No worries! Here is my full review, which I am giving to each game now that Round 1 is over :)
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AMONGST THE STARS - A REVIEW
Dear developer! Thank you for making this game :) Here's my disclaimer I'm placing before all my reviews - I appreciate all games, and I consider every creative work a gift from the artist to the audience. The very fact that you made something is worth celebrating! Being a judge of this game, as was stipulated in the rules, I had to play at least up to the first existing hour of every entry and judge the game on that alone - no more than that! If any gamebreaking bugs were found, the game would be disqualified, and I was to judge the game based on the submitted entry by the deadline - without any additional notes, haha! Here is my overall impressions of the game. Again - thanks for creating it! I appreciate every entry, that you gave it your all, and I encourage you to do what you love - if that means making more games, then please do so! Don't let my (admittedly sometimes too brutal) feedback deter you from making future games - I really want you to succeed! Much love, Cash <3
THE STORY - BACKGROUND TO THIS THING!
When Seren tells Lelah that they wish to reach the stars and be taken "back here when we grow old" (referring to a ostensibly lush outdoor region with trees and grass), as soon as they say this, mid-sentence, their entire world disappears. Or rather, it is transformed into a desolate wasteland, for Lelah at least. Seren is nowhere to be seen. We assume the role of Lelah, traversing a tower of puzzles that block you from progressing unless you solve them.
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF THE GAME...
To give credit, this is a nice idea for a game. A game where the puzzles would start off easy and then get more difficult as you progress, would be a nice idea for a game. I very much enjoy a really good puzzle game, and riddles are really cool - I enjoy them very much. However, if your puzzle game consists of a linear set of riddles that stop you from progressing entirely unless you solve them - there better be some form of hints or clues that the game gives the player if they're getting stuck!
LET'S TALK ABOUT MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE GAME... HEHE :)
Here, I stumbled through the first floor, which seemed to consist of four switches and four people that you could face in different directions. Sure, it kind of broke immersion that there's just suddenly four people you can place in different directions (it would have been nice to have some sort of story justification for this!) but then next hour or so consisted of me struggling to process what the first riddle meant by its sentences. They were deliberately cryptic, which is fantastic for a puzzle! But even now, as I'm writing this article, I'm not sure whether the solution that I happened upon was arrived upon the correct way, or if I just chanced upon it by the seemingly endless ways that I could have interpreted the first puzzle.
There were lines saying "the old man faces towards that which no one else does", which I assumed would mean that they face a direction that no other character is facing. There were some good clues, like the woman with the hat "tolerating the engineer", which meant that perhaps she faced him. However, the lines about the "old man and engineer going way back" and "hat woman looking forward to the future and loathing the past" and "blond woman being a stranger" led to me doing a lot of different options for around 20 minutes until I came upon the solution.
Now sure, this could be a great test to see if someone is good at interpreting poetic statements the way the developer intended.
Was it fun? Not entirely! I had a very difficult time doing this XD
But that is merely the design of the game. The riddle on floor 2 was solved in 3 minutes flat. Very very easy!
OOPS! HAVING TROUBLE ON THE 3RD FLOOR NOW! :D *SWEATING, SMILE AND WAVE BOYYYS*
However, the riddle on the third floor took me the rest of the hour that had been allocated to me to judge the game based on, and this made me almost feel as if I was banging my head against a wooden block! XD I had quite a difficult time interpreting, for example, the graphics of the "scales" that the objects were meant to sit on. I had Notepad++ open, doing algebra and ending up with weights that were, like, 8.3333333333333 recurring! It was then that someone in chat informed me that on the gamepage, the developer had said something to the effect that there was incorrect information displayed in-game about weights of certain objects, or numbers of them - I'm not sure, I haven't checked. But I proceeded to ignore this, because the judging process required me to judge the game based on what was submitted by the deadline, instead of additional notes added on the gamepage - the game was to speak for itself!
Needless to say, that given the incorrect information on a puzzle (if I may presume the chat member was telling the truth) - it was going to be impossible to solve! However, I stayed for the full duration of the hour and pushed through despite knowing that perhaps my quest was fruitless.
For example, there were 3 silver on the left of a cross, and 8 gold bars on the right. But it didn't look like a scale! It just looked like gold bars on the floor. I didn't even know if the silver was the scale, or if the distance from the fulcrum mattered with regard to force? Would a scale be made of silver or gold, and would this represent it? I was very very confused why they were on the ground. I assume this is because the developer was using full RTP, but if they were, then my mind was confused by the mixed messages, and I couldn't reconcile it! lol.
SO WHAT WAS YOUR OVERALL IMPRESSION, CASH?
Glad ya asked! This game had a really cool concept, but in the end, became very frustrating due to the nature of agonising over riddles for 20-40 minutes at a time, apparently missing vital information, and also the graphics not representing things very well, in my opinion. My overall experience was that by the end, I just wanted it to be over XD
The positive lesson I would take from this is to please, if you're going to have riddles or puzzles - try testing them out with a group of friends to see if they're fun! Oftentimes us as developers will make something very CLEVER and AWESOME in our eyes, only that when we test it out, it's not obvious at all! It's also a good idea in general to slowly ramp things up over time with regards to difficulty. Also, I would take some time to pursue maybe some custom resources and to improve mapping to better reflect the objects within. But this game would be much better if it were a series of easier, more frequent puzzles, as opposed to 3 really hard ones ending with a... maybe unsolveable one? :D
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Thank you for making this game - every game is a gift <3