Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A very simple puzzle roguelike with really small floors, and where the only real goal is to grab as many gold coins as you can before dying. It has great, clean pixel art, but the complete lack of sound makes it look uncanny. Unlike the similar puzzle games where player character in one hit, fighting is technically possible here, yet it is never to your benefit, as it always eliminates that enemy, yet simultaneously takes away one of your lives - regardless of whether it was the enemy that moved into you, or vice versa. Luckily, the standard low-level dungeon denizens (bats, slimes, skeletons) are quite apathetic about you, with only skeletons attempting to actively follow more often than not. As such, it is often possible to sneak by even when they are numerous, and there are occasional potions to restore lost lives, too. Still, the number of floors appears endless, so defeat is ultimately inevitable - and when it comes there's unfortunately no leaderboard, which rather dampens the excitement.
• There are a few things that this game does very well. The choice of artwork is very nice, the animation speed is good, the movement speed is good, everything feels nice and snappy to interact with. It is a very clean experience. The gameplay is simple but allows you to actually play the game instead of deliberating every turn, which I appreciate. My high score was 54 floors, though I tended to enjoy focusing on going down instead of getting more coins. Of course, I would like to see more added to the game-- more enemies, a ranged attack, some powerups. As it is, it is fairly bare-bones. It does do something very unusual, which is that you get hurt when you attack an enemy-- I'm not sure if I've ever seen that. It completely changes the interaction-- monsters change from challenges to overcome, into obstacles to avoid. This shifts that game into a more puzzly kind of experience, which is kind of neat. The issue with the puzzle, in my opinion, is that the random movement of the monsters along with the small board means that you sometimes can't avoid getting hit. The most enjoyable thing about games is when the player has interesting choices to make, but here you can't predict their movement or influence it, you do your best to avoid them and hope they don't hit you. Luut also has the bug or feature of passing the player's turn when you try to move into a wall, which usually I dislike since the player only does it by accident. However, here it could offer some strategy to the player if they want to move into the wall to re-arrange the monsters, so I think it's ok. The game definitely fulfills my requirements for being a traditional roguelike. Overall, while I think that what is here is extremely solid, I would like to see the player be given just a few more abilities or choices of actions.
• For both scope and fun, I was wanted to score 2.5, and I think they're pretty closely related for this entry. The basic puzzly/minimalist mechanics worked well, but I think there just wasn't quite enough content there to really explore the possibilities. It would have been nice to see more interesting movement patterns, and perhaps more terrain/traps and items. All I saw in the game was bats, skeletons, and slimes, all of which seemed to just move randomly, with slimes sometimes splitting (I saw afterwards that you mention skeletons are more inclined to move toward the player, but that wasn't apparent while playing). It felt like the randomness of the movement undermined the puzzly nature of the game. Some randomness is fine, but it felt like this needed more pattern. I also encountered the spike traps and health potions. If there is more interesting content later in the game, I would probably recommend introducing it earlier. Again, I think the core game is good, but it needs more content to shine. Art is great and controls are simple. Only problem I encountered there is that up and down arrows would scroll the screen, so I had to use hjkl which I'm not used to. It would probably be nice to add wasd as another option.