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Well, this is epic. A magical girl retro-style FPS with a complete and interesting storyline, multiple endings and a good 30+ minutes of runtime. The game was relatively easy to pick up, and I was able to get through the whole story without any issues or inconveniences. That's seriously impressive for a jam game. It isn't quite as streamlined as a typical console game though, feels more like a PC game, with its README files and extensive graphics options. Bonus points for 144Hz support :)

The narrative style quickly grew on me. There's a lot of character in how the characters speak. Much of the story is really interactive (and I'm not talking about QTEs, not that they were egregious in this game). The gameplay is good, having played a few FPS games I felt right at home with the controls and most battles felt fun and not too drawn out. The story is so good that I won't talk about it, you should just play it yourself.

Visually, there is a lot of care put into the world, with tons of props, good level design and even visual gags. The characters and especially faces might be an... acquired taste. I think many people will not be able to get over the faces, and that's probably what's hurting this game the most. So that's the one thing I suggest working on.

I had not played the previous games, but I got the good ending. I enjoyed it and I'm happy to have played it.

(+1)

Thanks for playing!

Overall presentation is definitely more geared toward "PCMR type who will twiddle with all the settings" with a dash of "mid-2000s freeware". This is deliberate on my part because I don't know how to do anything else.

I'm kinda surprised you were able to get 144FPS; my games tend to be shoddily coded and I really only target "60FPS on a good computer". Then again, I avoided having big swarms of monsters this time, which is usually what tanks performance on the CPU side.

The narrative turned out a lot better than expected. I've had the broad story beats in mind for a while now, but I wrote the dialogue by the seat of my pants and made some pretty late changes to the specifics of the story.

I wish I could have had more combat sections, but I ran into two issues. One was fitting it into the plot and setting: murdering 50 people will get you arrested, even in Surrey. The other was simply time. I really, really wanted to have a boss battle, but I realized that wasn't realistic in the time I had left and had to cut it. With that being said, I'm glad the combat that was in the game worked well.

I love detailed worlds. It's time-consuming, but even with a rough visual style having all those bits and pieces just makes it feel a lot more real and alive. One of my favourite old games is Duke Nukem 3D, which did this sort of things with its levels and contrasted dramatically with a lot of other games of the era.

The problem is that I really like drawing despite being terrible at it. In all seriousness, I'm well aware that the programmer art style is divisive at best. I personally like it enough that I'm not willing to abandon it, but I am planning to branch out a bit and not do every game in that style.

I'm hoping to get one more game in this series by the end of the year, a Christmas special. After that I have tentative plans for a few more, but who knows if or when they'll happen.

I'll follow up on a few points:

For a "shoddily coded" game there weren't any bugs that hindered the experience. I did bump down the settings to "Medium" I think, but it ran smoothly at 90-120 FPS which is what I consider excellent. It's definitely not very optimized, there are plenty of games with higher graphics that run way better.

As for your art, I don't think you have to abandon your current style to improve it. Study some of the basics and practice drawing from reference. Yeah it's not easy, but you can do it!

Looking forward to the Christmas special!