not a mistake, but that bad game design led me to believe it was important to ask, but no, I didn’t ask for everything. Just that having to memorise where I should get the items, and the prospect that I’ll have to ask all these ingredients eventually makes me not wanting to play.
You also don’t need to memorise the locations, as you don’t know where those locations are until you’ve found them and once you’ve found them, you’ve found the elves. Simple.
OK, but I still need to memorise where they are so that I know which direction to take when I want to go there. And even if you don’t need to memorise the names strictly speaking, it still adds a cognitive load; that, plus the list of tasks and ingredients and childs, and so on. Everything may be logical, there’s still a lot of information to pick up in a short time.
Draw a map!
I could, and usually it doesn’t bother me, but you still have too look at it each time you want to move.
If you play it in a window and resize the window to a comfortable size, the font gets smaller and you don’t have to do as much scrolling.
I tried, but since everything scales with the window (font size and image size), it didn’t change anything.
Well, my answer is getting a bit long. To summarise, your arguments boil down to “the game is easy/OK once you know how to play it”. That’s the problem. I didn’t know and I can’t know it if everything in the game just looks like a tedious chore. At this point it’s just poor game design. (No offence, but that’s my opinion.) And that’s a shame because I can see a lot of work has gone into the game.
I guess there’s an audience for this kind of game, but visibly I’m not part of it! And judging by your “Fun” placement, I might not be the only one. (All of this is still relative of course, you still got over 3/5.)
If you know that you have an audience that thinks like you and likes this kind of games, then great, continue and don’t care about all I just said!
But don’t dismiss your players’ feedback by just saying that they are wrong and the game is easy once you know it; the game nevers shows you that’s it’s easy. (If that’s wasn’t the intention of you answer, sorry but that’s how it sounded to me.)
Anyway, I don’t mean to sound harsh, so I’ll just stop. I sure hope to revisit the game once I get some time.