Notes taken during gameplay:
- Intro music is mystical and engaging
- Fire animation is nice
- Title splash text looks very nice, but doesn't mesh with navigation text on the tombstone. Similar font and color will help
- I like the hints which appear on the left side. There are some grammatical and spelling mistakes, such as liver instead of lever
- Camera view feels weirdly off-centered which makes me feel a bit disoriented.
- Cute character design
- Nice ambient sound effects, but would like music
- Art feels very sparse and untextured. It looks cool for the fire, but for the ground and background elmenents it feels unfinished. It almost gives a lego vibe, maybe lean into that art style
- Screen shake on gate opening is nice touch
- Whoa giant map for next level after tutorial. Feels daunting
- Nice music in level 1
- Wish I could move faster, especially with how big this map is
- Jump animation looks nice
- Crow caw is repeated too often, becomes grating. Sound itself is high quality
- Excellent flavor text for the tomb scrolls. Would have been a better intro to include some sort of flavor text in the tutorial section
- Far too dark in places without torches. Also the dark seems to have some sort of moving texture going on
- Unclear which scrolls match which puzzle until you visit at least two to realize they have a matching name - I visited the one on the left at first which was titled a tomb and thought maybe that was the monument's title and spent time backtracking to try that code. With how slow we walk, it feels quite frustrating to have to double back only for it to do nothing
- Effective sound design with the distorted voice for the voice actor
- Scroll text disappears even if game isn't in focus (eg was typing here and it timed out so couldn't finish reading it)
- Needs to be some way to review codes you've gotten, feels like I'm wandering around trying to find clues but by the time I find the matching gate, I've forgotten the code
Overall, great ambience and theming with well-written text, nice art/sound and solid core puzzle mechanic. The slow movement speed and lack of any way to review clues I've seen made it frustrating to play, however. I think with further development, this could be a great "spooky" game for tweens, and has a great vibe for a console game.