The game looks nice, and it has some interesting features. I do like the graphics! Unfortunately I had a very hard time playing it. Especially the combat.
My first issue was having the characters organized horizontally while the key mapping was done vertically made it unnecessary hard to remember which key was for who. The progression of showing when the would be ready also didn’t really work on the character portrait(s) with dark background. I think the “I’m ready to do an action” state must be much clearer and the buttons when ready shine and sparkle some. The one button that seems to say you can always and should always press as much as possible is rest. But I guess it also is disabled when the character is disabled? It’d be good if that was illustrated on the button. And the button might also be a bit duller in general until the player actually needs to heal and then shine up to let them know they are about to die. On that note, the word “Rest” sounds like something one does between fights and not during fights, so I kind of disregarded it until the very end of my last attempt.
In part fighting might have been made more working for me if it was a bit slower. And as it was now I was just looking at the lower part of the screen watching the bars and spamming buttons. So I didn’t even notice when one of the enemies died.
At one point I got to level up, and there appeared buttons but then the fighting scene ended before I could do anything.
I also felt like the healing potion refused to heal me when I had characters hurt from previous fight. But the portraits were full health, so perhaps I was mistaken. It did resurrect one of my characters though when I finally got it working. Not sure it was supposed to do that.
The font was neat, but a bit hard to read, so I didn’t get all that it said in the intro. It should probably not auto-progress.
Playing through, I’m guessing the crystals did something. Might be connected to the looping time? But I’m not sure. I’m uncertain what made the time get longer. And since it’s a central mechanic it would probably be good if the player couldn’t miss that. Or if it’s supposed to be a mystery, it could be made clearer that it should be that too.
The looping was… well I didn’t really get the point of it. It caused a lot of repeated traversal akin to backtracking. And that might have been cool if there was some foreshadowing. Like if you through a window could see a crystal in a neighboring room and you could set that as a quest for yourself to reach it but your steps run out so you have to find a way to open short-cuts and prolong your loop time. And there needs to be exciting things happening on the way that you have to repeat.
First time I tried to <TAB> out your game to start recording my playthrough the game just exited. Second time, the game survived but when I tried to get back to it, I got no mouse pointer so I couldn’t start it… so there won’t be any recording unfortunately.
Hope this doesn’t come across as overly critic. I’m not. I think it could be a really neat game that I would enjoy playing very much, I’m just struggling right now.