Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I had a few technical issues with playing this one - the window opens halfway off the screen on my machine and none of my usual tricks for unsticking errent windows worked - the only way I actually found to make the game playable in the end was by moving my taskbar. Since there doesn't seem to be any in-game way of restarting on game-over this quickly got annoying since I needed to do this every single time I started the game. The game has tiles, but they're so small that it's pretty much impossible to tell what anything is meant to be, other than the colours indicating element. There's an interesting (if not entirely original) elemental system at the heart of this game, but its let down by being totally unbalanced. As you absorb elementals you become stronger against that element in future, but this means that at the start of the game a lot of enemies can kill you in only a few hits but at the end of the game everything heals you. The trouble is that since you can't very easily control what kind of enemies show up there's not much player agency involved in this; the winning 'tactic' on the early levels is simply to be lucky enough to find an enemy that heals you and keep it alive while you deal with the others. Making it through the first two or three levels is therefore very luck-based, but after that you're strong enough not to have to think about anything ever again. There's a 'hidden' boss at the end (the game tells you you've already won before you meet him, so I suspect most players will miss him), which is a nice touch but I beat him without even realising it since by that point I could just wade through all other enemies with impunity. The difficulty curve could do with some major tuning, and really the game needs some items/spells that do elemental damage so that there's some player choice involved in how to deal with the different enemies, rather than it just being character stats which gradually trivialise more and more of the game.
• I was really intrigued by the addition of a resistances/damage types system to what appears to be another straightforward TCOD tutorial game, but as it turns out there's no way to interact with that system in a tactically meaningful way. (Unless I'm missing something.) You don't get to choose which type of damage you want to inflict, so it's all just sort of working in the background and doesn't add any meaningful decision-making to the game play. I suppose if there were some sort of threat or difficulty here, you might let your set of elemental strengths/resistances guide which monsters you will tackle first and which you will avoid, but as it turns out, that's completely unnecessary, since most monsters will actually heal you instead of harming you. At first I thought that was an interesting feature ("look, I've got a water buddy!), but it would appear it's just a bug of the damage formula, whereby if your defense is higher than their attack, it gives you health back. Or maybe it was intentional? Either way, it made the game trivially easy, and I was able to win on my first try just mowing through everyone and not even using a healing "tea" after the first level. While that all sounds rather negative, these are issues that can be solved by game balancing; underneath it all the design might be perfectly sound. Would be happy to try this again in the future after some tuning of the combat system and underlying numbers.