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lilithkismet rated By Lamplight

A browser game made in HTML5.

This very unpolished jam game is all about climbing up 13 floors to the top of a lightless tower inhabited by ghosts and vampires. To climb you need to maintain your health, sanity, and keep your lamp lit, so collect hearts to increase health, oil drops to maintain your lantern, and use your lantern  to light lampposts which increase sanity.

There are two things that really should be improved about this game. The first is the lantern-throwing mechanic. As it stands right now, there's absolutely no benefit to throwing it to attack (it's not any stronger than the "normal" attack), it only has drawbacks (you have to go pick up your lantern after you throw it, potentially wasting an extra two steps worth of lamp oil; if a monster moves on top of it before you grab it, you're screwed). The second but honestly most important thing to be improved is the ending. It's really unsatisfying to get all the way to the top only to see your character sprite killed. Even without a boss, just showing the stats totaling up with the words "final score" displayed, coupled with no ghost-swarm death, would have felt like a satisfying win.

A number of people on the game's page have complained about balancing - in particular that the oil runs out too quickly and can't be replaced fast enough, leading to death, or that they get blocked by attacking monsters. I'm going to be contrary here and say that I think the balance is perfect as-is. The game is all about charting an optimum path through the tower, of course you're going to die a lot/run out of oil/get stuck until you have the layout and the enemy locations memorized. Once you have it down, you won't even need to look at the stat indicators while playing anymore.

Objectively I think the game should be rated 2 due to the issues that it has, but I'm giving it a 3 (an "average" rating that I give most games, as opposed to a 2/"poor" rating). Despite the rough state of this game I still had a lot of fun playing it, memorizing the best way through the tower and eventually completing runs with 0 damage.