Thanks! I'm glad, despite how dense the writing and content of the game can be, someone was able to enjoy it.
I actually hadn't heard of Slay the Princess until you mentioned it! The concept itself is pretty simple; scenario, choice, scenario, choice, so I can't say any one specific game influenced this. It just seemed the best way to tell my dumb little poems about myself.
I streamed this game for this review. The link to the VOD will be below.
Overall, I actually had a pretty good time with this game. It seems very well designed from a gameplay perspective, but it's not without some jank.
The Islands of the Caliph is designed to be an old school, grid-based, first person RPG. As far as the aesthetic goes, it nails this! The game dumps you with little idea what you should do or where you should go, but it's clear by the man standing in front of you where you should begin. Trapped on a small island, the player is left to their own devices to figure out the steps to progress.
This is one of the things The Islands of the Caliph excels at. It seems very well designed at not giving too much information to the player to make things completely brainless, but at the same time it gives enough information or limits your options just enough that it's never cryptic. It's a rare balance that is struck in games, but here it was achieved with grace.
That said, It also nails all the baggage that comes with emulating games of old. I think this is one of the things that holds the game back the most.
Controls are clunky, gentle slopes impede progress, finding things like specific shops or items is often a lengthy chore, and traveling to and from your destination is always a lengthy process.
Sometimes these old fashioned design decisions are appreciated, sometimes they just lead to unnecessary friction in the game play.
But, I actually really enjoyed my time with this game. Once I got used to the clunk controls it started to become quite enjoyable. The question is whether I feel motivated to buy the full version and continue my experience or not, and that is tough to decide. So many other games exist that I don't need to wrestle with the controls to enjoy.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
I streamed this game for this review. The link to the VOD will be below.
Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this game, but it's not without some flaws.
Orrstead, a low-poly city builder, uses randomly generated islands where you can grow your new settlement.
After picking your island, you will build your people-spawning monolith and then from there begin constructing your new civilization through ploppable buildings.
While there are no “Residential, Commercial, Industrial” meters to balance, you will be balancing your building materials, your gold, food, and population.
The unique thing that leads to thoughtful optimization is the building range; where certain buildings must be within a range of another building in order to gain its benefits or even apply bonuses, and of course, account for a citizen’s commute from home to the ploppable building they work at to optimize your economy.
This is where things can get a little bit punishing for a game that feels a bit more relaxed;
The combination of these 4 aspects likely lead to a very poor first experience as you will eventually realize how disastrous your city is and realize that a restart is necessary. On the one hand, it's really great learning the game and seeing how to optimize things better for the future - that's part of the fun! On the other hand, it feels really bad to have to just scrap your town and restart. I can see that as being a major quit point for some players.
Ideally, Orrstead would teach the player enough to know the appropriate way to set up a basic town and then leave the optimizing for them to figure out on their own.
It would be great if there was a non-randomly generated tutorial island to help players learn the basic functions of buildings and maybe some basic “optimized” routes for the early game.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
Overall, I like the concept of this game, but the execution is both not my cup of tea and also needs a lot of work.
The game takes place within a maid café where the maids play a Dungeons and Dragons like card games with their customers - or so we are told.
One of the biggest failings of this game is connecting these 2 ideas.There are lots of opportunities for creative mechanics and imagery to connect these 2 concepts together, but instead it's often your very typical fantasy backgrounds and fantasy bad guys and an uninspired card-based battle system.
Considering how much the game stresses “ensuring the customer has a good time”, I am disappointed that there are no “customer interactions”. I would have loved to see something like an “entertainment” meter that the player needs to balance; where winning isn't about winning, but sometimes about losing to ensure the customer is having fun. The more fun the customer has, the bigger your tip is. Sadly that is not here. In fact, the “customer” is not really integrated into this at all.
The game has an identity crisis that runs even deeper; as the game touts one-handed control (*wink*), has a soft cutesy aesthetic, and really handholds the player a lot (except the combat - we'll get to that). It feels like the game is trying to be a very approachable and casual game. However, the combat portion is only given a basic explanation and from there the game says “you'll figure the rest out.”
You get one PNG splash screen before the first battle with no way to call that screen shot back up. And judging by how others were saying the game was really punishingly difficult, I assume it's because they just didn't note an important mechanic that was not taught to them (I assume the shield value if I had to guess). Basically, it seems like when it comes to the combat, the whole game throws out its casual and friendly approachability.
There are a myriad of other problems big and small that I feel run throughout the game; use of both AI art and assets ripped from other games, lack of keyboard support, grammar and writing issues, etc. I'm not going to write much on this as all of this can be adjusted with time as the game is in an alpha state.
I hope the developer will spend time identifying their core audience, and making sure the game's identity meets their expectations.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
Bone Idol
Written Review
I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Bone Idol is the rare Halloween game, the much celebrated, yet still a holiday lacking good games for it. Overall, this game surpassed my expectations; going off the screenshots I figured it was pretty standard, low-effort indie RPG game, but turning out to be quite the joy to experience.
The game begins with a black screen, again, setting expectations that this will be a typical indie RPG. However, the writing itself is quite captivating and is clearly the strongest part of the game.
The story is about the fact that you are dead, but have decided to resist dying, and thanks to the Halloween curse, you get to rise from the grave once again. This is already quite the enjoyable premise on its own; no magic elemental crystals holding the kingdoms in balance, no dark lord acting up, no "rich lore that no one is going to care about but I am going to spend 10 hours telling you about why Barfizal The Great fought in the Bilebut war when all the nations were fighting each other because the Not-Tolkien Elves were too in tune with nature or something"; no, there is actually a genuinely interesting concept here.
It is a little bit heavy on text, overall, but it's paced out well enough that the player will be diving into the action in no time (see above rich lore dump).
The game is informative about what to do and where to go, without being condescending to the player's intelligence; briefly telling the player where to go (and providing a few hints along the way) but never interrupting your free exploration to go and do whatever you want.
From my brief time playing this game, the combat doesn't seem particularly exceptional, but props still need to be given to the fact that enemies are animated and do have a few surprising unique behaviors.
There is some minor back-tracking, but again, this is tastefully done and doesn't condescend the player's intelligence.
It seems like Bone Idol set out with a goal, and the dev knew exactly how to execute it without unnecessary bloat and comprehension of what makes a game fun.
If I had any advice to give the dev is that this game really deserves better effort put into its marketing; the store page, screen shots and (first half) of the trailer really don't sell people on what makes this game so great. I imagine if this game refined its marketing material and was placed on Steam for $10, it may very well do pretty well for itself.
Finally, the game lacks some necessary modern accessibility options such as rebindable keys. At the very least, I would hope for an option to let me toggle between the old skool arrow keys and the more modern WASD layout (though ideally, full rebindability would be preferred).
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Pitch Black Secrets of Epiotica (which is a mouthful, so I'll just call it Pitch Black from here on out) is a game with a lot of style and a lot of flaws. It has a lot of potential, but as it's just an early beta, I recommend holding off playing unless you plan on providing valuable feedback to improve the direction of the game.
Pitch Black should immediately be eye catching to you. The developer clearly has an eye for design as each of the UI windows, map design, and character designs all look quite stunning. But this design may impress you at first, but the veneer will quickly slide away as you play more.
As an English player, the dialogue has clearly been machine translated, and it has not been particularly well executed. A lot of the dialogue gets lost in translation. There are glimmers of interesting moments in the dialogue, so I think if you were a native speaker (of whatever the dev's native language is), the writing would impress. However, as an English speaker, things are translated laughably, and sometimes results in a tonal whiplash. What exactly is the tone this game is going for? Is it a dark, Gothic mystery? Well the art style sure lends itself to that. Or is it a light-hearted hunt fit for the Mystery Machine crew? The execution in the dialogue certainly leans towards the latter.
When it comes to combat, it holds no punches. It throws you into the deep end (something that might be fitting of a grim-dark tone) and…really just feels like a pretty bog standard turn-based game with a lot of states to keep track of.
As Pitch Black is touted, it is meant to be a mystery solving game, but the dialogue drags on long, and the mystery solving lacks player agency, as the mystery will unravel itself so long as the player knows which NPC to talk to next. From what little time I had played the game (due to way too much dialogue), it never seemed like the game wanted to let the player use their brain to piece the puzzle together themselves.
I hope to see this game develop into something great, because it's got the visual aesthetic down, but it has a lot of other things that clearly need to be polished.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
p.s. is this a kink game? It's even in the devs name. This is clearly a kink game.
I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Endacopia most certainly is a strange game that naturally fuels a sense of curiosity at what will happen next. However a "non-traditional" point-and-click is not how I would describe such a game.
For a demo of the upcoming game, this is a solid start. I'm not generally a fan of point-and-click games, however something about the strangeness of this world had caught my attention and so I had to give it a try. I was not disappointed.
Endacopia starts you off in a bedroom but like no other. The atmosphere and sense of strangeness already present. From there, the game invites you to click on anything, and that is where the magic lies. Like any of the old point-and-click games of the past, everything can be interacted with at least to a small degree - a nice little bit of polish and charm to bring the world alive. And through this polish it makes you naturally wonder what to click on and so inevitably you find your next clue to moving forward. Indie devs can often struggle to lead the player in the right direction. Either they just outright tell the player what to do (which most of us never enjoy the hand-holding), or they tell us nothing and can't even at least provide contrast between objects to give us a hint, leaving us to wander aimlessly and hopelessly until we ultimately give up (kind of like the game I played at the start of my stream). However, in Endacopia, this polish of naturally wanting to click on things is an intelligent way of getting the player to progress without having to guide the player directly through overly informative text boxes and tutorials. This game is a charm!
Where things really need to be improved is its commitment to the 90's era point-and-click games. First of all, it is very committed to that bit, which is why I would definitely not describe it as "non-traditional". It is very, very much traditional and that's okay! However, it's commitment to this genre brings along the warts of awkward controls. Having to awkwardly cycle through commands using the right mouse button is just…well…awkward. These functions could easily be mapped to the keyboard. Similarly is your inventory. Although you never have more than a single item in the demo, it is still somewhat of a nuisance (and archaic design) to have to open the menu and assign the item to your mouse. It could easily be intelligently bound to your mouse if you have no other items in your inventory, but even more so, items, once again, could easily be bound to the keyboard.
What is funny to me is that the commitment also seems skin deep as the game employs WASD movement, which is actually a somewhat modern control scheme (at least when we are talking about the age of games Endacopia is trying to emulate). So there is a disconnect between the game trying to be committed to the point and click with everything being mouse driven, and yet also breaks it's own rules by incorporating WASD which only further creates the desire that things were not so awkwardly (and unnecessarily) bound to the mouse. I don't share this as a way to give the excuse of removing the WASD from the game and double down on the awkward controls. Rather, I appreciate the dedication to the old skool way of controlling things, but some things are better left in the past, especially if some puzzles have tight time limits that require the player to quickly fumble through the controls to complete those puzzles.
It seems the Kickstarter was successfully funded. Congratulations to the dev! I cannot wait to see what the finished product is like, and I hope to be able to play it one day soon with hopefully an improved control scheme (it would also be nice if the options were accessible from the game itself instead of launching a separate config program).
Dev, please consider creating a Steam page for this game soon so that I and others who enjoyed this work can wishlist it and easily keep up to date with its pending release.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
Hey there,
I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to connect with you after you reached out to me in the comment section of an unrelated game. While I appreciate your enthusiasm for making connections and gaining visibility for your game, I believe it's important to address this in a more appropriate way.
Firstly, I want to mention that I did take a look at your game, and it certainly caught my interest. As a musician myself, I'm particularly intrigued by the soundtrack. It's a topic I could see myself discussing quite a bit.
That being said, I'd like to kindly point out that reaching out through unrelated comment sections may not be the best approach. To ensure effective communication with creators, my contact information is readily available and visible on both the Youtube watch page and my channel's "About" section.
I hope you understand that my decision not to feature your game isn't a reflection of its quality. Rather, it's more about maintaining professionalism and proper communication practices.
I wish you the best of luck with your game development adventures, and who knows, perhaps in the future, I'll have the opportunity to feature an even more outstanding game created by you.
Take care,
Nolan
Hey there, thanks for the reply.
It sounds like you have really accomplished something great with this game and you should never let that be forgotten; your fans love it, and it won awards. That's really quite the accomplishment!
You are right. I usually take more care when posting my reviews to clarify it is more of a first impression, so I dropped the ball there by not making that more clear in my review.
Having played over 100 different games on my stream, I've gotten a good sense for when a game is something I will enjoy or not. That's also something key to keep in mind, is that it's whether I enjoy it - in other words an opinion. Some things (in fact, many things) I have mentioned in my review that I don't like can be overlooked by other people. Not everyone will enjoy your game, and that's okay.
I appreciate your hardwork. Don't forget that success you have made with this game, and don't let a review drag you down.
Hope to see your work again,
Take care.
I streamed this game for this review. The link will be below.
Theia: The Crimson Eclipse will hit you right out of the gate with some beautiful art. The game has superb presentation, but unfortunately that nice coat of paint is hiding some of the deeper problems.
It's unfortunate that the game makes use of a lot of ripped assets. It unfortunately brings into question how much of the beautiful coat of paint is the hard work of the developer of this game and how much of the hard work was done by someone else. Though I don't have a qualm with folks using ripped assets (so long as the game is free and they make that clear) it does unfortunately greatly harm the perception of the game.
As for the game itself, it lacks information to inform players what to do. For example, the very first game play section, I didn't know what to do because apparently I interacted with the story progression thing in the wrong spot, leading me to believe that was not the right thing to do.
Once the obligatory JRPG lore dump came on screen things really started to fall apart. It was far too long winded with way too many unpronounceable names. The names of people and places in this feel like a joke sometimes. The nice thing is that it can be skipped and for those of whom who play this game I highly recommend skipping this lore dump because it doesn't serve much purpose to the game itself. It could easily be summarized to a few lines, but instead it was needlessly long winded. The reason I chose to read the lore dump (despite not wanting to) is that this was for a review, and I worried that by skipping it, there is the potential of missing something important.
From there, things fall apart further with inconsistent game rules and just poorly thought out levels.
After waking up in a grassy area a small cliff impedes you from jumping down, despite our main protagonist displaying the ability to jump earlier in the game. An outcropping the player can pass under is the actual solution, but just like the interactable object at the start of the game, there really is no indication you can go under it. In this 2D space, it just looks like a cliff face.
The rules the game establishes for itself are quickly broken and only utilized when the game feels ready to use those rules.
I didn't get far into this game as I ran out of time to give it on my stream, but overall I was beginning to lose my patience as cracks in the design began to show slowly over that course of play time, I can only imagine how things might get worse were I to play longer.
If you'd like to watch my experience with the game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing.
Hey there,
I streamed Infernal Engine Defender! Overall, I think this is a really cool concept and well executed for a game jam game.
Infernal Engine Defender is about a train built to kill demons, what more needs to be said? Well, for starters, I think it’s clear we need more train games. The game plays like a tower defense game, where each round there are waves of enemies that must be killed before destroying a critical objective on the map. Between rounds, you are able to buy “troops” which get attached to your train to help kill more enemies faster - and that is where the twist lies. Unlike your typical Bloons TD, your “placed towers” are part of your carriage and therefore the towers are as mobile as your train is.
Between missions you get a vague “rogue-iness” to it in that whatever towers you can buy are randomly selected. I actually find this mechanic at odds with the design of the game. It’s the only place that randomness really impacts decision making and overall gameplay, and all it does is lead to unnecessary shuffling of the many cards you can select from - which, unlike your typical rogue-lite game with a “pick 1 of 3” system, you get to pick as many as you want from 5 (of course, each card costs money, so you gotta have the dosh to pay for the card) and you can spend a measly 5 gold to reshuffle the cards.. I think overall, this system doesn’t really do the game any favors. If it stuck with a more tried and true upgrade system found in many other tower defense games, I feel like that would work better for the game. If the player were presented with all of the possible upgrades they could pay for and then have to make a decision on what is best for their train, I think it would make for more interesting decision making. Otherwise, I would just remove the reshuffle option (but if you do that, the engine upgrades should be able to be purchased at any time, such as the acceleration, braking, and carriage length)
What I would really like to see is something like this, where the infernal engine travels the 7 circles of hell to bring the fight straight to the demon lord Satan himself. Just wishful thinking, but I definitely think we need more train games that accentuate what trains are for: traveling distances, near and far. I want to feel that feeling of traveling miles and miles away from home (while killing hordes of demons).
Either way, if the dev is considering expanding Infernal Engine into a full game, I’d certainly be interested to see how this game jam concept is expanded upon. Otherwise, it’s a nice little time waster, like the ol’ days of New Grounds and flash games.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Thanks for the reply. I'm always glad to see devs receptive to feedback.
I appreciate you clarifying a few things. I'd still argue that the pop up for the 9999 damage is misleading; like a cheap pair of headphones with a sticker on the box saying "Professional Quality!"
Anyways, the stream isn't considered definitive - that's what the written review is for - since during my streams there is usually heavy drinking and it's usually late at night for me so my brain is nothing but soup.
Hey there,
I streamed this game! Overall, it’s a master at crafting a vibe, but it’s also a master at feeling obtuse and unwelcoming to the player.
From Beyond the End of End (which is a mouthful, so if I reference the name, I’ll just call it “of End”) starts by opening lots of questions to the player, with plenty of proper nouns with lots of Strange Capitalization of Random words so you know those things are probably important or something. But that doesn’t matter, what you do know, as the player, is that this is a pretty cool looking world.
Unfortunately as the player enamored by all that glitter you were blind to the fact that “of End”’s obtuse title menu is a sign, signaling the it’s unwelcoming nature; the title menu hiding it’s options menu in shame gives the humble yet simple quit option a whacky name to obscure how one might exit. The strange capitalization and proper nouns, again a sign signaling the obtuse nature; this story will never be made clear to you.
If you want to understand what is going on: sorry, you’re out of luck. Is this due to the fact that this is a sequel to a game that I never played? Perhaps, it’s hard to say. But considering how often the game just wants to wax poetic with its metaphor and words but never actually say anything meaningful, to me it seems more like a sign that the game just has no interest in involving the player in its story. It will do it’s own thing regardless of how much the player actually wants to enjoy the game, which leads to a rather annoying and frustrating experience.
This type of lack of care for the player’s enjoyment goes further into the UI/UX of the game as well. For example, at one point in the story my screen got another whacky pixelated filter that lowered the resolution of the game. I don’t know why this happened; it could have been scripted, it could have been because I dared to accidentally eat a healing item because the UI design provided little feedback to what my selection and cursor were doing. What I do know about this effect is that for the very first fight in the game I couldn’t read any of my attack commands. I think any game that would harm legibility deliberately should really reconsider how they are portraying their effects.
This UI/UX problem runs deep into the veins of “of End”. You will find some equipment, but this equipment is not equipped in the player’s “equip” menu, but instead another menu entirely unrelated to the player menu. In the player menu, as previously mentioned, there’s little feedback by not having new windows pop up, every action looks like the same action. There is no margin either, so items get crammed all the way to the last pixel available on the space at the very top of the screen. Tutorials don’t exist, but the game will certainly throw state names at the player and just tell you to figure it out yourself.
This comes to a head when the design of the levels have no sense of flow; there is no clear common path to travel as the player. The path forward will be obscured by trees with no indication that the path forward is by traveling through those trees.
I would love to go into more detail about the music, since this is my area of expertise, but this review is plenty long. I think it’s important to make the point that this game has the potential, but it’s got a lot of cleaning up to do. As it is now, I am certain I am not the only player who tried playing “of End” and felt like the game’s indifference to me (as its player) was frustrating and unwelcoming and therefore just peaced out. It really feels like a game that was made for one person and one person only: the developer. He would be the one to know the non-existent game manual front-to-back, he would be the one to know the non-existent lore compendium inside and out, he would be the one to know how to navigate the world, operate the menus blind, and take advantage of the strategies that lie within the game. However, it seems like us plebeians who are not the dev cannot partake in this fun.
I hope that the dev will work hard to clean this game up, as its ability to establish a vibe is on point and if things were more approachable, I could see this being a great game to get lost in.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hey there,
I streamed your game. Overall I feel like this game has some potential, but really lacks a lot of polish.
Denko Chaser jumps right into the story with our protagonist pursuing a space pirate or something. However, the lack of polish already begin to rear its ugly head as our main protagonist guy is either too dense to know who the target they are there to capture is or this law enforcement agency is really poor at being a law enforcement agency, as our main protagonist guy doesn’t even know the gender of the person they are there to capture. There are a lot of things I can suspend my disbelief on, for example, the main protagonist guy having the authority to break formation, ignore orders from his superior, and go about his merry way on his own. Just anime things, you know? However, it seems strangely daft of this protagonist man to not know what the target looks like.
However, just like how the game just jumps right into the story, it also just jumps right into gameplay. This is a good thing. I cannot recall the number of times I found myself sinking deeper into my chair in complete boredom as Indie Dev #1,153,067 over indulges in a long intro filled with nothing of interest. So the fact that Denko Chaser can just get right to the meat and potatoes is a huge boon for the game. However, there are definitely balancing problems here; not in the sense that things are too difficult, but in the way of optimal strategies due to poorly considered numbers. But I am getting ahead of myself.
The game really likes to do text-dump tutorials and hopes that is good enough for players to figure it out. These text tutorials are usually out of context of when that information is needed. (For example, giving battle information when a battle isn’t currently active). This leads to a disconnect in the learning. I would also advise the dev on considering a “sandbox fight” which would be a fight where the player can comfortably and without worry explore what their kit can do. With a combination of more sensibly placed (and paced) tutorials, along with a sandbox fight, the game would be greatly improved in introducing the player to its combat.
The gear system itself is rather confusing as well, as there are way too many gear slots with way too many abbreviations to make sense of what anything is. You have these pick up single use items that deal damage and are told they do 9999 in a single attack, but they don’t actually deal that amount of damage, they deal rather pitiful amounts of damage; an amount of damage that I suspect will be quickly out-paced by player level.
Which brings me back to the combat; later when you get your other teammates, it becomes pretty apparent how useless TP attacks are; they take at least a total of 2 turns to charge and on the third turn, finally execute for damage barely more than a basic attack. Meanwhile, the magic caster can spend 1 turn charging his MP and charge enough MP to cast his magic attack 4 times, and his magic attack does more than twice the damage of the TP attacks, and more than the consumable damage item that promised 9999 points of damage.
There is a certain “anime” mood that I think it establishes quite well; it’s very assured in the world that it crafts, and it’s that confidence in what it wants to be that is where I see the potential lies. With some clean up in the things I mentioned, I can see some folks really enjoying this game.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Is it worth writing a proper review for a game that effectively equates to a shit post (albeit, a high quality shit post)? Who knows, but I guess my format demands that I do. Just, don't take this review too seriously. I streamed this game.
Pineapple on Pizza is a vibrant game with a a simple yet bright artstyle and a pretty groovy soundtrack (just the 1 track). You can explore the island until your heart's content and once you are content with your heart, you can leap into the volcano and end your life early. (This is of course advice for the game and not advice for real life.)
The game seems to be designed for youtubers to make dump soy faces at in the thumbnail, and I was left waiting for that totally poggers moment to make me soy like my favorite wojacks. The result was simultaneously expected and unexpected. Did it make me soy? Not unless you count me doing a totally poggers soy face as a way to make fun of all of the other soy faces linked in the comments. Was it at least entertaining though? Absolutely. The presentation is pretty great with the game. I was impressed that (again, for a shit post) the dancing animations mostly were in sync with the music. Though there were a few exceptions where I guess the dev just got tired of making a large number of dancing animations move in sync with the music, but I mean...I don't blame him, this was already a lot of effort for a shit post.
The dynamic shift in the music as things began to light on fire really did feel like the party had truly officially started. It really was a nice touching having the music seamlessly transition which again goes back to the strangely high level of quality put into this game.
It concludes rather satisfactorily with a few of the island people getting eaten by sharks. What more can be said?
Well, my frame rate starts to tank once things get set on fire. I guess if this was a game with commercial or more serious prospects that would be something worth investigating, but does it really matter for this game specifically? Probably not.
I give this game a rating of: 0 pineapples outta of pizza.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
As you already know, I streamed your game this past Saturday. Overall, I was actually pretty impressed with Soul Survivor.
Soul Survivor takes some of the best parts of a rogue-lite and puts them into an RPG package reminiscent of early Final Fantasy games with a bit of classic RPGs like DnD thrown in. What I enjoyed most about it was of course all of the natural and interesting choices that come from having to assemble a competent build within the limited and random choices provided to the character, however leveling also continues to provide choices as this game's motif seems to be "choices in 3's", where at each level you can pick 3 perks out of a handful of new options.
The character creation part is also interesting as well, and I think it is also an interesting and unique way of having the character creation lead into the tutorial.
However, the character creation is where some of my complaints begin; albeit all of my complaints are very minor and in no way affect the enjoyment of the game.
Character creation, though provides a helpful tip as to what each stat plays in context of the game, there is no way for players to make a truly informed decision on their first playthrough as to how these stats affect the game and combat as a whole. However, in fairness, since this game is a rogue-lite and is intended to be replayed, I would say this is gets a pass since you will probably be revisiting this character creation menu again soon.
Secondly are another 2 very minor complaints: Each weapon has a skill attached to it. When you find a new weapon it will show a comparison window to help you decide whether you want to replace your current weapon or not. However, it does not provide information about the new weapon's skill, it only tells you the name of the weapon's skill.
And the other complaint being absolutely minor, just a missing bit of polish: Camera scrolling (during cutscenes) uses stilted cardinal directions to scroll. For all of the other polish in this game, it sort of surprises me that Soul Survivor does not use a plugin to allow for diagonal camera scrolling.
Really, this is just a great game and I hope the dev is able to find the success they hope for this game. It's very rare that, out of the many, many games I play on my stream, that I leave a game thinking "I think I want to see more of that..." and yet the developer has achieved that effortlessly with a good idea, a good design philosophy, and the perseverance and commitment to see those 2 elements to completion.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hi,
As you already know, last weekend I streamed your game. Overall, I thought it was a game with some nice attention to detail, but the game play itself was not very engaging.
One thing that can definitely be appreciated going into The Tower is how quick it gets into the game play. There's been a number of games I have played over the past many streams I have done that I spend way too long going through absolutely boring dialogue, sitting in anticipation for the "game to begin". Here, however, The Tower, for the most part, just cuts to the chase. This is always welcomed.
There are small details in the design that are definitely appreciate and go a long way. Despite the game using primarily RTP assets that have been over-played and over used, there is some work such as neat little window animations as well as little water splashes when the player walks in shallow water. There is also a nice attention to the design in the game to help get the player's attention and to encourage them to move off the beaten path.
Upon stepping onto the first floor of the titular Tower, the player will notice an NPC scurry away. Once again, no dialogue, nothing to break the pace of the player. If the player wishes to pursue this NPC they can, or otherwise they can just go about their merry business. This little anomaly inside such a "forelorn" tower really works well at catching player's interest and is a nice design touch.
Things begin to fall apart for the game when it comes to the combat. There is a basic idea beyond the simple turn-based formula RPG Maker is known for, but it's not much more than that. With a magic system similar to TP, players gain "SP" by performing attacks, and can use SP by using magic abilities. However, for the most part it didn't seem to have much to encourage diverse and well considered actions from the player. It seemed easy enough for player's to just hold down the ENTER key and let the auto-attack sweep the field.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
Last weekend I streamed your game. Overall, it's got good legs for a game jam game but is definitely lacking some sort of hook to keep it fresh and appealing.
Although Ascentower started out as a game jam game, it definitely seems well polished at the point it is now, with randomly generated levels, turn based combat that seemed to have a lot of thought put behind skill combos and synergies, any-time-free-of-charge class changing, and some hit-or-miss humor.
The randomly generated levels is an interesting concept, though I wonder what it contributes to the game. The illusion was pretty quickly broken as I watched at each map transition the game "load" the layout. The maps are all fairly similar to each other and seemingly the only changes that may occur due to randomness are the pots, enemies, and some environmental flavor being added in. However, beyond that, it doesn't really change the game up, it doesn't really keep the player on their toes, and ultimately begs the question as to why it is there.
When it comes to the combat, it seems like the most was made out of the tried-and-true turn-based combat. While being able to change classes any time outside of combat is an interesting idea, again, it doesn't seem to offer much in the way of depth to the game. It is certainly possible my soup-for-brains may have missed potential synergies between classes, but for what I could tell during my experience with the game was that classes only had skill synergies within them, but those synergies never amounted to anything for your teammates. If this were to be expanded upon more, I really think it would be interesting to add more classes without the dev focusing on synergies, and instead allow the player to theory craft their own synergies amongst a slew of available classes.
The final major note I want to hit on is the music. The sound choice for music used is pretty rockin', but it's relentlessness in rockin' out can begin to feel fatiguing quite quickly. A few silent moments would go a long way on reducing fatigue.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
Last week I played your game on stream. Overall, I thought it was fairly mediocre with a sudden jump in difficulty.
Eternal Tale features some nice attention to detail to maintain the "lost NES game" aesthetic, such as making some screen wipes/fades have a limited number of fades.
I think one of the biggest problems with this game is how wordy it is. It took far too long before I felt like I had been finally set loose on my adventure to save the princess. It feel like everyone just had too much to say when things could have been cut back a lot fewer words and sentences.
There is a funny dichotomy between this game and the game I had played just before, as both games present themselves as "lost NES games", both use the same asset pack, but the game before had so much more interesting content and got to it faster. From the very beginning the player is able to make compelling choices: the gender of their character, the class they play as, and they even have starting cash with a variety of weapons to equip allowing the player to decide what weapon will suit them and their class best. Exploration was rewarded well which meant all of these small little choices the player could make lead to a more compelling version of Eternal Tale, and I wish it was Eternal Tale that followed a similar formula, instead of spending long amounts of time talking, and railroading the player through the decisions they could make.
While talking about the previous game: I want to give the dev of Eternal Tale the same feedback I shared with the dev of the other game: this asset pack seems to have become quite popular as a number of games are using this asset pack. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, other than the fact that it only serves to detract from your game's originality. If one lacks the artistic ability to make wholly original assets, then I at least recommend taking the assets you purchased and spending some time in a photo editor to edit the assets to be unique to your game, such as adjusting the color profile or rearranging details on some tiles, merging tiles with different sheets, etc.
The game also unfortunately lacks WASD keyboard in put. There are a variety of keyboard config plugins that are free and take less than a minute to set up in a project. There is rarely an excuse to not include basic key-rebinding so that players can play the game with the controls they are most comfortable using.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
This past weekend I streamed your game. Overall, I actually thought it was a pretty enjoyable game.
By far the biggest strength of Exony is it's no-nonsense approach to storytelling (quite literally) as it does away with back story, the set up to the story is brief (almost to parody), and has the player set off on their adventure in no time.
I think the biggest flaw with the game is some whacky balancing problems. Where, for example, one of the first fights I encountered seemed easy enough, then the next fight I am getting hit with a poison state that ticks more damage per turn than any other attack the enemies have. It's not the worst balancing I have seen, but for an intro enemy it can feel quite punishing.
On that note, I realize the game - according to the store page - sells itself as a difficult JRPG. Based on the little bit I played on stream, I actually feel like that is not a very accurate description, though that is probably for the best. The game doesn't seem to take itself too seriously and overall has a pretty light-hearted mood, so brooding challenge would be antithetical to the established atmosphere of the game.
One thing I didn't bring up during the stream is the unfortunate use of this asset pack. At the time, when I played the game, I was unaware that the art was from an asset pack which made me see the game in a more positive light. Ironically, the very next game I played on stream used the same asset pack. Then I see someone in this very comment section linked to another game using the same asset pack. While it's not the death of the game (my very own game in development uses a commonly used asset pack) it does detract from the game. Using asset packs as a base is understandable, especially if one lacks the artistic abilities to make their own art, but I think taking the time to adjust, edit, or recolor the assets to make things feel more unique to this game could go a long way.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
I always appreciate devs taking the feedback in strides rather than trying to start a fight, so thank you. In my opinion, if there are things you can fix quickly with this game: then do it. But the best step is to learn from the mistakes and apply what you have learned in your next great masterpiece. I hope to see it soon 😉
Hello,
Last weekend I streamed your game. Overall I found it to be a frustrating game.
Crimson Hope captured my attention when I was browsing for games to stream due to it's striking artstyle. If there is one thing that is done well in this game, it is most certainly the art (even if the black-and-white aesthetic has been done to death in the indie space). The wavy backgrounds were also cool.
Additionally, I was thankful the game gets the player to the main game quickly - at least when compared to many of the games I have played in the past.
However, the game itself is just frustrating and unfun. My experience with the game began wondering fairly aimlessly through the forest. One of the things I noticed right away is that enemies hit hard and right at the beginning are applying status effects that are punishing and impossible to remove due to limited resources. This discouraged me from fighting. That is, until I came across a boss. Now, because I had avoided fighting due to the punishing nature of it, I was under-leveled which required grinding, except grinding became a chore due to the aforementioned status effect. This resulted in me fighting a single enemy, that enemy would ALWAYS apply poison, so then I would be forced to turn back around, change map, save (to remove the the status and heal), then go back to the map where the enemy has respawned, creating an endless cycle of kill, heal, kill, heal, kill heal. (Side note, if I am going to have to grind like this, it would be nice if the save stones would heal the player regardless of whether they save or not.)
Once I defeated the boss from grinding, I also found out; well, I'm what I would call "soft" soft-locked. Not actually soft-locked, but due to a difficult barrier in the way, I might as well be considered soft-locked. The enemy ALWAYS cast poison first, so if I bumped into it would poison me. The poison state does way too much damage, making any future fights likely end prematurely, so the best course of action was to return to the save, heal, and try again.
Overall, this felt like it might not have been play tested well enough. The game was not fun, nor scary since constantly grinding and face-rolling the "scary" enemies takes any tension out of the atmosphere.
I would watch out for putting "bull-shit" into you game, even if the "intent" is to create tension, it can also lead to annoying your players.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
edit:
I want to make a small edit here to talk about the music since you brought it up in your bullet points: Overall, it's actually not too bad, but the mixing is a little bit on the basic side of things. It's hard to say for certain, but it seems like you may be using a basic tool for the job. I think you might be able to blossom into writing very capable music if you took the time to migrate to a more capable software. I grew up using Mixcraft but I can't really recommend it due to how buggy it is, so I personally recommend Reaper. It's not very user friendly, but if you can get past it's clunky UI it's incredibly powerful (and cheap! and has a generous trial period!)
Hello,
This past weekend I streamed your game. Overall I found it to be a bit of a confusing mess of a game.
Jesse The Fisher has rather lovely artwork and is definitely the best part of the game. The small animations attached to the various "fish" are definitely enjoyable to see. Black and White art styles generally tend to be pretty captivating (despite being rather over-done in the indie space).
However, things begin to fall apart from nearly the beginning when there is quite a lot of unnecessary dialogue that really bogs down any interest in the story and characters, the fact that many questions get answered right out of the gate as well sort of removes any curiosity that may exist in the story.
Moving into the combat, unless I missed a vital tutorial, things are explained poorly and there is very little feedback given to the player when the fish is ready to be "captured". In fact, by far this was one of the most frustrating aspects of this game, as some fish I could throw some bait and capture them in the span of 2 turns, meanwhile other fish I used every "skill" 2 or more times and still the fish wouldn't be captured. Things felt obtuse and as a result incredibly unfun to play.
I think there is a lot of potential in this concept if the writing itself was tightened up, if a proper tutorial was added that explained the concept clearly, and likely necessary feedback to tell the player when the fish is ready to be captured.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
As you already know, I streamed your game last weekend. Overall, I think the game has a lot of work to do before it's ready for the big time.
I enjoy the custom artwork that has been done in this game, which helps it stand out from a lot of the fair that I play. There's clearly been love and care put into the game, and the tactical combat is a treat.
However, the balancing seems really poor. For a game that presents itself rather light-heartedly, it's rather unforgiving. It was a real kick to the nuts when I was able to fail the tutorial and the game just goes on without me. This has a few problems: 1) It really sets a bad precedent of what to expect ahead, really lowering my motivation. 2) It doesn't give players a chance to explore and experiment with your game.
The current design philosophy behind the fights is the reason why the tutorial killed me, and killed me quite swiftly: The monsters have low health pools and deal high-damage skills leading to a low time to kill.
Ultimately this leads to cheese strategies of huddling all of your monsters into a tight group and waiting for the rather dumb AI to slowly make its way over to your group.
I don't know if later in the game enemy attacks/skills force the player into using different strategies, but my main point is that it is a real shame that the very first fights you are able to do require the player to huddle into a group instead of trying to think strategically.
I hope with time this game will improve and become a real winner, but as it is now, it definitely needs a lot more time in the oven.
obligatory copy-paste:
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
Thank you for releasing such a fun game for free. Last night I streamed your game. Overall, I thought it was pretty fun, but at times kind of awkward to control.
This game strangely reminds me of one of those New Grounds/Miniclip finds that one might stumble across back in the day. Were I a high-schooler trying to pass my studyhall time away by procrastinating on my studies, this would have been a great game.
For a free game, the presentation is pretty nice with some nice art to open the game up with.
The controls are simple to understand, but are a bit awkward at times. A minor annoyance is the upward combo requires an awkward finger dance of pressing W, mouse click, then Space. Simple, yes, but a bit tough to adjust to. The awkward inertia and floaty jump also make controlling the player character quite tough, when it is already quite tough to just focus on controlling the ball itself. This also leads to frustrating moments where, when the player whiffs a shot, then may go flying past the ball, crest over a hill top and either have to fight the inertia to go up that hill to return to the ball, or potentially be unable to go back, requiring a restart. This can lead to some frustrating restarts. I feel like, in such a fast-paced game, a single whiffed shot is already punishment enough, having a bunch of time wasted having to clamber up a hillside just leads to frustration.
Similarly, some of the "puzzle" like elements begin to detract from what I think this game does best: comboing hits together and moving fast. If there ever were an "extended" version of this game, I think having "speed run" levels and "puzzle levels" be separate things entirely, instead of a frustrating frankenstein mash of the two together.
Regardless, this was a fun, short game that I enjoyed playing on stream! (The music could use some work though...I wound up having to replace the game's soundtrack with the soundtrack for my own upcoming game.)
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
What if it was Harvest Moon, but you are Harold who has fought thousands, possibly millions of monsters and world-ending threats, but now you're stuck on a farm milking cows and pluckin' raddishes and the boredom of farm live is slowly driving Harold insane.
That's not this game, but that's the game I want to play.
This past weekend I played this game on my stream.
Overall, it seems to be the quintessential RPG Maker game, flaws and all.
The game begins with a seemingly thoughtful inclusion of a "I'm not sure" option when asked to set your difficulty for the game...except, it does nothing. It doesn't act as an option to explain the difficulty options, it doesn't do anything intelligent to check the player's competency to set the skill level appropriately, it doesn't do anything. It seems to merely act as a "Button-Mash Prevention" system. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with it other than just being typical weird RM jank. It wasn't well considered or well thought out, it just exists as a hack to stop players from making an incorrect selection.
This type of weird RM jank just runs through the blood of the game.
Dialogue uses *asterisk* uwu *asterisk* text to pantomime actor's actions, rather than taking the time to draw different expressions for their bust art or to animate the sprites to convey the action.
After experiencing the dialogue, you'll find that you have 5 party members to start. I suppose I appreciate cutting right to the chase, but it makes it rather difficult to get to grips with each party member's strengths and weakness and find their role within combat. It's a lot of information to juggle right at the start. None of this is aided by the fact that there is no tutorial for the combat. Though, honestly, perhaps the developers felt it wasn't necessary since it seems to use a barely-modified default RM combat system. Skills have basically moon-runes as their description that mean nothing to the new player, so not only is there a missing tutorial, but just trying to use the information provided via the system is utterly alienating to anyone unfamiliar with whatever the devs were thinking.
Finally, as with many RM games, there are a ton of inconsistencies within the game's own logic. For example: At one point you're told not to go near the cracks in the floor because they are dangerous (as an aside; this serves no purpose for the game - the cracks don't deal damage or anything). However, later, you encounter an obstacle: a crack in the ground. The solution? Jump over it, of course. However, there are tons of cracks on the ground throughout the entire game, but those are impassable tiles, you cannot jump over them.
At one point, the characters panic "Oh no! These boulders are in the way!" and the main character says, "NP, I can punch'em to death". Was this tutorializing that you can clear boulders that are in your way? No, of course not. Outside of this cutscene, that interaction means nothing. Any boulders you come across while playing cannot be interacted with and they will just impede your path.
I think some of this stuff would be pretty easy to overlook were it not for the fact that this game is a commercial game, with some weird business practices around distribution. Speaking of inconsistencies: their website seems like a scam when you can buy the game not on sale for half the price on Steam or Itch, but if you buy it from their website you have to pay double. It's just such a weird decision since it seems like the core player base for these games are people who are familiar with this company and the games they make, meaning the people who are most likely to check their website. So it almost looks like they are taking advantage of their biggest fans by charging them the most money for the game.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game. Prior to playing the game I also did a deep dive into the company's website and business practices. That portion of the video can also be found in the timestamps.
Hello,
Last weekend I played your game on stream. Overall, this is definitely not my kind of game as I found the combat to be a bit dull and perhaps an overcorrection on the difficulty of the game, though I will admit that I see the potential in this game for others who might enjoy this type of game.
What caught my attention with this game was the art itself. The art is pretty striking and is very well made.
However, after reading the store page about the game being difficult, the first impression of the game was...that it isn't difficult, so it feels somewhat misleading. I never played the original version of this game, but it makes me wonder if the pendulum has swung too far the opposite direction instead of finding a happy balance in the middle. Of course, that was for the majority of the game until I reached one boss. Suddenly the easy going difficulty curve hit a cliff-face and became frustrating. What exemplified this frustration was constantly being kicked back to the menu, having to reload the save, and then watch the same cutscene (made worse by my poor decision to select the dab mode - really wish a description could have been included as to what that is in the game itself since I didn't see your description of it on the store page until just now coming to write this review). I really, really urge you that if your game rule is that "spikes don't kill you in one hit" that you follow that rule for everything. Make sure your rules are consistent. I noticed in a comment below you said "except for one boss". There really should be no exception for this rule whatsoever.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hello,
This past weekend I streamed your game. Overall, I can understand why this game was cancelled (but I hope that doesn't mean you will give up on game dev)
What caught my attention with this game was the art. I thought the character designs were cute and the edits made to common tilesets looked very nice.
There were obvious flaws that make sense given that this was suppose to be (one of) your first games in the engine, such as transition events not making sense and lacking the "if player is facing..." conditional. (It's on page 3 when adding a conditional, by the way).
There is definitely a lot to learn about the engine, despite any perception around it that it is a limited game engine. I know I am still learning and by no means consider myself a pro at using it. I hope that you will continue to make games in the future!
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
Hey again!
Great to have you help clarify more points for me.
It sounds like you may have taken this stream rather personally. I'm sorry to hear that. Before continuing this discussion, I would just like to know if you are responding on the developer's behalf, part of the development team, or if you are responding on your own accord?
I'm always careful to ensure I represent the games I play accurately. My review was made in fairness, and if the developer feels I have misrepresented their game, I will gladly issue a correction in my next stream.
Take care of yourself!
Hey!
It's great to hear that the Lonely League has such passionate fans.
I've been a PC gamer for my entire life, growing up on Roller Coaster Tycoon, Start Craft Brood War, and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 & 4. Tactics games use to be one of my favorite genres, but admittedly over the past decade or so I burnt myself out on them. I'll be the first to admit I am not the best at them, just something I enjoy, so I definitely appreciate you helping me understand where I went wrong so that I can improve my gameplay should I decide to return to this game in the future.
I do appreciate you taking the time to tell me what engine the game was developed in. Though I do stream games built in a variety of engines, the main focus of my streams is to help other RPG Maker developers with their own game, so I often pick out a few RPG Maker games to stream.
As an RPG Maker developer myself, there does tend to be a misconception that it is impossible to add options to the game, however that is untrue. The game I am currently developing contains a plethora of accessibility and difficulty options that can easily be adjusted to tailor the game to the player's preference. RPG Dev's would be mindful to include plugins from Yanfly, such as Options Core (which makes adding options a breeze) and Keyboard Config (which will add rebindable keys)
Most RPG Maker devs often don't include options simply because the engine itself is designed with archaic design choices that do make adding options more difficult, but it is by no means impossible. At the very least, however, you have to go out of your way to out-right remove the engine's default options of: Always Dash, Command Remember, and audio sliders for BGM, SFX, and Menu UI. The reason I encourage developers to include tutorials and options is so they can foster and even wider range of passionate fans like yourself. It can be a little bit un-inclusive if the game is uncomfortable to play or difficult to understand. I am certain - just like any developer - he likely wants as many people to enjoy his game as possible, so it only serves to benefit this game and anyone who enjoys it by making the game accessible to the widest audience possible.
Take care of yourself, and keep fighting the good fight!
Thanks for replying. I also wanted to inform you that it was brought to my attention that you used the POP Horror Tilesets in your game. Since your game currently lacks any sort of file encryption (even if RM encryption is easy to crack) you are still effectively enabling piracy of the tileset by distributing a commercial product freely with your game. Personally, I don't care, but it could land you in hot water (sort of like everything else in this game). I would recommend using file encryption right away. You are already playing with fire with the excessive use of copyrighted IP, let's not also play with gasoline while while we are at it.
