I have never been so impressed and disappointed at the same time.... Anastasia (sorry, love that name). Not because the game was bad, actually, the first 3-4 hours I thought it was the most brilliant top-down horror game I ever played, unapologetic with edgy content, fun characters, original art, hilarious references, and so playful with so much location variety, and then everything went to ____ when you decided that 70% of the game needed a plain combat mechanic on top of great game you already had. BTW, did Valve held your game hostage for content checking? Somehow I am not surprised ;), I wonder if they found everything though.
Is it safe to assume the game was somewhat Undertale inspired, or just maybe that Mother mentality in general, not so much in terms of story, obviously the world-building in this game is very different and much darker, but I mean just that meta narrative, player expectations, and things of that nature, with the game being very player focused and highly interactive. For me personally, there were some parts of the game in the first two chapters where I thought it was more clever than Undertale, and I don't mean it in condescending way, honestly I think you were doing those type of interactions and exploration with more thought behind them, particularly design of the locations, having much less of that default RPG look with more things that grabbed your attention, there was almost always something happening or something to look at. Generally speaking I also liked the writing for the most part, sometimes maybe it felt like it had that Undertale imitation to it, but you still did something completely different with the world.
The thing is, the combat in Undertale felt like a seamless part of the experience, if you wanted or not wanted to engage with it. In your game combat felt very forced, and I didn't mind it during the boss fights, more so once you start shooting all the generic slop enemies over and over, and instead of having that awesome horror immersion that you had for several hours, now the game went from being a horror game with memes, to a meme game with horror in it. So essentially my issues with the game mostly started around chapter 3 where most of the generic combat takes place, and don't get me wrong, you still had some fun locations and interesting narrative elements, but it felt like game completely changed the vibes at that point, and I can't help but feel like you destroyed the most enjoyable aspect of the game.
I can also apply the same logic to puzzles and navigation. I felt every puzzle in the first 2 chapters was intuitive and it never felt like it was too obscure to find the quest items, if anything it was very fun to explore. And at chapter 3, now we hiding keys behind some #### trees, now we doing some random fetch quests in the generic dungeons and some random battle arenas, you lost most of the nuance of the careful game design you had up to that point. The narrative, you had a lot of build up for it, the characters were interesting, and I can't say that it improved toward the end, maybe the game went for a bit too long, as silly as that sounds, it seems you could not create enough substance for those 10 some hours, even though the first 4 hours were great.
So up to about the end of the chapter 2, I genuinely thought it was like a 10/10 game, and gradually after that the game started to show cracks in your storytelling skills and perhaps your game design choices. Not that you not capable of greatness, and I can see those amazing aspect of the game in those first 2 chapters, maybe it's just lacking good feedback, perhaps that "subverting expectations" went a little too far this time, feels like you overlooked what was really important in your game, and what the most enjoyable aspect of the game was, which was tension, playful content, good puzzles, and exploration.
[h1] Pros: [/h1]
(+) So what like, hours of original artwork for this type of game? I don't know enough about the tiles and all, but I assume all the character art and animations are unique? But overall the game looked great, you created a ton of unique sets and animations for it, as far as I can tell, more so than most games, even nice little cutscenes, those were very sweet. The locations were fun to navigate and explore, with many little secrets and things that grabbed your attention.
You also just have a very nice art style for pixel art, even the best devs in this genre tend to have less detail overall, or not produce so much animation in general.
(+) Very dark and unapologetic game when it comes to the narrative. Funny enough it reminded me of South Park a little, mostly because of how edgy it was at times (is this game even safe for steaming?) For the most part I think the dialogue and the characters were interesting, there was a lot of nuance to it, even if the pacing was not great toward the end. I thought the horror and comedy were great, in some chapters at least.
Very playful game with constant player interactions and something that catches your attention
(+) The puzzles in the first 2 chapters were both creative and not too obscure, I also like that you would utilize those traditional genre mechanics/ideas without making those sections too long.
(+) $10 normally would be a stretch for a game in this genre, but no, this is a big lady here, plenty of content and effort behind it.
[h1] Feedback: [/h1]
- I didn't like that the combat became such a huge part of the game, hours after not having indication for combat. And it's not even so much combat itself that I dislike, more so what it meant for the game at that point, you had such a great pacing and horror atmosphere, I just felt like the game never got as good after chapter 2
On that note, I would recommend buffing the damage for super-spread gun and penetration gun by about 20% maybe, you made their DPS so low it's honestly easier to use the default gun in just about every situation, even with multiple enemies
- you should remove most of those random box interactions, any curious player will click on everything, and you just have all that random crate lore they will read over and over, maybe keep a few, remove 90% of the empty interactions with them
- for the factory puzzles, I would maybe put a character somewhere there just to remind you a puzzle could utilize multiple floors, as a player sometimes I assume everything related to the puzzle should be in the same location, or just a note or something, it's not like you never broke a wall in this game, remind the player to get the box
- some of the backtracking in the chapter 3/forest feels less intuitive than before, now all of the sudden you must interact with some specific ### character to progress, or find some random key in the forest, maybe again, put a few extra clues there
- the timed room was a little too tight on the timing, without the second dash upgrade your margin for error feels like 2 seconds or something
[b] Overall Thoughts: 8/10 [/b]
You had it Avocado, it was probably the best game in this genre that I played by the end of chapter 2, and I don't know, maybe the whole subversion got the best of you, you were doing much better job with pacing and gameplay prior to introducing the combat. I still think just the effort that you put into this game is undeniable, so there was still a lot to love about the game, it's just a shame you didn't have the foresight to stick to your strength of storytelling and horror. You had a good story and fun characters, but it felt very thin by the time I got to the end, honestly it could have been a shorter game with no combat, and I think it would be a lot better.
[code]Niche, obscure and underrated games: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]
