DISLIKED: It's apparent that the scope of this game was a bit too large for a jam. I kept running into glitches that halted my progress or trapped me in doorways, I can appreciate having a grand vision and know that there is only so much debugging you can do, but I ran into them so early and often that it left a bad taste.
The combat was also somewhat confusing, I'm still not sure what Floundering does. I also suggest adding in an enemy damage animation next time, it would just make hitting that perfect melee attack a lot more satisfying.
This isn't to do with the game, but I'm not sure how closely it relates to this jam in particular.
LIKED: Atmosphere and Graphics were great, the enemy sprites in particular were very creepy, I love it. The story was also engaging,
OVERALL: It looks and sounds nice, but a lot of things are holding it back. I strongly suggest sticking with this project and polishing it after this jam concludes, this has potential!
Thanks for the feedback! There were a lot of things that I wanted to fix/add so I'll 100% look into a health system, but with the way the game is set up, I think the false sense of security that gets set up is really effective. But I'll experiment!
Thanks for the feedback! I'm gonna fix some stuff up after the voting process was over and was thinking about adding in a sprint feature, I'll do that most likely.
There's a lot that could be improved: - An indicator when you run out of ammo would've been great. - When I spent "100" points to upgrade my attack, it took 400 points, maybe look into that - The music felt a bit repetitive - The UI was way too fuzzy
Takes a while to load, dunno if that's Godot's fault though.
There just wasn't very much to it, the gameplay felt a lot like cookie clicker, except I had to aim.
Some improvements you could make if you choose to work on this more:
- Some audio or visual feedback whenever you dig a little would help a lot - Some layers of audio ambience like heartbeats or droning noises would really add to the tension, like adding them in whenever the "keep digging" messages pop up. - The giant walls around the environment sort of break the immersion, get rid of them if possible.
Even following the instructions in your game's description, I still needed to figure some stuff out. What each ghost wanted should've been placed somewhere more obvious, not directly on top or behind it, it was very hard to see without squinting. I also did not like how you had to be on the perfect pixel in order to turn into a different path.
Once I got started and figured stuff out it was a fun, pac-man esque challenge, however the first few tries soured the experience for me.
I acknowledge that life got in the way for your team and I'm happy you submitted something, that takes guts, but as the game is I can't rate it too highly.
Disliked: There was no clear visual indication that you had to wait for the sprint bar to fully recharge before you could sprint again, it made me feel a little cheated when I died to the monster when I felt like I could sprint more. The respawn points are inconsistent at times as well, sometimes when I died I would respawn at the village/cave entry, other times I would be booted back to the start. The monster also didn't look that scary, if you took away the audio, then it would look a little goofy, one of the strengths of retro graphics is you can be a lot more creative without having to rely on realism, so play into that!
Liked: The atmosphere was a stand-out for me. The use of sounds was top-notch, I was a particular fan of how the heart-beat got louder and more distorted the closer the monsters got. Limited visibility is also a plus in games like these, I got super lost and kept going in circles around that cave. Claustrophobia was real! I also liked how you rewarded exploration around the village with a map of the cave, it's a nice little touch. The retro PS1 graphics are also great for horror games.
Overall: A little rough around the edges, but overall a solid horror game. I'm not sure how well it fits into this Jam's theme (Graveyard Secrets) but the cave was like a grave for those soliders, so I'll let it slide!
