Thanks for your submission. Overall, I enjoyed this one.
- Use of Theme - 5
- Theme is strong in every stage and apparent in the recovering from grief thematic. If anything, might be a bit heavy-handed with the stage names being overt but works well.
- Gameplay - 4
- The game is short, but interesting for its run due to the interplay between level design, character movement, level goals/danger zones, and the emotional state.
- My order of fav: bargaining > depression > anger. Acceptance and denial are the weakest but makes sense in a way.
- My main issue is that the jump timing is too unforgiving, relying on the sprite to be half-off the platform to make the jumps.
- Creativity - 5
- See prior. Top marks for using the theme creatively to make each stage stand out from each other. Particularly
- Bargaining: being unable to catch that "hope"
- Depression: the slow movement, dim lights. The endless maze with "false paths" that are really illusions to reinforce the suffering of the longer paths.
- Anger: the intermittent darkening red borders. I was less a fan of the spikes which are more frustrating than anger-provoking - was thinking it could be better if you had to lash out at something (like push a NPC into the spikes to move on).
- See prior. Top marks for using the theme creatively to make each stage stand out from each other. Particularly
- Art - 3
- Some nice tricks with the light dimming and the red pulsating
- The intro and speech UI seems to have been an afterthought and missed opportunity to reinforce the theme further
- Sound - 2
- The BGM was good, but was static throughout all the stages taking away from the theme (i.e. too nice for anger).
- No SFX.