Hydropawnics

2nd greatest game of all time behind Gravebound

Hmmm. OK, look; this is a student project, it gets some allowance for that. With that in mind, this gets a thumbs up; it looks delightful, the basic gameplay loop works and I understand what's going on, and it's a pretty good time. There are two main issues here, and they're closely linked. The first is that... OK, balance is very tough in development. The issue is that it's very hard to actually gauge how difficulty the game is when you made it; you've naturally left in things you found acceptable, sanded off the stuff that grated, know exactly how everything works and spent a bunch of timing playing it. If you're not careful you've made a game for your own skillset and tuned the game for that, and in the process made something harder than you realise... and I think that's the case here. Depending on the distribution of breakages and keys and such, timings can be razor-thin, and just making a suboptimal choice on what issue to tackle next can be game-ending even if you're otherwise playing flawlessly... which itself is hard, giving the level layouts sometimes demand precise walks over precarious areas (that pipe in level 1) or multiple chained jumps over gaps that don't quite match your jump length, usually with a pretty harsh punishment in time if you fall (and with the camera at a fixed pulled-out distance, you're never *quite* sure exactly how far you are to an edge). Timings could perhaps be loosened a tad to make this a bit more welcoming to players who aren't playing at quite the dev's level, is what I'm saying. The other main issue is that, for how nice the maps look, they're rather linear in practice. There's usually only one specifc path to get to where you're going, which makes things a little less interesting than they could be. The levels are full of piles of crates that [i]look[/i] like you may be able to jump up them as a staircase, or fences that [i]look[/i] like you can hop over them to get a fast route down to lower areas but, nope; you'll use the designated stairs and like it, bucko. That's especially a shame given the pairing of timed platforming with dodging enemy shots. There's no little room here for creative corner-cutting to get better timing between shots to make jumps, or weaving deviation to take a slightly different route that gives you cover. You have one path, and you better hope the guns don't fire when they'd hit you because you don't have another route to take or time to stop. Dropping some of the barriers and adding more alternate routes (even if just subtle variations like making single-wide paths double-wide) would give the players more creativity in how they handle attacks under pressure... And make those tight timings less of a worry, with skilled players able to keep a buffer through creative shortcutting. ...Also, damn I wish I could stock up on water AND hold a keycard at the same time. Especially on that last level, running back-and-forth managing 3 machine's keycards took up all my time, only lucky patterns would give me the wiggle room to make the extra trip. Being able to stock up water with a slight diversion one way, then use it with a slight diversion later, would've made this much more manageable that it being a full trip every time. Anyway, I don't want to be too much of a downer; I do think this is good, I did enjoy my time with it (short as it was), and I think you should be proud of your work. Well done!