PC spec’s
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800x (Stock Feq)
- RAM: 16GB DDR4 @ 3200Mhz
- GPU: AMD MSI R9 380 4GB
- Played at 1080p
I didn’t get to complete the game as I got stuck in the hospital level. So feedback is limited to those 2 area’s.
A TL:DW of my thoughts & some suggestions from the video above, this is gonna be a long list still, but I’m being honest on what the good bits were & I felt was missing or wrong with the game, so take this as a list to possibly work upon for the release build xD
Menu
- Laggy load of menu (probs the 3D scene bits), its best to hide the menu UI & all behind a black screen until its ready to avoid such an issue. If not then split the menu scene into multiple scenes and load them it bits instead of all at once.
- Controls on menu not clear to which is which, UI would be better in a traditional list style
- It was unclear which keyboard keys controlled which actions, notably journal (which I didn’t open after I first used it, maybe have a use for it? I might have not gotten far enough & flashlight.
- Menu lacked controller support from what I could tell? you can check for this in both old and new Unity input systems I know xD
- No indication a controller was in use?
- Some menu text is blurry (are you using TMP? you should be xD default unity Text is terrible for scalable UI)
- The brightness slider had 0 effect for me as far as I could tell.
- Lack of esc option in all menu screens.
- Loading screens felt a little too frequent and didn't really give much to the player while they waited.
General
- When looking down, the player model lacked moving feet xD I could tell it was sliding around.
- Mouse sensitive was really high by default
- Mouse was visible in cutscenes, use Cursor.visible = false when in cutscenes xD
- Performance was mixed dependant on scenes, I left the FPS counter on so you can see in the video where it got bad for me.
Train Area
- Transition between train & hospital was a little weird in a gameplay/narrative style, I may have missed some story that linked it, but it was a bit of a jarring change of scenery.
- Particles & effects seems to really tank performance? either that or parts of the environment, needs a performance pass really.
- Performance was a bit low for a Unity game, possibly due to my GPU and/or Graphics API in use but it was not great given the hardware.
- The tutorial level took a while to figure out what I was meant to do, a lack of hints meant I was wandering for a while until I figured out the simon says.
- The laptop screen is the train scene was a bit dark compared to the light it was emitting in the environment. Maybe add a emission material / emissive colour to it so the screen brightness matches.
- The game as a whole was very dark, for my budget monitors I could see more of the monitor backlight than the game at the start. A little backlight would help mitigate that a bit.
- Some controls were very odd, the item interactions annoyed me the most as I constantly dropped my flashlight on the ground trying to exit some UI.
- The UI was okay, though I did get some popups stuck.
- Could use some polish to make it fit the theme better
- The dialogue text was okay, but sometimes was hard to read over what the player was looking at
- Dialogue text would be better as a left to right read instead of a centered element in typewriter style.
- Some UI context clues for using the hammer on the hospital door would’ve helped make that part clearer.
- Some backspace text UI had inconsistent line breaks.
- Inventory UI was a little large for the screen,, you could do a 50/50 split, with the slots on the left & the info on the right, giving the items a larger preview for the user to look at. The width between each slot was a bit annoying.
- Voice acting was good for the most part though some characters where better voiced than others.
- The food items in the train felt out of style with the rest of the train assets.
- Might be the art pack used.
- One of the cases on the train was defying the laws of gravity on its side and took me out of the immersion a bit.
- Sound overall was pretty well implemented, though I will touch on this later
- Wire puzzle controls were a little unforgiving, maybe allow a little leeway, if you’re using raycasts maybe have the start/end points be a little larger so they are easier to hit.
- The door puzzle code only showed 3 numbers on the display yet I had to press 4! I think it should show 4 if 4 are needed.
Hospital Area
- The toolbox dialogue said there was a clue on the lid, yet it was on the side of the toolbox xD
- The maybe there is something around here that could break this prompt was annoying and stuck even past the door being opening when I returned to the area, maybe have it not run once the user has passed x point to not confuse them with old prompts.
- The horror was good here, the second jump scare actually got me good xD
- The second room (with the torso’s) got me lost for quite a while, some ways that might help to improve this:
- Item sheens, have items occasionally sheen when the player is near them.
- Larger hitboxes for items, so the user doesn’t have to be fully over the item to select it.
- The torso SFX could be spammed, it was funny but annoying after a while of being stuck.
- The glass on the doors didn’t react like glass, it lacked a lot of the see through it would have from further away.
- The sliding doors just vanish into the walls xD, maybe have a little bit poking out?
- I got stuck in the door puzzle, I though I needed to use the vent with the screwdriver to proceed, but couldn’t figure it out, then threw my items into the vent, which meant I couldn’t get them back as it ate them, so I left it there.
Closing Thoughts
That’s of it, obviously there is more in the video, but I think that’s the most if it xD Overall still a great project and well done for getting it this far xD as getting this far to the point of publishing to the world is an achievement in itself especially with a large team xD I hope this feedback is useful and I’ll happily play the full release as and when it comes out and provide an updated playthrough and feedback.