Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A short puzzle-ish roguelike that's mildly amusing but ultimately has little to sink your teeth into. All the action takes place in the 7 X 7 tiles garden, and many of those tiles start off randomly blocked by tree stumps (?) as well - at least until the orange hornets (?) run into them and destroy them in a single turn, getting extra HP in process. They, along with the hares, the moles and some red-eyed black thing (rat?) are your primary enemies who'll aggressively come after the Strawberry Earth Mother: they generally have no chance if you can fight them one-on-one, as your attacks stunlock them, but getting attacked from multiple directions is often death. This apparently made the earliest version of the game very difficult, but the addition of powers added for every three strawberries collected makes things much easier - especially since one of the powers you might luck into, Destruction, straight-up clears the screen of enemies and so is perfect for getting surrounded - and stuff like Teleport or Heal is not bad either. You cannot fight indefinitely with these though, since strawberries appear on the level once, while pests will spawn indefinitely in random places in the garden, a grey cloud of dust foretelling their arrival - and they can be freely attacked before they emerge out of it as well. However, you get nothing out of killing the pests, so just go to the portal after collecting the strawberries on the level. In fact, you do not strictly need to collect strawberries either: the portal is always present, and I once tried to just rush the portal every time without collecting strawberries, and it worked, especially since there are only six levels. Strawberries collected do determine your score, but that is inherently subject to randomness: if a bird, the one creature that does not attack Earth Mother but instead eats strawberries, happens to spawn right next to a strawberry on the other side of the garden, there's often not much you can do to stop the bird from eating it and thus permanently losing a point, especially if there are stumps in the way. In all, an amusing game and a good start for its creator, but the issues with progression and in-game incentives mean that you'll be unlikely to do much with it after beating it once or twice.
• The sound effects, movement and colors made this feel like a classic Colecovision game. It's really difficult and I'm not sure what was happening most of the time. A health bar might have been nice and a little work on level layouts would help a lot. More than once the only move I could make was to exit the level.
• TASofSEM is a Broughelike game based on Jeremiah Reid's Broughlike tutorial. I'm not too familiar with Broughlikes but I enjoyed this one. The game feels complete although I did play the post-7DRL version which adds some features and hones in the difficulty in a way that made the game feel more "complete" than it did in the 7DRL version. I really adored the art and overall aesthetic direction of this game, it was a pleasure to play. The game is relatively basic and doesn't do anything terribly innovative mechanically, but the post-7DRL version's abilities are creative and begin to make it unique. I gave a 3 rating for Traditional Roguelikeness because this game (and other Broughlikes) don't capture all of the ingredients that creates a true traditional roguelike in my mind.