Amazing! At first I was thinking of it as somewhat of a modern take on retro Touhou games but I think calling it just a clone of a different game wouldn't be fair, it feels unique and in a very good way. I love the main mechanic and how it is used, it didn't feel like just another gimmick to make avoiding patterns easier, it felt like the patterns were made for this mechanic in mind and that is honestly not an easy thing to get right. It was hard to get used to but it felt fair... except for this one specific pattern where you have to dodge two djinns AND other patterns, my mind couldn't fully comprehend that and it felt like a big difficulty spike, so I'm thankful for the forgiving checkpoints. So the gameplay is really fun, I think the sound design was good, the visuals are well done, the game looks good while also not being overwhelming. If I were to complain about something it's that the default controls on the keyboard are a bit odd, it wasn't terrible I just wish there was a way to change the controls to the way I'm used to play. There was also the issue of the button to continue the dialog covering part of it and some of it going outside the box so I had to add some words in my head from context. Lastly, weird complaint I know but... I wish the font was different? I don't want to nitpick, it's just that it was the one thing that just didn't fit with the artstyle for me and it was this mild annoyance every time I noticed it. With that out of the way, this is the best game I've played so far in this jam, keep up the good work!
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Thanks a lot for your feedback!
We indeed used Touhou as our main source of inspiration (it’s actually the only bullet hell we’d both played before this jam I believe), and this gave us the idea of the new mechanic.
I think you’re right about the double djinn & the other enemies together, they might be too hard. I’m pretty sure I struggled on this too, but we didn’t have enough time to polish the levels as much as we wanted at the end of the jam.
About the keyboard bindings, we had some early feedback from our testers (some were Touhou players, others not) before the end of the jam and they were not satisfied with it either but had different opinions on the best key bindings (we hesitated until the very end of the jam between mapping “slow” to shift or k, or even mapping everything on one hand with slow on shift and warp on e). If would be interesting to have your opinion on this matter, as we couldn’t reach a satisfying answer! We have never implemented an in-game controls remapping system, and though we’d have loved to do it here, we had higher priorities and sadly never found the time to do so :(
We didn’t notice the dialog button overlapping the text below, nice catch!
I also agree about the font, we didn’t want to use a pixel art font for the dialogs as it would negatively impact readability but we could have chosen something more fitting!