Hey! Definitely a different approach to Dungeon Crawlers than I would have expected :)
What did I like:
- The park scene was nicely arranged and the foggy clouds fitted the experience to be there at night. I liked the different assets and the lighting by the street lamps too. Well done!
- The ping leading to the 4 Yokais was also a nice guiding element. This is one example of guidance through the level. The second one are the visible paths. I like features like this because they tend to give me as a player a feeling of "I know where I am and I know the rules of this environment". Finding the other 3 was therefore much easier.
- The match 3 part had a different visual style but it still looked nice. With the Yokai at the left side it looked really nice and inspiring. A match 3 where you fight and collect monsters maybe? Or some kind of RPG to level up by doin match 3?
What can be improved:
- The music in the park is super nice, but it reminds me more of some film noir street music and it contrasts the scenery. By watching the park scene without music I would expect something thrilling and dark that underlines the danger of the Yokais and gives more meaning to the task of pacifying them.
- The connection between the match 3 and the park scene is setup by the bits of story only. In the game they feel a bit like 2 completely different and unrelated games. There is the counter that sais how many Yokais you have defeated and the match 3 starts once you enter the particles in the scene but somehow that still does not feel connected. Maybe a bit of the park scene style can be taken over into the game itself or vice versa? On the other hand I would have really loved it to move through the park using match 3 :). Imagine 4 colors and every time you match the color you move into the direction of the color ^^. So you cannot move freely. Something like this would have connected the both worlds a bit better. Another thought: Maybe the presence of a Yokai could have altered the park to something more strange, and once defeated the park would have been restored. That would have added another level of meaning to the task and gives the player a visual reward.
- Compared to all other entries, the movement in the park felt a bit less like dungeon crawling and more like a standard 3D movement. The grid could have been a bit bigger for my taste to have more defined steps since sometimes it felt like I would fall of a bridge or walk right on the edge.
All in all a nice approach, that could use some tweaks here and there. It definitely inspired me and my imagination :)