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Congrats on your release! Looking forward to the The Waking Cloak.

I haven't read the other comments. Maybe I'm repeating something.

I liked the game overall but I have a comment about puzzle progression:

After getting the swap scroll it would be nice to have a very simple test of the mechanic to let the players get used to it. For example: In order to exit the room, there is a pot that blocks the door and you need to swap with (a single shot). Afterwards a room that requires two shots and then introduce mirrors, etc. It was not the case back in the 90s but nowadays I guess is the expected way to introduce new mechanics.

I think the item in level 2 pretty much destroys the dungeon. The puzzles have a great design for level 1 but are trivial for level 2. Maybe all these puzzles should be mandatory in level 1 in order to get to level 2. Or you could consider nerfing the weapon for example by only allowing the ball to turn at certain tiles (maybe only can change direction when touching a wall instead of mid-air).

I played for an hour in total but I had to restart the game twice. The first time I had to stop after 30 minutes because of an appointment and later I there is no save feature. After work played again but after some time I got stuck. I think I fell through a hole while moving in diagonal and I got stuck in a candle :( I believe that games that lean on the puzzle side should have a button to restart the current room. It would also fix my stuckness. The third time I was much faster and finished the dungeon in ~10 minutes. I found a hidden lake with a weirdo in there.

I can't talk much about the difficulty because I published a puzzle game with a similar mechanic in a gamejam couple years ago so the solutions looked quite obvious to me.

I played with an USB Xbox controller. Evertyhing was smooth  besides when I got stuck in a candle.

Bug? It looks like you can move a bit the character while the screen in black in the intro so you can make it fall in a different place. That was my impression, I may be wrong.

Thanks so much for the detailed review! I do plan to have more "teaching moments" in the next dungeon. My issue this time was trying to pack it all into one room--the mirror, the pot, the blocks, the buttons, gates, etc. I'll spread 'em out more next time. :)

And yeah, I've gotten some great feedback on the lv2 spell. lv1 was originally planned to be a "short range" swap and lvl2 "long range," and a lot of the puzzles were built around that. I changed it very late in the game because it didn't feel good, and irrationally thought that the puzzles would be fine. But watching playtesters and gathering feedback, turns out not so much, lol. The dining room in particular got super broken by the  lv2 spell. I'm actually working right now on the next major patch that will shuffle some things around and force some linearity--needing to complete the dining room puzzle to access the room with the lv2 spell in particular.

Next demo dungeon will have saving if I get the chance to implement it! It just didn't make minimum viable product this time, unfortunately. Trying to keep things agile. :)

Anyway, I appreciate the comments. I'm pretty pumped gathering this feedback and starting my big ol' post-release analysis document. I learned a lot about dungeon design from this (which was the point) and am super excited to get started on Episode II.