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(1 edit)

Great game! You did the art for this? That's really amazing! The art for this game is quite good, beautiful effects and enviroment. The combat is very much half a puzzle, my only disappointment is that the rooms almost feel constrainted to only have one real solution with the string of powers given. 

It's very punishing, enemies have a high attack rate, instant kill, and the dash doesn't seem at all useful without invincibility frames or a longer range. 

The last room funnels you up a stairwell, with a red arrow firing at you off screen and a funnel point where you have to deal with homing sphere and a laser, which really just comes down to if you're lucky enough to get through sometimes. It's sometimes hard to the point of the definition of madness where you're doing the same thing over and over until you get a result.

The gameplay is quick and designs are diagetic and clean, the character's head filling up for the dash and changing colours for the different powers, a good gradual increase in difficulty and introduction to each enemy power, the starting area with each orb in display to let you test each power, the design is good, I just wish the enemy attack rate was lower, though it's not like it's impossible so long as you try enough, it's still feels harsh.

Great job on the game!

(+1)

Firstly thank you so much for the feedback and for going into depth with it! Yeah the art is original and I'm really glad you like it, top-down movement is a new one for me but between using reusable tilemaps and the enemies just being recolours of the player model it luckily made the workload doable. I agree that I wish the rooms were able to be much more interesting as well. Unfortunately, time restrictions meant I had several hours remaining when starting on them so they're mostly copy/pasted with only a couple of variations but a big point to improve.

Really useful to hear about difficulty as well and I agree I think I enjoy the rest of the game more than the last level due to the almost singular slower way of doing it. Personally, do you think you would enjoy an actiony and more open version but with more toned down enemies, or staying quite tightknit and puzzlelike? Definitely agree some invincibility on the dash is a good idea so I'll try to amend that quickly before the polish week ends.

Thank you again for playing through it and analysing so much, the point of view is really helpful so I'll try to make some of those suggested changes!

(1 edit)

I believe that despite it's harsh difficulty, it's tightknit and small game space allows for rapidity of play and restarts, the puzzlelike element is there because each restart has the exact same variables and mostly same reactions (Same respawn point, same enemy placements, and the placement of the power you have to get to start fighting back,) it works in your favour for the most part as progressing through these tight levels rapidly is fun and satisfying.

Each level usually lasts a minute or so, and even in that space you can die handfuls of times, it's very nice and rapid that way with it's constrained rooms. The problem is that it makes me feel like each room only has one solution, even if it technically doesn't, I feel that the design needs to be a bit more open in that sense, like having more than just the one power available in the room at start for example.

It's probably just that you needed the time to test out a variety of level types really. Otherwise, it's perfectly fine as is.