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(+1)

Well this is so far the first Unreal dungeon crawler I've played this jam so it's unique in that aspect. And while it looks great and there's a good amount of polish, I'll go over the issues I encountered first.

The first issue, which is probably mostly on me, is I couldn't figure out how to get past the second room. I had assumed that I used the yellow keycard to get into the second room (since the door going in was yellow), and thus wasn't required to actually drag and drop the keycard onto the doors. Once I figured that out I was good.

But on the subject of the rooms, it's a bit disorienting moving forward and suddenly teleporting. I assume this was done for performance reasons, which with Unreal is fair enough, though it caught me off guard at first. Oh and I ran into a bug where when going through the first yellow locked door, it teleported me back to the starting room. Had to run through it again to get to the first open area.

Like several of the other comments here I found something a bit off with the tile size and position. Some were definitely too small, like in the final boss room the camera clips into red columns. And others just felt awkward, like in the first room you're either too far away from lockers or have your face pressed against it. Just generally a bit weird. Oh I also discovered you can step onto objects, which isn't an issue and is kinda fun, but I wasn't sure if it was intentional or just an oversight.

 

The final boss was kinda neat, but again with the tile size issue it made it awkward to fight because it's hitbox is so small. And even though I beat the boss, I don't think I made it to the ending because I couldn't figure out where to go next. I searched through the boss arena and backtracked through other areas and didn't find anything. Is there no win screen?

Now covering the things I actually liked, graphically the game world looks great! The sparks coming off malfunctioning equipment, overflowing sinks, running showers, etc. all looked very nice. It chugged a bit on my machine even on low graphics, but I honestly think that's due more to some issue with my PC than the game itself because it's been a bit slow lately.

I liked finding all the little secrets scattered around, the blue and red stimpaks, and the toy weapons were all fun.

I appreciate the options of instant or continuous movement, I switched to instant as I found it a bit faster. Mind you my game has slow movement and no option for instant movement, so you got me beat there!

The combat was fine, I know others have mentioned it being too easy but in a jam I always prefer too easy over too hard. I assume there was a magic system planned but scrapped, since Intelligence and the blue bar don't do anything.

I also liked the interface, very intuitive, and I like the detail of leaning into crates when opening them. Very Legend of Grimrock!

Overall I had fun with this one. It has some obvious growing pains of devs who haven't made a dungeon crawler before, as you mentioned in other comments, but I think if you were to take another swing next year you could make something great!

(+1)

Thanks for all this great feedback!

We are definitely starting to see a trend in recommendations and pain points here.
Also, you assume correctly that we were going to have abilities. Those got scrapped, and we forgot to disable some of the associated stuff.
You did find a new bug or pain point; the credits screen is supposed to appear 10 seconds after the boss HP hits 0, and that is meant to be the end. This, along with the level transitions and boss hitbox, are all just weird compromises we made for the sake of time, as I have mentioned in earlier comments. We had originally planned to put a starting and ending cutscene in the game, but we fell way short of that; our scope was blown up too far just getting all the systems in there and working together, even having planned it all out thoroughly in advance.

The tile issue and overcommitting to a plethora of systems instead of focusing on a handful and just making those and the overall experience more fun are both great improvements for us to focus on next time around. You are correct, since this was our first time making a crawler, we had no idea how to get the tile sizing and layout right, we just got the grid working and did the best we could with the assets to make them not feel weird. Do you think starting with a different FOV would have made this feel better?

Thanks again for taking the time to play, though; very much appreciated!

(+1)

Well I'm happy to provide all the feedback I can! I had the experience last year of vastly overscoping on mechanics and ended up with only a tiny tutorial level with one enemy lol.

Some playing around with the FOV I don't think would hurt, and I would also recommend combining that with experimenting with the camera placement in the player tile. That's just advice for something to do in-between this jam and next year so you have time to try what feels best. For this specifically I think it's more the grid in the world itself that's the issue. Because it doesn't matter how comfortably the camera is setup if there's tiles where the walls intrude too far on the player position.

But hey, this is all part of the learning experience! Good luck with your future dungeon crawler work!