Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A cute premise executed in a straightforward manner, but at a very high level. Every aspect is polished, from the graphics, which convey a pen, paper and miniatures feel, to the balance. There's a variety of weapons and enemies, but the environments are all very similar.
• Generally a pretty polished game, with good presentation and no bugs that I've found. The gameplay itself is straightforward hack and slash, very beholden to random chance - my best runs have been the ones where I happened to find a wealth of strong armour and lots of oil. My worst have been the ones where I didn't find much oil. Aside from a couple of very small usability niggles (it's annoying to have to go into the inventory and use oil to refill your lamp, when there's no reason you'd ever not want to) but that's to be expected from a jam game. My main criticism would be that the oil restriction feels too tight. There's a sanity mechanism here which is a bit reminiscent of Infra Arcana, whereby you gradually lose sanity while you're in the dark, which is a solid enough way to keep the player moving forward. The oil doesn't last very long though, just 20 turns per flask, which is nothing. The tightness of this limit, along with the unpredictability of whether you'll find plenty of oil or almost none, can make the game frustrating. Doing anything other than sprinting to the stairs feels like a waste of precious light. The game would be a lot more playable if oil lasted a bit longer, or it was more consistent in how often it drops. A solid entry overall. I would have liked to see it try something a bit more novel (I feel like a lot of the effort went into presentation and left the gameplay very vanilla) but it's a good try for a single week.
• Straightforward hack and slash dungeon crawl. Impressive amount of foes and decorations for the seven days. I liked the feel of miniatures, although the UI and sound could have done with a tiny bit more polish. Nice work!