Wow, thanks for capturing footage and commentary. It was nice to see realtime reactions and gameplay. I don't know whether or not you are being sarcastic about the "well executed" after seeing the video, which I am not proud of. I'll take it as sarcasm, but correct me. At this point we are definitely aware that level 4's onboarding is not great. The purpose of level 4 is to teach you to use the slow motion mechanic, because later levels and mechanics will become much easier if you use the slow motion. The blue-purple bar under the player is your slow motion meter, and you can hold down the slow motion button (space) for up to 3 seconds at a time, and it recharges twice as fast.
Our strategy for the onboarding was to be hands off, only give the player button prompts, and let the player experiment and figure out how things work themselves, to handhold as little as possible. But I totally see how level 4 was just too soon. We needed one or two levels before level 4 that introduced the slow motion mechanic more gradually.
I was glad to see you eventually give into using the slow motion mechanic, because that was the entire purpose of level 4. You almost made it to the end, all you had to do was use slow motion more frequently. You can grapple at extreme angles to your destination and avoid spikes, if you just have the time to do so, by using the slow motion.
You are right, you don't need to hold down the button. We were okay with people not holding down the button if they figured out they didn't need to. But what we realized is that encouraging holding down the button for the normal grapple conditions people to hold it down in general, and so when they get to the blue "swing points" they would typically automatically hold it down there as well, which is needed.
There are also some situations in later levels or even in level 4 where you may want to let go of the button halfway to the wall, turn on slow motion, and regrapple somewhere else. And so keeping the grapple enabled only while you hold down the button gives us some versatility in the mechanic which is more explored later on. I would compare it to how you can adjust the height and duration of your jump in platformers by holding down or letting go of jump.
Three things that really puzzled me in your playthrough, which I apologize for. We also have not gotten feedback from other players about these, as far as I know:
- No idea why it took so long to load. My only thought is that you didn't double click, but you probably did. We haven't seen this issue on any of the machines we have tried it on, but maybe we haven't tried a big enough variety of machines.
- Super surprised to see the character bounce back in the direction they came when they are supposed to travel forward on a angle reflected across the normal of the wall collider. We have not been able to reproduce this on our end, on any machines we tested on, but again I apologize for that contributing to a inferior playing experience.
- Also surprised to see that the blue walls that close once you pass through (we call them doors) do not seem to work for you sometimes, which we saw a good amount of in level 4.
I am glad you took out the time to play, and we can never blame a player, but for a dev it is disheartening to see a player give up on level 4, only 1/3rd of the way through the game. Things gets easier from there - levels are simpler, but you get to see plenty of new ideas / mechanics / enemies / obstacles. You even get to grapple an enemy's bullet and throw it back at them, like telekinesis. You can see a lot of these new ideas and mechanics in the trailer: