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(5 edits)

This is absolutely one of my favorite games ever! Its like you combined undertale with outer wilds, and made it a bullet hell. It solves so many problems that I have with those types of games too, like being able to hit enemies with single-bullet shots, or getting hopelessly lost on a puzzle, just because you went into the wrong room and missed the tutorial for that thing, whereas all the puzzles in this game can be figured out by themselves. (Although the tutorials help)

My only suggestion is that in boss fights, it can get hard to see the cursor/crosshair under pressure, and then the skull marker showing what direction the boss is from you is easy to confuse for it, making you barely change your aiming direction to aim at the boss, expecting it to change a lot more. But other than that, this is probably one of if not my favorite game out there. I beat it on easy mode, and now I'm going back to beat it on normal. 

Honestly, my favorite part of the game is the fact that things will sometimes want you to know things about the world, and the story of the game, which is just amazing to me. I think the only other game I've seen do this is outer wilds, (although in that game, knowledge is the only form of progression).

  • Did you get stuck/frustrated?
    • Never really frustrated, but I got stuck once at the suite's garden (the place with the 3 colored stalls), where I didn't realize I could go to the bottom-right
  • Did you enjoy the combat? Were there any mechanics that were hard to understand?
    • No mechanics were hard to understand, but some of the bosses were very hard, and the "intended difficulty" difficulty setting is probably best just labeled as normal mode, to not discourage players if they aren't experienced enough in bullet hell games.
  • Did you enjoy the dialogue? Was it funny? Were the characters too wordy?
    • I think the dialogue was perfect, and it was constantly making me laugh. It didn't seem to be too wordy at all, either. (the same can't be said about this review, lol)
  • What difficulty did you play on, and was it appropriately challenging?
    • I played on easy mode, and I found it to be just the right amount of challenge for me. (I'm not that good at bullet hells)
  • Did the game run well on your computer?
    • The game ran perfectly on my computer, with the exception of a few half-second lag spikes that happened about twice in the game (at seemingly random moments).
    • Using a macbook pro (the original, mid 2012), OS X Yosemite version 10.10.5, Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel core i5, 1280 x 800 Pixel screen.

Hey, thanks for playing! I can't say that Outer Wilds is something I ever expected Vacant Kingdom to be compared to, but I'll take the compliment because that's just generally one of the most impressive video games out there.

Yeah, I think when playing with mouse & keyboard, losing the mouse in all of the chaos can be a real problem.

The full game will include some areas which are only mentioned in the dialogue in Prologue, so I hope that can satisfy your curiosity about the world a bit more.

Noted about the difficulty naming convention. I guess it's a hard thing to find something that works for everyone, especially with bullet hell games being something with a pretty large range of possible player skill. 

About where you got lost... the current development version does have a map feature -- so I hope that can help people understand where they may have missed something if they get stuck!

Anyways, thanks again for playing and taking the time to leave your thoughts. The full game of Vacant Kingdom is still something I'm working on every week, so please keep on eye open for it on here and Steam.

(1 edit)

Thanks! This is definitely one of my favorite games out there by far, and I didn't really get stuck at the garden for that long, only about a minute and a half. I also think the map system is a good choice, especially if the world gets very big in the full game, and if it gets big enough, I feel like a fast-travel system with something like 2 or 3 travel points would be nice too. (Depends on how big the game gets, though.)