itch.io

It has been a good while since I played one of the demos but there has been a lot of improvement. The upgrades are a lot more gradual and feel a little better. There is a definite bread crumbs feeling to the level design where you can sort of tell there will be more to do once you have the right tools.

The main menu does have a lot of options on it for them all to be so similar visually. It looked like you had dividers it still felt hard to tell if I was looping through the same options or if they were new ones. Maybe color coding or switching some to sub menus would help.

Your controller support seems to be much smoother since the last time I played a demo. I had zero issues this time and didn't have to fiddle with the controls any.

All in all a lot of improvement and it looks like you are making a lot of progress.

Trying to self destruct for me did not throw an error, but if you did it while the system is off you can't escape the menu and you have to restart.

Love the core mechanic and the character designs and models. 

VFX on attacks, both yours and enemies, would go a long way to making combat more readable and impactful. As it stands you often can't tell when or where an enemy is attacking or if your attacks will hit an enemy. The minions diving in as an atack is cool, but having like, a wooshing highlight over them when they are attacking would give a little more clarity since they mill about a lot.

You have several secret areas, but they are mostly filled with useless items. This doesn't really incentives looking for them. even just having a couple of the minion bar expansions be in the secret  area would make it more interesting.

The writing has a great sense of humor and the drawn animations for the cutscenes add good personality.

There are not enough puzzle/escape room style games that are cute and lighthearted instead of horror Stylization. This is a very cute game that take you on a short journey to learn the rules of this world and escape it. the view controls have a few issues, but otherwise it a well put together game well worth the time to play through.

Very pretty game.

I was not able to get very far. The mouse controls are a lot smoother and easier to work with, but I kept suddenly loosing x axis control. I imagine with an analog stick or more consistent mouse control this would be a lot of fun.

Solid style, solid controls, solid demo.

You have heavily referenced Metroid and take a lot of 'the good stuff' but also taken other scifi influences and they are coming together nicely.

Technical notes:

Hooked it up through steam on a windows machine to try out the steam controller and it is pretty good. Takes a few seconds to detect the controller at startup, and if the controller ever disconnects you have to restart the game to get it back. These are pretty common issues with controllers, so are at worst C bugs.

The diagonal angle fire is a little wonky feeling, but I imagine you get used to it with longer play. You might consider keeping the character facing the same direct when moving and holding an aim button so the player can do some backpedal firing and can also target switches a little better.

Less technical notes:

I am interested in what other elements you plan to include. How much are you planning to diverge from Metroid and what kind of story you plan to tell. (I am not asking you to answer any of that, I am just saying those are the elements that would excite me most about the continued dev on the project)

They are small touches, but the reflections on fluids and the little light enemies go a long way to pull you into the game.

Likewise, starting out with nothing instead of starting out all power armored up feels like a better plot piece. Others have already spoken to progression and it sounds like you have some ideas about it, so I will just note that you have made the first part of the game feel almost more like alien isolation and then you get to build up to being a force of your own. It feels good and has a LOT of potential as an immersive experience and I hope you find the balance you are looking for there.

There are also a lot of teases of lore and you figuring out what has happened to the base. That is an aspect I would love to see leaned into. The little bot at the beginning who gets you started is a beautiful little touch and you have other ones scattered about as well(like what appears to be a corpse of another female who looks very much like you as you flee the first section.)

All and all this project feels like it has a great deal of potential.