Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This ones got the whole rogue-like package, varied game-play, a good variety of enemies, heavy strategical elements, fun power-ups, appealingly simple art-style and punishing difficultly. that last point doesn't sound great but its difficult in a way that didn't discourage me from coming back. I think that's partially due to the calm atmosphere and partially due to the game-play loop being pretty fun in a resource gathering kind of way. Honestly the best game I have played so far and it broke my usual write a fun essay convention because Im not sure how to properly articulate why i like this game so much. So i have resorted to a bulleted list of pro's/con's/bugs: The tutorial is really seamless and intuitive, feels like dropping into the ocean and just being asked to explore. having the seeded run feature is really nice and worth the dev time imo. Sometimes fish will just lose aggro permanents, like they lost all will to eat seems to be cause by certain areas gold items can occasionally spawn in 1 block wide chasms making it nearly impossible to get to them. Swordfish will sometime refuse to move horizontally w/o dashing making them uncatch-able If you drop bait on your line and there are no fish nearby to eat it you will never be able to rewind through it, soft-locking you. The fish variety is good the first time a swordfish dashed at me it completely changed the way I interacted with the space around me. I would love to see more enemies with quirky rule breaking movement . despite my like 4+ hours of playtime I haven't beaten the game, which is probably because Im just bad at it, I never quite got the golden objects to spawn in ways that allowed me to get all 3 at once. This is the only real balance I would change, having the golden relics replace your item slots and have a downside really push's the player a little to hard i think. If they took up their own separate slots or you could return them to the ship one at a time. Even allowing for some way of purchasing like 1 extra life for 100 line or something would I think allow for a more satisfying amount of winnable runs. I also never caught an angler fish it just took so long to coerce them up to the net every time i tried something else ate me on the way up clown horn on clownfish eating bait :^)
• Neat game! Glad I read the comments to figure out what to do. The controls were easy, graphics cute, and the music perfect. The beginning was rather slow and uninteresting, but then I got into a situation where I had to lure/escape one fish while controlling another, which was cool. It got interesting once I reached the swordfish. I think the game could use a little less traveling to/from the ship. All in all, very cool 7DRL entry!
• The cartoony graphics and bright colors would make you think this game would be easy. Don't be fooled. This is a rough one. The fish are unrelenting and the bait to throw them off is only slightly effective. There are a lot of nuances in the game and fun little touches, like tying your hose in a knot. It definitely has the unrelenting difficulty of a roguelike .