Oh nooooooo! I was so looking forward to playing this since narrative stuff is my jam, but when I hit play it pops up with a fatal error on the page saying "No valid storage adapters were found".
Wow, I love this so much. Legit, if it were a touch and more polished I'd spend money on it. I wasn't able to fully beat it and see everything since it's really hard to spell Frederick backwards with the evil hand interfering, and that seems to be necessary for completion. But I deeply enjoyed what I did play, the presentation was wonderful and the highly branching narrative is exactly my personal jam.
Oh, yeah I definitely still had fun. Also I guess I didn't mention, but the art is so cute! It's delightful. I might take a second go at it, and if I do I'll grab my mouse for it for sure.
Very nice, a delightful take on the prompt! And congrats on getting Voice Acting!
Gameplay-wise, I don't really understand the boxes with arrows on them, and level 6 is where I got stuck, but was having a good time with it.
I do think there's a slight dissonance between the theme and mechanics by letting the player control the King slightly with the shoot button. I'd be interested to see if there would be a way to have the King shoot automatically. Some of the levels and mechanics would need to be adjusted, but you could then make up for it by adding time pressure with a ticking clock on when the King takes his shot!
Very nice level of polish! I am so grateful for the volume options, and love that the time was taken to make the UI fit the rest of the game visuals. Boxbear showing up when I only had a sliver left of health was delightfully terrifying.
Controls were kind of janky, though that might be partially due to playing on a laptop with a trackpad. The mouse buttons felt like they weren't responsive, especially for the scratch attack.
It's fun to play once you figure it out, and everything looks very nice, though from a concept standpoint it's kinda jarring on a meta level that you're trying to get rid of the cursors when the only input method for the game is your own computer's mouse/cursor. I think it would make a lot more sense if it was button controlled or something.
The gameplay loop is quite enjoyable to me, though I think it needs some balancing tweaks. Played it a bunch of times, and no matter what I do it always ends with one of the crew mates getting to level 15. Even if they're at a major disadvantage, the players almost always succeed if they're level 13 or 14, and the level 1 and 2 crewmates die a lot even if they're at a major advantage, so I think the impact of level on success might be a bit too much. As it stands, I can't send out lowbies to level up a bit while I wait for the perfect opportunity to take out the highbies.
Also, very minor detail but the "Player" and "CPU" UI elements at the top are confusing. They don't seem to do anything, and they show characters that are crew members. I'm guessing they're artifacts from a shift of development plans?
Very cute, but the tutorial text was completely illegible to me and I couldn't figure out how the forms in the second level worked. I think they could wall jump? But I couldn't get it to work consistently, and whenever I tried to use the ability it seemed like nothing happened. I'm generally garbage at twitchy platformers though, so there might be a confounding skill issue here.
The gameplay loop was simple, but sensible and enjoyable in a relaxing way.
Bummed that every time I play, an adventurer winds up freezing in front of my counter and causing adventurers to stop coming, because I really wanna see if anything happens when you get all the items.
Also, as some other folks mentioned, the balance is off such that spamming "How can I help you?" doesn't cause any issues aside from the one time a second person wanted to spend the night and couldn't. Again, that gameplay felt soothing to me though, so it just became a puzzle of how to get the quest items. Hence trying after softlock hit multiple times.
Absolutely delightful, experiencing the player come at it from different angles. Enjoyed it so much that I played a second time and let the poor guy take me to 0 health. I wish there had been an alternative ending for doing that, but all in all very fun.
