Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• When I saw Tetris, I immediately guessed that you probably made Equipmentris from the last year :) That said, I like Duntris more - here optimizing tetrominoes is integral to the experience, and the game design overall feels tight. There are several dimensions to decision space (leaving enough space for future pieces, not opening too many question marks at once because you might get overwhelmed by enemies, potion recognition, pathing enemies to walk over traps / unwanted potions, etc.), and all of them are naturally interconnected. There are even varied powers-ups and teammates - the scope of the game, even without visuals and music, is impressive. My main problems were with balancing (never got past level 5 - how many are even there?), and with the game sometimes telling you Game Over when you can't place a piece, and sometimes not - you explained in the comments why that is, but the experience doesn't feel uniform. It also seems like the enemies get tricked after killing one teammate and won't attack the other.
• There's a lot to really love here. The sound and graphic design works very well, and the game controls fairly intuitively. The tetris mechanic is designed fairly well and there's a good streamlined set of mechanics to support it. The ability to find a 2nd+ party member is a great surprise powerup, and there are a few others that also give a nice surprise. A very fun entry, this is really close to just being a really standout jam game, but there's a sort of flaw that brings it down. There's just a bit too many things competing strategy wise, and it makes the game feel exhausting or a bit random in outcome. Quite often I felt like I was picking which gamble I wanted to take rather than working on a strategy to minimize risk. There would be so many competing metrics for decisions that rather than picking a good option, I was just picking the least bad. For the pieces for the most part you can plan around what pieces you get offered when and that’s a great part of the game, but there’s definitely points where you will have to take a risk at potentially blocking a treasure. Perhaps starting the player with either 1 piece preview or a recycle could help there? Combat wise, floors 3+ make the armor system feel very punishing. If you reveal a big slime from a small ‘?’ you can often be left in a no-win situation where you only have 1 luck 1 attack and that’s not enough to kill a 1 armor foe. There’s no guarantee you’ll have seen any source of +attack or +luck by then. With all of the utility items and stats like range & speed it seems actually pretty unlikely. Pills also are a great incentive for exploring, and make for good variance and tactics in the level, but the identification system also makes it difficult to feel agency over the game. The auto-attacking, which otherwise feels great, and the multiple pathing options for an enemy makes it very difficult to pull enemies over new pills. Though I did also have cases of killing an enemy, having them drop a pill, and a second enemy moves over it right away. Combined with the pills that offer very negative outcomes and the armor system pushing you to find buffs, the identification metagame feels a bit hard to control beyond just gambling on new pills. What it feels like you have done is carefully thought through how the player will play and designed systems around those to mix up the play, a great idea of course. But what’s missing is the way for the player to then overcome those challenges with good play. Your players will pick up on using range early on, then you introduce big slimes with creep, to counter that. But that leaves players without much of a play around *that*, either they take advantage of their range or they suffer from being blocked in by creep and there’s not enough spare tools to deal with that. I don’t think there’s anything that needs to be added to make this a really fun and addictive game, but possibly just mixing up the existing mechanics a bit to give the player a bit more agency would go a long way and would let players feel rewarded for attempting to make plans or cautious plays. Overall happy to have played the game, it’s got a great charm to it, hoping to see it refined and taken to the next level.