Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• "Tenebris" has pretty cool Greek-style intro/outro, and a cute tileset that makes exploring the dungeons fun. There is various equipment, including weapons, armor, and bombs. There are also various enemies, although I haven't noticed much difference between their abilities beyond the miss chance and total hp. I think the game could provide some information about hp/damage of monsters and items to make decisions a bit more purposeful - otherwise one can only guess that a two-handed sword is better than a normal sword, or heavy armor better than light armor. The balance of the game is a bit off, as it's easy to finish on the first playthrough with tons of items just hoarded in your inventory. Most importantly, the premise that enemies behave differently in the presence of light didn't feel explored deeply enough - I noticed some enemies (ghouls especially) keep away from the torches, but didn't feel like it significantly altered my strategy. I think that with a bit of tuning, atmospheric background music, and a more pronounced ending this could be an enjoyable dungeon explorer.
• (Review of Post-7DRL update.) With its Latin title, Tenebris sounds like a horror game, and the subtitle also implies as such. However, it is disappointingly traditional in practice. Your character will be bumping a typical assortment of low-level creepy-crawlies (primarily rats, giant spiders, zombies, and in what appears to be a NetHack reference, lichens and centipedes - the latter being the most likely to present a threat due to being as damaging and evasive as their NetHack-tier counterparts) to death and gradually trade the starting bone shard and shirt for proper (but still basic) swords and body armours that are simply straight-up stat upgrades. There is no levelling up, so this is the only progression. The one distinguishing feature - that monsters tend to be afraid of the light and will not enter the candlelit rooms, allowing you to retreat there and recover lost HP - only matters at first, and stops being relevant once you have found your first sword and enough grenades (which only cover one tile, with no risk of splash damage backfiring) to delete any enemy that starts causing trouble, which occurs pretty quickly. Even an ogre I encountered near the end only took up two flame grenades out of 8 I had at the time - not counting the stun grenades or a pair of "big boy" flame/stun grenades. The game is completely devoid of sound. Its best-looking part are the intro and ending screens, which have some neat text animations, while the dungeon levels themselves feel too large for the amount of unique content they have, and are so zoomed-out that many creature tiles are confusing - I still do not understand why rats look the way they do in-game. Altogether, the game works fine, but does not do enough to stand out, and there's far too little variation - the first level is almost exactly like the next five. If the creator intends to develop the game further, my recommendation is to reduce the size of the levels to have more zoomed-in graphics, work on making the floors meaningfully different, and to emphasize the darkness/horror aspect.
• Tenebris is a great basis for a Roguelike, and there's a lot here to already be very happy with. The lighting system works well to make monsters a little more engaging and gives the dungeon a good sense of place and setting. The floors were paced well and the layout variance kept things a bit fresh. Doubly so because it was obvious how much further left in the game there was, always a great thing to know for shorter form games especially game jam games. However, beyond standard hack & slash there's not a whole lot there yet, just the start of a lot of promise. The bump combat is tuned pretty well, enemies are threatening or easy depending on gear, but there's no variance beyond that. Gear seems a strict upgrade over previous finds (or downgrade), and the items are useful and nice, but aren't yet offering depth of vary combat. The foundation is all there, a great accomplishment for 7DRL, now it's just a matter of fleshing it out and making it feel unique. On the Aesthetics side I struggled a lot with what to score. The intro, death, and victory screens are all gorgeous, something stylistically I wish you carried through into the UI for the game itself. The actual game map & world is pretty as well, the sprites are nice and clear and the dungeon lighting adds mood. On the other hand, this game was really rough to play during the day, I actually had to come back at night. Even the smallest bit of screen glare made the levels, especially the cave, almost impossible to see. It's the double edged sword of using lighting so heavily in a roguelike, but I think a small tweak to the lighting would make it more accessible. Overall I was happy to have played it, there's a good start of a deeper roguelike here and the start, death, and victory screens had some great design which made them a treat to trigger, but the relatively basic hack & slash kept the entry from really playing well.