Dragon Fin Soup

I was [b]really[/b] excited for this game, and followed the development for a while. I just can't recommend the game, though. I love roguelikes and have played a number of them (Caves of Qud, ToME, DCSS, etc.), and this game isn't nearly as fun as any of those. The controls are akward, the UI is clunky, the missions are boring, and it's hard to even see what is going on. I gave it a shot, and was sorely disappointed. EDIT: Developer responded, apparently they have updated the game. I won't be playing it, though as I was turned off by the initial release and refunded the game. Hopefully the kinks were worked out and the game is as good as it seemed it was going to be prerelease. Cheers.

Sadly I will have to give this title a "thumb down". As we know amazing art assets does not create an amazing experience. I can see a lot of poor decision that the dev team made for convinience( like given more ephasis to the portability of the product) by sacrificing game experience itself. -Front Ortho-cam is rather unefficient to handle multiple overlaying scene objects that are more than one square unit tall. -No key shortcuts or key remaping options (after all you dont use keys on a tablet or phone right?). -There is a lack of user feedback and tons of redability problems. That said the art would be the only thing that could justify the current price. If you are not art an art oriented person I would suggest you to think twice before purchasing this title. =====================Second Edition================== Hello Ash and Grimm Bros Team, It is nice to see that the dev team is willing to improve the current product and hear the customers’ opinions and observations. Since you took the time to take my opinion into account I would be more than happy to provide you a more detailed answer. Before getting into those details I want to express that I’m aware of the complexity that is involved on the creation of any interactive media product and how difficult it is to create an accurate user-product dynamic. I do apologize for my English as well, since it is not my first language. With that said, lets begin with the answer you requested me. USER FEEDBACK RELATED ISSUES: Cut-Scenes: When watching the intro cut scene I saw no “press <input> to skip” kind of message so my first thoughts were that transition between one cut scene image and the other one was automatic. Then the dialog stopped and it didn’t advance automatically. Hmmm…maybe I should press a key but which Key? There were no clues to figure out the key that I should press. I wanted to see the intro cut scene so my concern was: “what if I press an input to close or skip the whole cut scene instead of advancing to the next part of the cut scene”. I tried pressing space, enter and a bunch of other keys. But the game wasn’t asking me for a key. It wanted me to perform a click. Too much user-guessing right from the beginning. Game Mini Map: A mini-map’s main functionality is to allow the players to locate themselves on it. That means that you main focal stress on a mini-map should be the convention that represents the player on the map. A yellow pixel on top of equal sized brow pixels are not the best pallet and form choices to achieve this. All the other secondary elements on the mini-map (NPC and items) are more visible than the main character’s location itself. Conventions take a while to figure them out since there is no visible map legend to take a look at. Also it would be nice to be able to see key level features on the minimal like where are the local-zone teleporters located. Party health and stats: Moment to moment feedback of you party member’s is a must have. I can only see my party members’ health-bar briefly when moving from one tile to another one. Why not showing it always to allow the player to take more accurate decision and weight the risks before moving. Key bindings: In the beginning I thought that there were no key shortcuts on this game. Then I read in some forums that apparently there is some key shortcuts but not much information about them. The game should include a control scheme section to be able to see the possible inputs for the user. Also the ESC key functionality could be a little bit more practical. Open main menu and close menus will be a more common setup for this key. Curse Skull Icon: I didn’t notice when it was added to my screen or for what reason. I thought maybe is the time that I have to complete my quest. Then I notice that I ran out of time but I didn’t failed the quest. Then my conclusion was maybe is a period of time in which the undead enemies spawns. But again I was misled to believe that because of the undead iconography. Then I notice that it didn’t appear again. Long story short the 4th time I got cursed was when I realized that that Icon was meant to be the curse duration GUI representation element. Chosen Path for the main character: If you give the players the ability to move by clicking on the ground at least show them which path is the one that the AI is going to choose since the best path decided by the AI is not always the path that the player has in mind or would like to take. Moving by clicking is rather risky since the player is not able to forecast which path the AI is going to pick. READABILITY RELATED ISSUES: Overlaying Objects: I can see how important was to create non-square art assets to maintain the overall aesthetic of the game. But, the proportions of the objects combined with the chosen orthogonal perspective create a lot of undesired overlapping. I can see that the current solution allows the player to see the main character through the front objects by reducing the opacity of the last ones but the low opacity is not enough to see the immediate surroundings of the player. It is really difficult to spot obstacles, path and items on dense vegetation areas were a lot of overlapping occurs. Input inconsistency: In terms of inputs there are some dynamics that are natural for the user to expect. One user input equals to one outcome. If the user press the movement key once he or she would be expecting for the character to move one step on the map instead of two. The same can be said on the menu. If the user press the down key to go to the next option it should go down one step not two. Vegetation and Terrain coexistence: The Vegetation and the terrain does not integrate well in terms of creating a clear paths for the player to follow. Sometimes the vegetation can spawn in some places where it would give the impression that the player reached the boundaries of the map but is only an illusion created by the graphic composition on screen. This can be rather annoying if a target or objective is located on an area that is only reachable through that path. This is one of the biggest risks of leaving the level design to a procedural process. It can work very well sometimes but other times it could go really wrong. UI Usability: Trying to open the options menu is rather risky if you miss the button. The icon that brings the in-game main menu has a rather small clickable area and size. If you miss the click your character will walk towards the border of the screen no matter how far it is and how dangerous it is. You could step over several traps or get into undesirable fights. Also it would be nice to be able to close the menus by clicking outside them instead of closing each menu one by one. Once again thank you for hearing my observations and I will look forward to see the evolution process of your product.

As someone who kickstarted DFS, I have to admit that I'm impressed with the game so far. Considering this is Grimm Bros.' first game, it's a lot of fun and has a lot of charm packed into its story. It's got flaws (the UI, the crafting), but roguelike fans should still get a kick out of it. PROS: - Three game modes (Story, Survival, Endless Labyrinth) - Two difficulties (Normal and Hardcore/Permadeath) - Unlockable characters in Endless Labyrinth - Controller support (and it feels great now, thanks to patch) - Pets to collect, up to two in your party - Crafting and fishing systems to play around with (fishing bug has been patched) - The dungeon areas have a lot of little secrets - Devs are listening, taking in feedback, and releasing patches to fix major issues CONS: - Crafting UI is awful. - Menu system needs to be reworked - Not enough information in battle - Dungeons can feel "cluttered" and sometimes tricky to see/escape - A lack of keybindings - Storage space is small SUBJECTIVE: - The game can be difficult as hell (For me, a huge pro) - The aesthetics (bright/vibrant colors!) Having put some time into it, I can definitely recommend this to fans of the roguelike genre. The combat mixes in melee with ranged. Pets provides some tactical advantage since it allows for flanking/backstabbing, and they have leveling independent from your own. You've got a rage meter, magic spells, and a crafting system to play around with. Scattered throughout the dungeons themselves are traps, switches that benefit or harm, rare merchants that sell crazy stuff, switches that create surprises when hit in the right order, and more. And now to clarify some of the cons. Most of these are small gripes. Admittedly, a lack of keybindings does hurt the game, especially since you're forced to navigate the (rather simple) menu in order to access Inventory, Equipment, Magic, etc. Adding keys to individually open up these specific menus would be great, but it's a small issue since the menu is easy enough to navigate. Also, you DO have storage space - but it's not terribly large and you may run out of space fairly quickly. Fellow packrats, be warned. The crafting UI, on the other hand, is just plain bad. Your learned complex recipes (gear and such) are on the left-hand side and this is fine. However, simpler recipes such as creating planks out of raw wood, or the number of zinc required to make an ingot, are absent. Either memorization or documentation is needed for these, unless I'm missing something obvious. Additionally, you can only craft one item at a time. When crafted, it's required to move the finished product out of the "completed" slot before crafting the next one. It's tedious as hell and really needs to be modified. Additionally, the menu doesn't need an Inventory screen. It's redundant when compared to the Equipment screen. Combat, while a lot of fun, also just doesn't give you enough information on your enemies and pets. You can't check individual pet HP, you can't scroll through enemy HP to prioritize them (a problem when in a crowd, since it could be a bit tricky to make out which bar belongs to who). I'm still wrapping my head around terrain bonuses, which would have benefitted from some kind of mouse-over or something. In short, the UI needs love. Lots of it. CLOSING: Overall, I personally feel that the game feels FUN despite its flaws, although (once again) you need to be a fan of roguelikes. This game is *hard.* If you enjoyed Dungeons of Dredmor, Izuna, Shiren the Wanderer, etc. then there's a good chance you'll enjoy what's here. That and the idea of Red Riding Hood traipsing through the woods, cheerfully murdering monsters is an idea that appeals to me. As stated before, this is Grimm Bros.' first game. It's kinda rough, it's by no means perfect, but it's a solid title. I gave the devs my money and put my faith in them, and I've got faith that they'll keep updating/supporting this title by making it shine even more. Patches have already been shoved through the pipeline and they're checking their forums as well as Steam's. Will update this review as necessary. Edit: Added some details on the dungeon-crawling and removed the detail saying that DFS has farming. There is NO farming, I was writing this at 4am and had just finished a surreal dream about Kevin Costner. Also, my biggest cons have been patched, so huzzah! DEFINITELY recommend it now!

I can't comment on anything more than my early impressions which were positive: the game stands apart from other similar games thanks to a slick presentation and very funny dialogue. Unfortunately my playthrough was stopped a couple of hours in due to a progress-stopping bug (this was around a year ago) After checking the forums I found a thread from the devs that promised a new version of the game ("Dragon Fin Soup: Extra Chunky Edition") which would have included a lot of bugfixes as well as much needed gameplay improvements. Trusting that thread I put the game aside, checking back from time to time to see if there were any news. More than a year passed since the last dev posts, so it's safe to say that that promise is not going to be fulfilled and that the game is abandoned to its current state. DFS had a lot of potential but it can't be recommended at this point.

Idea is good, the implementation is not. Pros: + pleasent graphics and animation; + humor in dialogs; Cons: - repetitive boring music; - repetitive boring gameplay: fishing, digging, crafting and at some point fighting are not enjoyable anymore; - weird mechanic: lucky dodges, stats which doesn't tell/explain anything, all same weapons/gear; - poor UI, game is targeting too many platforms and as always PC version suffer: lack of keybindings, partially working hotkeys (you can open inventory with F1, but you can't close it with F1), with mouse is easier to talk to npc, but impossible to combat; - perspective is weird: it's unclear where are obstacles, walls below obscure view; - effects: fog, strange lightning change; - primitive AI. - map: it's half-opaque, hard to see on certain background, maximized map is absolute crap, colors indication is terrible (red enemies and green friends are ok, rest = crap). - bugs: got many UI related bugs, disabling touch-screen will disable mouse lol, most annoying is to get impossible to complete quest; - quest system: poor description and rewards, boring non-skipable dialogs, repetitive random encounters; - balance: digging may yield item for lvl 40 worth 30k, while completing quest rewards with just few coins and worthless items; - fishing: boring, unclear, but with related quests; - crime system: incomplete, unclear and worthless; - no steam ingegration: no cloud, no achievements, not even cards; - magic system is dumb; Game feels shiny at first look, but once you get few levels the woah feelings are gone and you see how incomplete it is and how much polishing it required. Stay away and don't be fooled (as me) by videos, it's boring as hell.

To sum up: It looks good but feels wrong. It feels like a casual game and a bad port and something that could be fun. I hope the devs polish this a lot. The PC release needs to play well on a PC. Let's start with some basic things, controls. Though the devs have stated that the pc is their primary platform, they don't play by longstanding pc conventions. What do you expect 'esc' to do in a game for pc? Nothing? Oh, wait, it exits menus, but does not bring up an options menu with load and save and most importantly - quit?! How about "alt-tab'? In full screen, nothing, nada, zilch. That's not right. In a roguelike, dungeon crawler, rpg, etc, pushing the "i" key should bring you to your inventory. And it should be customisable. These are only a few of the issues. All in all it feels like a bad port made primarily for gamepads or touchscreens. I play with mouse and keyboard and have the option of a touchscreen. Touchscreen is too tedious and not precise enough for the action. Mouse and keyboard are awkward. Moving by mouse click will have you fined your hard earned gold when you accidentally cut down city trees (Protip: some things are worth smashing in town once you have some money to pay for it). Moving by WASD and QEZC for diagonals is much better, with enter for attacking the selected target, though that requires the occasional mouse use to point your character in the right direction. For a game that require precision to survive, the controls don't always allow it. Then there's the camera... Though the difficulty ramps up appropriately for its genre, it doesn't feel very satisfying when you die or lose your comrades to clicking on an iceblock instead of the ghost next to it. The terrain needs to turn transparent at a distance, not when standing directly under/north of/next to it. And it seems that this "feature" is used in the dungeons fairly often to hide treasure and treasure rooms. I found myself playing by the minimap too much, which just can't be right given the work put into the look of the game. And sadly, once you remove that aesthetic, DFS doesn't compare well to other roguelikes out there. The limitiations of the character, the apparent lack of content (linear progression), and the awkward controls really let it down. Oh, and the fishing minigame is broken out of the gate (to be patched soon according to the forums.) The menus UI must be improved. It can easily be slimmed down. There are three, possibly four, screens that could be combined into one. The inventory screen is pointless; it might as well be merged with the equipment screen. The pets screen could be merged too, since your pets are just another item. The other item management screen, crafting, has its own issues - far too many clicks, no recipe automation - and realistically could be merged with inventory too, though that might confuse the already awkward controls. One glaring fault in the crafting menu is no easy transition to equipment. If I make something worthwhile I probably want to put it on as quickly as possible. There is wasted space on the left hand side, why not have my equipment over there so I can try on my new stuff? Or, if that isn't feasible, and I admit it would start to look a bit too cluttered, how about a button that brings me straight to my equipment menu like the one that the redundant inventory menu has? Crafting is dull, awkward (again) and a bit of a grind. When you finally do make something interesting you probably can't use it for some time. I have some cargo pants that must wait to wear because I was half the appropriate level when I made them. Finally putting them together was a genuinely exciting moment. But now I must be very patient. To wear cargo pants... As far as awkward goes, it is far better with mouse than with gamepad. But it can still be imroved. Right click, shift click, alt click, ctrl click,middle click, even double left click could move the ingredient into the crafting station. Instead we right click the ingredient, move the mouse to find the occasionally different location of the move ingredient button, then left click that button. You do this over and over again to level up your abilities to craft something that might be useful. You can slowly drag and drop too, but both of these options are inferior to a simple double or single click. This particular problem has been solved, before. Why are we reinventing the wheel of inventory management with every game? The right click context menu of move, eat, exit menu, and trash is unnecessary and slows every process down. Perhaps it works for gamepads but it's a step backward for the rest of us. A trash can in the corner works fine for the few times you need to use it. I doubt it requires the 25%-33% attention that the right click context menu affords it. And the buttons moving around are just... aweful. On the far right hand side, I have to be very careful not to throw my gear away, because the context menu buttons are suddenly in a different place to account for the side of the screen. And they change based on edibility. There are no takebacks for trashed items. Combine that with the massive amounts of item sorting for successful crafting/ingredient storage = headache. Skills also need improving. They have short descriptions but no NUMBERS! I must open my equipment, look at my wall of numbers, exit to the game, use the skill, open back to my equipment and then compare to see what it did. Why not just tell me in the first place? Once again, this problem has been solved before. The devs say it is not a casual game, but the text only descriptions of skills says something else. Skills are also gained entirely at random, which brings me to leveling. Leveling. This is where it feels most casual. Sometimes I get +1 attack from a level. Sometimes I get +1 in six or seven other areas too. It isn't obvious why this is happening. I assume it is based on what skills you have used. This leads to the following scenario: if you spent a character level (or ten) doing very well and killing enemies before they can damage you, then you won't improve your armor skills, leaving you out of luck later on in the game. Your character doesn't progress in any other way. There are no skill trees, classes, abilities, perks. None of that. You find random skills in crates. For a game with an "adult humor" veneer, that feels very immature in a game design way, not much substance, it starts to veer into a territory that is very shallow, very... casual. Combat is hampered by all of the above. Also, when you heal or find an item or skill, there is a very annoying popup (can i get a popup blocker for this game?) that hangs around for a little too long. It is directly over your character, stopping all action. Put that information to the side where it belongs, color coded to show health and items different from damage rolls. There are also obnoxious popups for leaving areas. If I walk through a doorway I don't want to confirm. If I speak to a vendor I don't want to confirm. All in all, this game seems to have gone through production without quality feedback. Some of these design choices are obviously wrong for the medium. Escape should bring up an options menu so we can quit easily (and seek a refund, perhaps). You don't hide it in a submenu of to the side. Furthermore, game design according to the popup ads industry is a huge annoyance for everyone. Keep things smooth. It all leaves me my scratching my head, and by the length of this review, for clearly too long. That said I am still trying to play it and I am having some occasional fun. There seems to be some fun to be had here, but the tools to scratch that itch are all wrong and somewhat painful. Much of this is cosmetic. Some is substantial. For me, it is death by a thousand cuts.

Abandoned long ago. As a kickstarter backer I am very disappointed. I never even got my art print I paid extra for... Such a shame. Great concept but poorly implemented and the big update to fix it never released...

When I got this game it was great at the time. Since then the Developers have disappeared leaving it buggy and overall underwhelming. I do not regret purchasing the game because at the time it was a lot of fun to play. As you dig deeper you see the bugs and will not be able to complete some quests. Great idea, neat lore that piques interest but after you dig a little deeper you realize that this was just someone's summer hobby to tinker on that they forgot about three years ago. Now it sits like a forgotten project in a garage waiting to be sold for spare parts or hauled off to the dump

What the Heck is there in my Library Edition 2020? What was with this Game....? (Reading up Notes) Ah Yes... Since 2017 waiting for the Extended Version... Now, as of 2019 / 2020 Abandonware

So, I have a few things to say about this game. I have to give credit in a couple areas, but unfortunately it just doesn't save the game for me. The music is pretty good, the art is really cute and aethetically pleasing. I've only played for a couple hours, but to be honest I couldn't really stomach playing it for longer. Why? The movement feels clunky. Despite watching videos and other people stream the game, I still wasn't sure in the end if I was even playing the game "right." It felt uncomfortable and was not easy to slide in to, as it should be. The writing is done in such a way that it almost treats the audience as if they are dumb, and cannot infer information based on decently written dialogue. The mini map was not helpful or well "mapped out" at all. I had no idea what the game was trying to indicate to me with its' little green squares for everything they were trying to mark. Further, a little bit of a pet peeve about this game: you have to pay money if you damage stuff. That sounds logical maybe, but listen -- most of us have been conditioned to break things if we see we are damaging them. We want to see what goodies are inside! (I broke a stump had to pay money. You should be paying me; I removed that nuisance from your yard.) And due to this mechanic, I basically started the game bankrupt. Furthermore, what I was doing felt empty. Boring. Pointless. I didn't feel engaged. Make it matter to me, because right now, it just doesn't. I did have some interaction with the devs and I have to say that for the most part, they are some pretty nice people. Unfortunately, that doesn't make for what I consider to be a "good game", all due respect.