I like the concept of rebuilding the community with items gathered from the areas. Its a pleasant gameplay loop where you become stronger by helping your fellow villagers, which in turn lets you help the villagers more quickly. There might be an issue for the player where you cannot gather any more of the right materials if you kept too much of an another material. For example, I got to the 4th upgrade from the cook which requires 15 of 2 types of material, but I wouldn't be able to gather anything more as I was already carrying the maximum amount of materials. Will there be an option to discard materials to avoid this?
The music is quite nice, and makes the sprite animation appear more springy and lively. The story is straightforward, and provides a decent motivation for the character and player.
The momentum based controls feel ok, but feels a little inconsistent when moving vertically:
- When you apply a vertical direction whilst moving horizontally, your character will keep moving horizontally and gradually move upwards or downwards. I think this is fine.
- However, when you're moving vertically and then apply a horizontal direction, your momentum drops to zero and you have to rebuild your speed. This also applies should you let go of the horizontal input whilst still maintaining the vertical input. This brief drop in speed makes the character feel slow when you're trying to move upwards or downwards.
The boss fight was straightforward due to the upgrades allowing me to tank the hits and survive long enough to keep striking it until it died. The boss' mercy invincibility length and damage rate wasn't enough to discourage this tactic. A potential method to discourage such a tactic could be to increase the boss' invincibility length, the damage per attack, move the boss on taking too much damage within a given amount of time, or introduce a move that immobilises or knocks the player away.
Overall, I enjoyed the general vibe of the game, and how the gameplay loop consistently leads to positive story outcomes as you progress through the areas.