Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• All the other games in my review block had been extremely simple and able to be picked up instantly, which made this one a bit of a surprise: As simple as the mechanics really are, and as much effort as the game puts into making them learnable with tooltips and introduction text, there's enough going on that if you're determined as a player to avoid all of those explanations, you in fact will be a bit lost for a while.
  

  After I got my bearings, though, I found this a quite carefully thought out small roguelike experience. The difficulty level is on point, in part because of being essentially self-tuning - on your first few runs, the revival mechanic lets you keep making progress while being aware that there's room to do better, and once you're more advanced as a player, the game gives you the choice of hunting monsters for score or trying out different bodies. And if you just want to give the game a fair shake, getting through it without dying makes a good baseline roguelike experience.
  

  And then on top of all that there's the Director's Cut option, which actually brings out whole new depths in the game, as suddenly there's much more room to make use of monsters fighting each other, body-hopping in fights, and carefully managing cooldowns. I almost feel like I've been treated to two 7DRLs in one - the mechanics might be largely the same, but the way you engage with them is completely different.
  

  The character graphics do a lot to make the game more fun by giving their own little charm to the experience. This being the closest I've ever come to playing a Resident Evil game, I probably missed some references in the bosses' introductions, but I thought they were cool nevertheless. That said, I would probably have avoided a few deaths caused by one Lisa Trevor if I'd had some forewarning about her nature...
  

  The only little annoyance that almost made me dock a point off Completeness was the tendency for fights on the second level to take place near the top of the screen, where interface text would get in the way when trying to target abilities. Sharing a tile with an enemy also seems to be a presumably unintentional circumstance that I ended up in several times. Those were small blemishes on what's easily been the best I've personally seen in this year's 7DRL contest, though.
  

• Completeness - 3, Aesthetics - 3, Fun - 3, Innovative - 3, Scope - 3, Roguelike - 4

  For a 7DRL entry, this was well executed. I'm only vaguely aware of the RE series (gasp), so on the first play through, none of the real quote references "clicked". It was only when I spotted the linked YouTube video to the PS title gameplay in the entry's comments where I understood. 

  Neat idea with the monster vs. S.T.A.R.S, and I thought the idea of a popup of each STAR for the level was a good one. The scrolling text worked fairly well, and the "kill list" helped. The Director's Cut idea was cool.

  I didn't make it through most of the stream content, but thanks for linking them from the submission page, as well as the dev blog. 

  I definitely encourage you to keep adding to this entry (if you want to of course). 

  Some (minor-totally-optional-peanut-gallery) suggestions 

  • any sound / music effect
  • a bit more tinkering with the level so that you need to explore at least 50% before the level Boss shows up
  • a way to return to the previous level. There were a few times I was cornered, so I warped to the next level to escape..
  • when playing the Director's Cut edition, experiment with creating a "letterbox" view of the game with the top / bottom black bars. Yeah it might not work if you decide to experiment with it, but just throwing it out there.
  • maybe another game mode could be "Commentary" or something where you pull in some voice overs for the levels. I'll stop now. :)

• Well done! The game feels feature complete but missing some more polish. The controls are mostly intuitive except for exiting the level. I thought I was looking for stairs and only after re-reading the instructions did I figure out you can exit as soon as you've killed the level boss. I didn't have a lot of fun with the title, I think because switching bodies always felt like a worse off option than dying and I could respawn immediately. There didn't feel like a risk of death until I got to the game over screen where it explained my score could be improved by not dying. Fixing this is be your first focus if continuing. The extra character abilities were only a little innovative and switching bodies could have been more so if there other bodies were interesting to inhabit. The scope is what I'd expect from a 7DRL and I can only classify this as a roguelike-like since it's missing roguelike features such as permadeath.