Nice relaxing entry!
I think the movement was rather slow, which might make sense if you are some slow-moving rig with lots of gear and such, but then it would have been really nice to re-enforce that with sounds and camera effects while moving. Quite a few times, I overshot where I wanted to go even though the movement was slow, so there was something in the queuing up of movement that worked unexpectedly for me. Not sure exactly what. I also several times got confused about which block had the ore since they so often were in the periphery of the block.
The mining mini-game was also quite slow compared to normal speeds of such events. I even thought for a while, what if that first level up of the mining would speed up the minigame. That was the reason I got it. it also felt a bit unfair / unexpected that I didn’t get to try the remaining keypress challenges if I missed one. I think that’s usually how those work. But it could also just quit you out of it directly when failing too. If I could have increased the speed of the game somehow, perhaps as a risk/reward thing, perhaps through upgrade, it would have been nice.
There was a small bug that the mining prompt showed after you had mined a location.
With the mining, I think it could just as well have triggered when moving towards a block with ore instead of a separate mining button. I also wasted quite a lot of ore, I think because my inventory wasn’t completely full, but I guess too full to take any more ore. It would have been nice with a clear feedback there.
The main reason I didn’t want to continue though was the movement in combination with backtracking. Since you go ever deeper, it becomes a lot of presses to get back. If movement was snappier and if I could hold down to move forward or if there was a separate backtrack function (could even be an upgrade), that lets you watch as the character moves back. That’d be nice.
At one point I was a sliver of stamina away from death and I think that came from a combination of lack of feedback in the UI that I was running low. And that I would imagine that mining would be a big drain on stamina, but just moving back not so much.
Maybe I didn’t dig deep enough. But it would have been nice with some variation on rock. Taking more time / costing more stamina to cut through. Thus increasing the need for upgrading pickaxes that way. Also if there were different ores of different worth so that you could get a little thrill rush of discovering some gold.
Nice relaxing entry to start today’s voting with while sipping on a cup of tea.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/sOg6BgZKh5M