Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Very nice-looking and fun to play, music can get a bit repetitive. Gets really difficult quickly, so I wasn't able to complete the game yet. Will stay in my regular rotation of games tho.

• Sky Rogue is an impressive and impressively polished 7-day game. The pixel art is beautiful, with both a consistent style and color palette and lots of smart touches to communicate game state to the player. There is even charming 8-bit style music (rare for 7drl entries). The graphics are all the more impressive given that this is a Pico-8 game; in particular, the scrolling parallaxed clouds give the whole thing a great feeling.

  The gameplay is tight, simple, and fun, and the author has done a great job of creating what I would call puzzle-game-progression from level to level, introducing you to new mechanics one bit at a time before complicating them. As the author alludes to in their instructions text they DID make level 2 too hard, and I worry that many players might never see the later levels. (FWIW, letting the horizontal obstruction to the right of the second guard obstruct vision would be, I think, the least invasive way to make it easier). I also liked the interplay between having and not having Blinkstone. Without it, this game plays very deterministically, with some puzzles requiring you to time out things to single steps. With Blinkstone, the game is a little looser, and puzzles often have multiple solutions, with Blinkstone functioning as a panic button if you miscalculate. Frankly, I think the author could, by adding more levels and mechanics, develop this into a VERY fun longer game.

  Finally, I must observe that the game is not really what I would consider a roguelike. This game is basically a mini-Monaco, done in Pico-8 (which I mean as a strong compliment). It would be possible to use these mechanics to make something more rogue-like, adopting an Invisible Inc. style of random level progression, but the challenge of procedurally generating such a stealth map would be considerable. So, it makes sense that the author didn’t take that on for this jam. Nonetheless, a fun game all around.

• This game is solid.
  

  As a minor nitpick, I had a hard time judging the distance of blinks.  It's easy enough to tell where tiles next to you or guards are, but hard to tell what's exactly 5 blocks away with this tileset.