Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This is a creative roguelike; it basically has the theme of trying to find your bearings in lost woods--to do that you have to clear 10 rooms of the woods. Different items will offer wildly different progressions; e.g. some will give you bonuses for moving a certain direction and others are the usual bonuses. Perhaps it's telling that in the first successful run I wound up being a very defense-heavy archer and in the second I played a much more melee-focused, tactically-tense glass cannon. It's not the most innovative or balanced game ever (it gets pretty high marks for completeness from me, but it does have a couple of spots of bad balance), but its depth really pushes its fun factor up high. Aesthetically fine to look at, though controls are somewhat tricky to manage. A little more visual feedback and obvious menu changing would go a long way there. Scope and traditional roguelikeness are pretty on-point for a 7DRL.
• This feels very close to a full game, which is impressive. The art is nice and clear and I like the different environments. There are some interesting ideas, making level decisions based on your items is the beginning of a really interesting mechanic. Using letter keys for movement is unusual but it ends up working fine. I like the symmetry of hand positions. The item keys were a little confusing because on my keyboard 7 is in the top left, but on the UI, seven is in the bottom left. There is a lot of tactical potential here, and I felt that I had to carefully consider my turns, which is what I play roguelikes for. The fact that you can shoot over mountains does mean that positioning is less important than it could have been. The monsters do not have good pathfinding and get stuck a lot. There are also some balancing issues, allowing the player to get so powerful, sometimes even early on, that no monster on the level can hurt them at all. I also would like to be able to inspect what items do after picking them up. Sometimes my turn count would reset without monsters moving, your turns should reset when you enter a new level, and at some point every game I would get to an empty white level with nothing in it. Maybe it was heaven? For a roguelike made in 7 days through all of these issues are understandable and overall, this is a very good effort with cool ideas that could be made into a full game.