Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• There are a lot of interesting things going on in here. The sword controls took a bit of getting used to, though clicked eventually and instead one of the biggest UI issues is the semi-transparent overlapping menus making it hard to read text. Item descriptions would have been helpful, too, although trying things out to answer questions worked in some cases. The balance needs a lot of work, but the systems are mostly there and this could be even more fun with additional development. I like the idea of mixing items to get new items; maybe check out Mage Guild to see how that game does the system since it lies at the core of that roguelike. This is a good start for a somewhat bigger game, keep at it!
  

• A fairly incomplete game, but with interesting elements to explore. When wielding your sword it appears as an extra tile next to you, which you rotate to slash at enemies - this leads to some interesting tactical considerations. It also has an item fusion system which I couldn't explore very well, but seems like it might have some fun elements. The game is unfortunately let down by its incomplete state (missing content and polish is clear everywhere) and a very poor UI that involves a lot of tedious menu navigation. The tiles also are very unclear, making it easy to die to walking on damaging terrain - ASCII would have worked better than these small icons. Overall I think the game was trying to do too many interesting things in the short timeframe.

• Completeness:

  Games seems complete and polished on the first glance. But the longer I played, the more rough edges I saw. "Examining" items results in showing empty window; transparent menus overlaps and are not very readable; it's very likely to encounter sirens without adrenaline in backpack - and playing with swaying screen just made me sick; room placement is random and not related to doors connection; and so on. On the other hand, I didn't encounter game breaking bugs, and overall feeling is good.

  
  Aesthetics:
  

  Graphics is nice, controls are easy. But there are some issues here and there - like mentioned in previous paragraph menus. Dev wanted to keep UI as minimal as possible - it nice idea, and I see his efforts, but end effect is not that good - sometimes is just hard to tell what's going on. Also, I don't understand why I have to use [space]+WSAD to move sword - if I'm using WSAD to move player, it would be intuitive to bind sword to arrow keys.

  Fun:

  I want to like this game. It has great potential for captiving coffebreak. But it needs polish badly. All the issues I already mentioned affect "fun" factor as well. Some additional stuff: rooms are arranged randomly and doors connections are not corresponding with room placement (well, hiding map borders seems like easy workaround); fusing items seems like important mechanics, but I'm still not sure, how it works.  

  I see that this review looks very negative. It isn't my intention - I want to provide enough feedback to dev to help him make Hathwell better :)

  But, let me focus on positives now. I'm really enjoying "exploration map" mechanics here - it reminds me Binding of Isaac and Runers, but it's not bad thing. Yet, this mechanics is not common in roguelikes and it feels fresh. Room's layouts are interesting - irregular shapes of rooms, lots of fluff packed here and there - it's immersive. Combat mechanics feels rewarding.

  Innovation:

  Well, experimenting with combat mechanics is not uncommon during 7DRLC, but I don't remember any roguelike that implemented swordfighting in that exact way. Map exploration mechanics is nice twist as well.

  Scope:
  

  Reasonable.
  

  Roguelikeness:
  

  Yep!