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It has been pretty neat seeing your game evolve so much without losing its soul. I hope you make more in the future!

A lot of the red abilities seemed useful in theory, but I found that playing that was the best way to consistently lose the game. Undertuned, maybe.

The thing with the briefcase is that you have to weight the payoff against losing access to the excellent extra interest item forever, and it does not compare favorably. If the game gets longer, that prospect will be even worse. However, I did not realize that a full-yellow run was even viable in this 8-game format, since it's so hard to get the opportunity translate money accumulation to any real advantage when the pieces you want to snowball into are so rare and slots are so expensive. It does make sense to have the briefcase as a pivot, since it would be the lesser of two evils.

Having played this a little bit more to finish it...

All the modes are too short. It feels like you're being told "no fun allowed" whenever you're just getting your build going. And I can barely feel the difference in their difficulty.

Red is junk. 

Black is grotesquely overpowered. Inactive turns are extremely common and not the imposed limitation the effects seem to assume. The dog being busted as a final unlock makes sense, but the samurai, not so much. 

Wildcards are disproportionately good, but they add so much player agency to the game that I would like to see even more of them. 

Yellow, besides the extra interest one, is awful, but that's mostly because the runs are too short. I think it might be actually impossible to get any value out of the briefcase unless you pick it exactly on the final round of the run, considering the lost interest, and even then, it's barely a payoff. Color buffs are often not worth it even if you're mono-color (and there's no reason not to be.) The high rarity items are all overpriced junk, so why would I want more of that? The only time I mathematically got any use of any was in using the cheaper rerolls to get the fully upgraded build badge.

Weapons are very rare to come by now, yet upgrading them is such a big advantage. Are you going to have more weapons besides the starting ones?

It's been a long time since I last played this.

The new title screen is very soulful. It reminds me of the Afterlife Gladiator hub. There's lots of inconsistencies with outlines and fonts and such, but honestly, it helps sell the euro aesthetic.

I don't know what you changed, but the lighting looks a lot more like old-school prerendered 3D than stock Unity now. The shaders for the outlines and wall see-throughs and orbs and such are all excellent.

Having to type a text box whenever you want to save is annoying.

The voices and noises are very well-implemented.

I expected to cheese the game with magic in classic ARPG fashion, but there's plenty of ranged hate in there once you get past the first floor. I don't know how melee characters handle this, but that certainly makes the game more interesting for magic users. 

I don't understand how to use heavy weapons. Their slower attack speed seems to make them 100% useless when I'm trying to hit and run.

I got to level 5 on the floor with the cultists and now I have no healing, so I guess I'm bricked. It took me forever to get any spell worth using at all (the electric shockwave). Snakes die faster than it takes you to summon them. Fireballs aren't any better than autoattack when you're in a cycle of kiting enemies anyway. Bloodlust is not even a spell. I expected to get some sort of magic that would convert mp to hp, but never did. As a result, I had a huge pile of useless MP potions.

I like the core gameplay here, but it's not fast-paced enough for the roguelike replayability structure to be enticing for me. 

I love the art and presentation in this game. It seems to be an /agdg/ tradition now that the best-looking games always turn out to be turn-based RPGs that my stimulant-addled brain struggles to grasp, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. 

It is insane how much density of soul there is everywhere. Wherever I go, there's new animations and music. I normally mute game audio after a few minutes because it grows repetitive, but here it changes up so often that I stayed interested.

Holding the confirm button during dialogue accidentally made me skip a lot of conversation text, and I can't find any conversation log function.

Conversely, it would be nice if pressing confirm during the opponent's turn in combat skipped to the next action.

I can't stand the high-pitched UI sfx. There is an argument that it is soulful in just how bad of a fit it is, but after a while I was just sick of it.

The UI in general comes off as stock RPGmaker and clashes a bit with the otherwise very bespoke artstyle. IMO refurbishing that is the single most obvious improvement I see that could be made to this game.

The constant choices and the way the game seems to react to them is overwhelming and disorienting in a good way. 

There is quite a bit of content here. Does this have an Afterlife Gladiator-like system for importing data into future versions? I want to see where this goes, but not if my progress gets deleted in the next update.

I understand the gun can build up momentum over time, and I do think it would benefit from doing that faster overall, but what I mean is that the instantaneous control you have over the character is far greater in jumps/wall jumps than it is in deciding whether to move horizontally and which direction to go. Perhaps once you know the levels you can just bounce around and never have to readjust, but, for learning them, vertical sections are a lot more wieldy and give you more to work with immediately. If blasting through with momentum is the intended design, maybe you could have the gun equivalent of a spin dash?

Thank you for your interest! Maybe I'll have the demo done by next Demo Day.

I managed to get to the end message with the new build. Pretty neat ending. I don't know how the battles earlier on have changed recently, but the encounter design has a lot better in the latter parts of the game. I hope to see more games from you in the future, as this one was very soulful. 

Cute Mario 1-like.  It feels a little bit faster than the original, which is good.

I don't get the control scheme. Let me run with shift and jump with space so I can play this with one hand from the goblin resort games room.

This is neat as a little unassuming demo, but if you expand it to more worlds it's probably a good idea to have original mechanics.

It is nice to see the aesthetic from the 1D-metroidvania fleshed out like this. Is this in the same universe? 

The gun pile mechanic is unique and a non-trivial implementation. It's pretty good flavor, especially for these 2D run-and-gun games that usually don't do anything too out there.

Horizontal movement is a bit slow and the enemies are a bit too spongy. If you're trying to emphasize the gun I suppose that is reasonable, but it does feel a little bit strange how you end up with mobility that's better in the vertical axis than horizontal. The vertical level is pretty solid and I think these vertical climbs are the best setup the game has at the moment.

It doesn't seem like there is a penalty for spamming parries. Doing just that seems like it might be the only way to keep the style meter up on bosses. IDK if a time-based chain/style meter mechanic is optimal for how this seems to be more on the methodical side. I guess I'd have to get good to figure that out. 

The presentation is insanely polished already in all places. Well done.

By the way, in case you're unaware, you can use Cinemachine virtual cameras to get camera transitions without having to write a full 3D camera system all by yourself.

You're welcome! I mean the disembodied question mark and speech text with generic fonts, hard camera transitions on dialogue, etc. 

Please significantly increase the movement speed and/or add a run button. I'm interested in this sort of game and I like what I see so far, but I went from mild annoyance at how slow it was to quitting in utter disbelief when the first puzzle required cinematically crawling back to reorient and check planks.

You're like halfway there to a really cool psychedelic aesthetic. I think the main problems bottlenecking it into a sloppy appearance at the moment are the stock interaction ui and slop props with stock lighting and materials. 

The platforming is rudimentary and way too slow, but it seems you are just getting started on it. 

Somehow you've got a special animation when you're standing close to edges and that's turbo soul. 

Neat little physics game. 

The spiders are a bit creepy. I'm not sure if they fit the atmosphere.

It seems inconsistent whether thorns change your direction or not.

If you're trying to make the game punishing you could add limited flight per level, but I think it's fine as-is

Yeah, that in itself is a common trope, overall. I think what made it stand out to me was the presentation of it being a very brown flashback + the imagery of displaced people traveling to it + it being linked to a healing factor purgatory-like environment with disfigured creatures in it + the viking helmet and moth duo. I wouldn't call it a ripoff, and it's probably just a coincidence, but it took me out of the story a bit during an important moment.

Nice! I'll check it out tomorrow.

It is good to put these soulful models to good use.

The progression is a bit slow and the game takes a bit too long to ramp up. Too much of the game is just getting lightning or dark bolts early on. The starting sword swing appears to operate based on an instantaneous hitbox that does not match the animation, and makes this worse.

I like the easter egg game over if you run up to the villain.

The power ups could use some description so you can make an informed decision. I got a bunch of health and regen ones that seemingly do nothing.

It seems if you die without getting any points your game over screen will think you have the score from your previous session

The music does not loop smoothly.

Time bombs could stand out better against the terrain

I can't tell how the chest mechanic works. Sometimes it says no key and sometimes it slowly unlocks. I never saw where I got any key from.

I got to 1402 until I was absolutely swarmed by flaming skeletons. I'm guessing that's where the content ends, because the game felt like it was breaking. Overall this is an OK stopgap but I obviously think the main game is fundamentally more interesting. Are you going to have this in there as a minigame or something?

The new logo is not pixel art, so it looks jarring with the rest of the title screen. Same for the game over screen.

You can really FEEL the polish you've been adding. It feels so smooth it's like the game is running at a higher framerate.

After disabling fullscreen mode, the game goes back to it automatically between menus.

Battle speed is not saved between fights

Xanadu archer's lifesteal is not permanent. It seems to reset after you reload with low ammo.

Xanadu knight should leave the hall

Facing Right Hand without Ermine alive to cast slowdown puts you in what seems to be a softlocked state where he just casts invincibility over and over again after running out of summons

8th plague's description has a typo

I can't enter the tallest tower. Clicking it plays the transition animation, then reloads the map exactly as it was

The orb flashback is a bit too close to Made in Abyss to my liking

Other than that I have enjoyed this game a lot. Is the ending already there? I'd like to be able to access it

I like the badge system better than the old unlock method.

Whenever I think I finally understand how damage works in this game I am proven wrong.

I miss the top row bonus turns. They added a nice wombo-combo nature to the game even if they made digging a bit OP

>balatro-like

kek i was thinking of this game seeing Balatro blow up

This is a very fun game - it's nice to see it has seen a bit of the two cakes effect.

It is around here

The idea here is great, but the low FOV, flat lighting and lack of detail in the environment makes it annoying to keep track of what is even happening, let alone creating a mental model of the space around you. Made me motionsick/10

Very soulful attention to detail with the UI, hair/snow physics and disintegration shader. I think the content has been trimmed down from the previous demo? I can't find a lot to do other than go around the tower with the stairs. Going through the door at the start just puts me next to a bottomless pit.

Walking into the wall where it is near edge of the map a little bit beyond the cat's house placed the player character into a pitch-black area that keeps logging actor lost and actor registered messages

2000 lines removed?!? Now I'm curious about how that looked like.

Fun gambling-like. It feels like the meta is to go wood (better highrolling lategame) or bees (more consistent).

 There's not much pivoting over the course of the game as cross-synergies fall flat and the other, poorly scaling options are junk. Even early on, they are just board pollution, since rubberbanding the floor for goals based on your current gold rather than fixed values means you don't get any long-term benefits from picking them. 

The way so many different powers do the same thing in boosting wood is uncanny - the flavor is not really there. 

If you die while highlighting an icon, it gets stuck on the screen.

What I mean by animation-skipping is pressing a confirm button while animations like battle animations/text, overworld animations and screen transitions, etc. are playing to move forwards into the next queued action. And yeah, running being too slow, combined with the lack of diagonal movement in diagonally-oriented maps, makes getting around quite a chore, especially if you want us to backtrack to investigate. If you don't want to trivialize running away from enemies, having some diagonal movement that's deliberately slow would still help, as would a faster running speed when there's no enemies on the screen. 

Yes, it's a very pretty game! I would like to return to it again.

I like the art style on this, and it easily carries the game all on its own. The maps could use more landmarks/less repetition, and I feel this sort of dudes-in-a-row RPG Maker structure demands additions like much faster run speed + diagonal movement as well as being able to animation-cancel text/turns to be fun. As-is, I lost all enthusiasm for playing in record time once I died and had to redo anything.

I like the concept, but I was hoping for it to manifest as something more elegant in its depth, like a puzzle game version of the Game of Life. This ruleset feels more complex than good arcadey, perception-based puzzle scoring games tend to be, but it's not quite deep enough to work as a simulation game that gets you considering strategies at a high level of abstraction, either.  I think as-is, this is a sort of game that I would play with levels and objectives rather than scoring.

The flying feels way slower now than it was in the last build from a couple days ago. The graphics have gotten uglier too, though I understand that's due to the transition to the new shaders. The new street lights are interesting, I assume you're going to use them for lighting? 

I can't seem to lose any blood unless I hit walls. Not sure if intentional.

The music style is going in a better direction.

Hitting the ground now often results in a stunlock until death. 

Other than that the game is the same as when I last played it.

I'm playing on a Chromium browser.

The polish in this game just keeps getting better and better. I love just starting levels and watching the animations and countless easter eggs by poking the fairies and such. I think you might have said at one point you intend to carry on with these characters after this game. A 100% asset flip would be completely reasonable.

I could really use a checkpoint/savestate/rewind/undo system of some sort rather than fully restarting every single time. There's definitely an issue with how slow the game feels in general, despite that being helpful for the animation shenanigans.

I don't find the aim assist helps much with anything, though it doesn't hurt either. Maybe get it to highlight whichever fairy is going to be eaten?

this is cheating 

The way these blue frogs occupy space in general is not very well represented. Another instance is when you're supposed to solve a puzzle by using them to block a leaping fairy, which they don't look large enough to be able to, standing at the same height as fairies that don't.

beautiful

You might intend for it to be an orblike, but, to me, this instead has a lot more appeal as a more or less feature-complete vertical slice for a Ragnarok-like. I'm interested in where you might take it, in terms of content. That being said, the current menus are a mess. The skill tree is especially bad. Just everything laid out as one indecipherable jumbled mess where the icons are barely descriptive and the text doesn't help that much either. It took me a while to figure out I had to specifically click on the tiny unlocked lock to unlock a skill, as opposed to the tiny locked lock which is barely one or two pixels distinct. I had to zoom in my browser window for the tiny text to be readable, too.

Perfectly functional breakout-like. My only problem with this game is ball visibility, especially with the coins. Overall, I think these coins being everywhere is just annoying and don't add anything to the game. The appeal of these games is to break blocks; distracting the player to pick up a thousand bonus objects with every single block destroyed is a constant diversion that detracts from the core gameplay.

Pretty neat for something made in a week. I could see a full game being made from this concept.

Enemies don't give chase and killing them nets no reward, not even the peace of mind of not having them respawn, so I felt no reason to fight them without the bow. 

It feels like the game rewards stalling a bit too much. Most of the time, the limited uses for sliding just force you to hit your head against a wall for a while to recharge with little consequence. The sliding mechanic itself is downplayed a bit by limiting the rows/columns you can use it on. You can often get stuck for a tad too long when you're surrounded by walls on non-slidable tiles as well.

There is some jank with sprites often not reading as what their mechanics are, and they often overlap in confusing ways, but the artstyle itself is polished. It is often not clear whether doors are locked. Tiles could use some visible seams too.

Weapons overwriting each other sucks. It reduces what you can get out of the already limited gamut of non-stackable upgrades.

The game is a bit short. If these stages are procedurally generated, the parameters could keep rising for a good while longer without breaking anything.

I like how there's less straight dungeon-like gameplay here than the previous one. The /agdg/ lore writing on these is fun, whereas the stock RPGMaker adventuring held back that old one. 

Unexpectedly seeing the gargoyle here was really funny and it took me by surprise.

It is weird how you can't light up the fire when you have a spell called fire, especially when there are battle system-related solutions like having the beast in your party. 

I was getting "don't know how to start up the caravan yet" text even after obtaining the tools. That being said, even with the text displaying wrong state, the caravan still started up when I completed the other requirements. 

I got out and then reloaded to finish the sidequest until I got the strongman the potion. I gave it to him, but seemingly nothing came of that.

This is a nice little demo full of variety; I actually wanted for there to be more content beyond the blockade. 

Solid game; you've nailed the aesthetic. I got to draw the curtains and then died when I jumped back down.

The crosshairs are hard to see. The text for ammo/health is too tiny to read and they look interchangeable

Enemies will just sit and get shot as if they had cover if there is a short obstacle between them and you.

Circle strafing is the answer to every enemy encounter, but that's fine for a first level.

Overall the only problems with this are the ugly UI and title screen.

I don't know the specifics of implementation to articulate what feels off about the controls, but it's generally when going slow or moving over/jumping on sharp slopes that it's not quite right. I could try to record it the next time around. Part of it is the camera too, I think. It could be moving around too much while trying to execute finer platforming.

Yeah the game looks great already so it's hard to tell these are not final levels.

Yes, from what I have played so far, I would prefer to control the characters individually. That could change depending on what ideas you have to do with the commands later, though.

The idea to use a key combination itself works well, but I intuitively try to use the directional key that would move the kid closer or away from the adult at that given moment rather than memorizing that left or right do fixed things.

What I mean is that the password I get by beating stage x and moving onto x+1 puts me at the start of stage x rather than x+1.

The tutorial works just fine as a showcase of mechanics for levels that are yet to be designed, but as a tutorial for an actual game, it's almost silly how eager it is to introduce complexity only to do nothing with it. Mechanics like the soccer ball and enemies in general appear multiple times without ever serving any use. A lot of the tutorial prompts and even the controls themselves could be simplified in too many ways to list; you should really rework those levels if you want the average player to see the rest of the game.

Chase/run being tied to fixed right/left buttons rather than relative to which character is to the left is confusing.

Besides the matter of ladders for some reason resetting command states and having special commands associated with them, I'm not yet sure what you're going for with this command control scheme that wouldn't be achieved by controlling the characters separately.

I got stuck by falling here without the kid. Passwords take you to the beginning of the level that awards them rather than the next one so I'm not going back.

Overall, I don't see what you're going for with this game just yet. It's a bit of an amalgamation of props without any core idea to explore. If you want it to be about a narrative there didn't seem to be enough of that and I couldn't really tell what the props and environments were meant to convey in terms of a story.

I like that you didn't copy Sonic mechanics 1:1 as these games are wont to do, but, as a result, the controls feel a bit janky and inconsistent. Wall jump inertia is odd, you get insane momentum by jumping on a specific type of slope, sometimes you just bounce off stuff flying into the sky, you can wall jump-dash back onto walls to cheese momentum checks, etc. I think sorting these out to feel good is higher priority than adding content. I got through the available levels and I agree with the sentiment that some spectacle early on would be nice; it might be a good idea to have those machine gun sequences in the first stage. That being said, I disagree that the level design is bad. It's perfectly fine; it's really the controls themselves that are getting in the way.

There has been a lot of jank and glitches with game states in this game all-around. It looks like you're hard-coding a lot of things to check for conditions independently where a state machine/observer would be proper. Just something to keep in mind if you're starting another project after this one.