I've been looking forward to trying this. The updates in the thread got me interested, with how weird and unique they are. Here are my thoughts as I play:
- I think games should start fullscreen. If someone downloads your game, and runs it, they are giving it their attention. By starting it in windowed mode, it's kind of saying "you don't need to pay too much attention here, this is trivial." Just give an option for windowed mode in my opinion, but treat your game with respect by assuming it deserves full attention.
- The menu options took me a second to understand, which I like. Getting me in the mindset of the game right away.
- Intro cinematic is fantastic. You have a really good style.
- The game structure of action -> encounter -> action -> encounter is good. I think all it needs is some visual indication of forward movement. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, even a sort of zoom-fade on the tunnel ahead. Just something to make it visually obvious that once you perform your action, you are actually moving through the sewer. The premise is that you're trying to escape the sewer, so I think this component is important.
- Unless there are reasons that come up later, it feels like the menus can be condensed by one layer. Fight/Item/Run on the top level.
- A little bit of movement on the scene of Albert looking ahead into the sewer would add a lot. Even if its just his sprite barely floating up and down, or some alpha channel flickering on the background. Ideally, the background has a two frame animation. That would give the scene some life.
- The smiling horse is really disturbing haha.
- Blasting the grinning man with my gun was fun.
- The prego rat is funny.
- Wish the sucker punch stayed in the #1 position though, so I don't accidentally use a ton of MP if Im clicking through
- The mushroom? and mush man fucked me up. A few times, the difficulty felt like it randomly spiked way way up and I'd get slaughtered. I was trying to heal with my chicken nuggets, but they easily did double the damage I could heal a turn it felt. Maybe they were getting lucky with attacks or something. In general, I think the balance could be smoothed out a little bit. That is, the peak damage from any single fight is lowered, but maybe the amount of healing from bandaging is lowered a bit too.
- I'm really not convinced that starting completely over when you die is the right approach. What does that accomplish exactly? This is not a roguelike or something where every run is unique. Even for a roguelike, it's a damn hard sell to be starting over all the time. I think there are far more interesting things you can do with death than restarting. I was a few fights into the caves, and was feeling a good groove. I was having fun. Then I randomly died in a fight and had to start over, it completely takes all the wind out of my sails. My motivation to start over is basically non existent, even though I would really like to see more of the game. The potential of getting randomly cratered after spending however long is just too off-putting. Fortunately, I think this is not a hard fix at all.
Overall, a cool little RPG with an extremely unique style. There's something really devilish and grotesque about the whole thing which is appealing in its own bizarre way.