Downwell

Got it for 74 cents and it was the best 74 cents I ever spent super fun and I could see sinking 100 more hours into this game.

One of my favorite games! Great visuals, music, sounds, and overall game/mechanics/level design. It's basically 10/10, nearly... After playing the game for so long, there are some things I think about, perhaps it's over-thinking. Spoilers for the game I supposed below. I finally completed hard mode, I had to use levitating style, but hard mode also punishes it. Everything but standard style has downsides, except standard falls a bit too fast, levitating is almost a bit too slow, the other styles might just be there for fun "extra", but it's one thing about the game that feels a bit off in the balance of the design. Maybe I should just had played with standard style the whole time and gotten better. I could try complete hard mode again with it... So, I'm not sure if the styles and palettes and the whole leveling thing is needed in the game at all, I ended up with 3M gems, way over max. It seems maybe it was made for a convention of games having leveling and "unlocking things", and maybe after programming a cool looking progress bar that goes up with satisfying visuals and sounds it would feel bad to consider cutting it after putting effort into making it (I've felt like that for projects in the past). For the palettes I just left the standard palette, even after trying all of them, they just feel visually annoying to look at besides a few that is mostly just a hue adjustment to the standard red one. There's something about the combo system... Landing long combos can be fun, but the game punishes too long combos. It can become easy to over-combo, and in the limbo stages it's basically mandatory because there are no places to land for long stretches, which might be part of the design to limit getting too strong at the end, but it feels like that's when I needed them more before going up against the boss (in hard mode at least). Maybe this was the design at first, that a 90 combo would be 3 25 combos, so 300 gems, 3 charges, and 3 health? Instead it just becomes one and I feel scammed out of combos. It creates a conflicting feeling of long combos being difficult to do so it feels good to pull off long ones, but also it feels bad in a way too because there seems to be no upside to go beyond 25 or even to not land exactly 8, 15, 25. It is a challenge in itself to land those exact combos, that it feels good in a way to "min-max" and not over-combo might've been the design? It's fine that not everything has to have an external reward, it can be fun just for the sake of being fun making a long combo, but even if not having some special or extra upgrade beyond 25 there's an incentive to not keep making a combo. It could be that it's fine in normal mode, but not in hard mode. I mostly ended up playing only hard mode trying to complete it, and in hard mode there are more enemies for longer combos. The combos could almost be 10, 20, 30 in hard mode, and landing 50 would be 1 hp, 2 charges, 200 gems? Or work differently entirely, combos of 10 is 100 gems, 15 is a charge, 25 is hp. So 50 combo is 500 gems, 2 hp, 3 charges. Combos could have a long multiplier so you would never wanna land, like sustained combo could add additional gems, like every even 5 combo get (5 * combo) gems, or have that be its own exclusive gem bonus, instead of 100 for every 8 or 10 or whatever, since it scales up you can keep going, idk maybe other formulas. Perhaps they also give bonuses as you go without landing, maybe that would just be a "the floor is lava" mode then? Maybe a fun mod idea xD? I also wonder how the game could be different without gems at all, so it would have most focus on being in the flow of landing combos and shooting enemies/obstacles, or just avoiding damage, and making long combos of course, I don't find the collecting of gems is really something I really care for. Maybe even combos and the upgrades in the rooms can be the only way to get upgrades. But the shop is cute... maybe it could still exist but for trading some item instead of the gem piles? Some powerups would have no reason to exists then also, so I don't know... maybe the gemhigh could just be a combohigh? What do I know what was tried in the designing of the game though... this could have all been tested in variations to find what ended up in the game was best. I'll have to put the ideas in my games I guess! xD Anyway, after that It may seem like I don't like the game but I still love it how it is, If I didn't like it I wouldn't play it so much to cause me to think so much about it.

The game is called Downwell and lets just say... it doesnt go down well.

Очень прикольный рогалик нишевый так сказать

I suck at it, but it's dope.

its a cool little game, to kill time.