I streamed this with the dev present, so just leaving my notes for posterity:
- +Cute art and concept!
- +The enemy portraits during combat are very appealing
- +The humor was cute (tho a couple of off-color jokes could go).
- +I became more interested in the backstory than the hijinks of the current cast, which quickly turned into very shallow "hee haw joky jokes". It stung that I could not finish the game due to the last boss to see what happened.
- -WHY is the resolution so tiny???? I don't think I've ever seen a game try to make such a tiny resolution. Worse, ballooning it to any proper viewable proportion without me losing my eyes made the text rather fuzzy and hard on the eyes. If the problem was the pixel-perfect nature of it, just zoom your assets to a fixed x2/x3/x4 or the like and adjust the resolution to that.
- -Text needs a second go to fix a few minor issues and sentence oddities. There's some places where the textbox is also partially used, or the line breaks weirdly between textboxes.
- -The combat did not do well with me, it felt very unsatisfying. If it's trying to imitate the Undertale style it falls very flat, since none of the interactions are charming, and they are all capped to a single use before you are reduced to just slap the enemy around.
- -More on combat: it eventually made me rage quit at the final boss (i believe it was, the yellow granny). The game seems to expect near-perfect input. There is not much variation I can see, and the need to plan two turns ahead for every action (including the basic "oh shit" heal) was very annoying. I had to restart multiple times. I TRIED! But it was still antagonistic and with no margin for error. This feels like a mistake. I do not get the feeling this game is trying to be a perfect execution sort of thing, and in that case the difficulty and demands of no bad moves the game expects are entirely unreasonable. I'll be the first to admit I'm not the most tactical thinker, but there were MANY ways this could have been alleviated. The easiest among them would be to just make your defensive actions (Protect and Deny) always go first, no matter what. That alone would have probably allowed me to beat it after a couple tries.
Overall the game left a bitter taste in my mouth due to the final boss making me ragequit.