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I just finished the main bit (without the secret boss) and had a lot of fun!

Did you get stuck or frustrated at any point? If so, where?

It took me a few tries to defeat some bosses, but nothing out of the ordinary I would say. I am not an experienced danmaku player, and I also have a weird hangup about trying not to use slowdown items in games unless completely backed into a corner. I had no issues with the environment puzzles. I opted for the simple riddles.

Did you enjoy the combat? Were any of the mechanics hard to understand?

I did, the player is fun to control. I started playing with mouse and keyboard, and had a bit of trouble keeping my aim on the bosses as I would sometimes lose track of where the targeting reticule is. When aiming with the mouse, the reticule's positioning is affected somewhat by how the scrolling will lock against the boundaries of the map. After the first boss, I switched to an XBox 360 gamepad and found it easier to target the bosses.

Did you enjoy the dialogue and story? Did you think it was funny? Did you think characters were too wordy?

I enjoyed the NPC interactions. The contrast of cheerful characters against a gloomy atmosphere worked pretty well. Love the music.

What difficulty did you play on? Did you find it appropriately challenging?

Intended Experience. I felt it was reasonable.

How did the game run on your computer? Did any parts perform poorly? (If so, it would help me if you could post your PC specs!)

I experienced some dropped frames and performance fluctuations on the first boss as it got closer to defeat. I don't recall having any technical issues during later fights. Here are my system specs (this is an old Windows HTPC that I recently dug out of storage)

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, Version 1809
CPU Make/Model: AMD A6-6400K APU With Radeon HD Graphics
CPU Clock: 3.90GHz
CPU Logical Cores: 2
RAM: 4 GB (DDR3)

Hi, thanks for playing and for leaving detailed feedback! I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed your time!

I started playing with mouse and keyboard, and had a bit of trouble keeping my aim on the bosses as I would sometimes lose track of where the targeting reticule is. When aiming with the mouse, the reticule's positioning is affected somewhat by how the scrolling will lock against the boundaries of the map.

Yeah, I've made the aiming ridicule larger a couple times and I'm fairly convinced that losing track of the mouse in the chaos might be somewhat unavoidable for new players. I think it's the kind of thing that one will get better at after playing for a while.

I'm not sure if 100% understood the second sentence, I think you're talking about how scrolling the screen will move the mouse along with it? It might be interesting to experiment with an option where the mouse cursor stays still (relative to the game world) when the screen scrolls, but I think something like that would be less than ideal for anything except a relatively small boss arena.

I experienced some dropped frames and performance fluctuations on the first boss as it got closer to defeat.

Good to hear that other than this, it was smooth for you. The last phase of the first boss is a problem area, it's my go-to scene for benchmarking right now.

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I'm not sure if 100% understood the second sentence, I think you're talking about how scrolling the screen will move the mouse along with it? It might be interesting to experiment with an option where the mouse cursor stays still (relative to the game world) when the screen scrolls, but I think something like that would be less than ideal for anything except a relatively small boss arena.

This is totally a nitpick and I feel silly dwelling on it, but the boundaries of the arena are close enough to the boundaries of the map that scrolling stops when approaching the corner of the arena, changing the player's targeting angle as they move around when aiming with the mouse. Just wanted to mention that during my playthrough, it was my motivation for switching to gamepad input (which ended up working really well).


Looking at the behaviour again today, I see that there is more going on with the camera than just keeping centered on the player, like the focus mode expanding the zone that the player can move in before scrolling occurs. (And losing visibility on the boss because they're out of frame would be a worse trade-off.)

Ah, I see what you mean now with the aiming. Arguably this behavior is desirable since one would hope that your bullets would always fire towards the crosshair? I guess I tend to leave my crosshair as close to the boss as possible, if not directly on top of, so this hasn't been as issue for me. I see how this might trip you up in some scenarios, but I'm not sure if there's a better alternative. (A conclusion which you seem to already agree with, I think.)

For sure, I think I would have acclimated if I had continued with KB+M.