Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Completeness: 4 The game has a great variety of enemies, items, weapons, and resources to keep you coming back. Some enemies move randomly, while others will hunt you down. Some weapons buff melee, while ranged weapons offer a whole new load of decision making. Face huggers are hilarious (and horrifying). Aesthetics: 4 The art and audio are awesome! It feels cohesive. There's a nice ambient background with plenty of well-curated sound FX. The sprites and tiles are easy on the eyes. I'd love to see more terrain types in that style. The controls for keyboard were not quite intuitive, but all the information is displayed in-game so that's a plus. Fun: 4 The game is great overall. The memory disk writing is funny and actually kept me hunting for more to try and figure out what happened. Innovative: 3 Visualizing the dice rolls and ranged mechanics are nice addition to the RL experience. Scope: 4 There are tons of enemies, weapons to discover, though they are tiny variation on the same core gameplay, they are satisfying to discover and use. Roguelike: 4 This is a pretty solid RL.
• A lot of great visuals, flavor text, and style. It's also a good amount of depth for a control scheme that fits on a controller. The die roll UI is definitely a nice touch, though the different shapes of the numbers made it a little confusing at first (but later much quicker to parse). As for gameplay, mostly this is a standard hack & slash roguelike, but with a focus on really tight and constrained resource management. Most of the interesting decisions are around inventory management and balancing the 3 resources (health, o2, energy) and that works well mostly. I think there's some balance issues that really pull the game down, but the overall implementation shows a lot of promise. I am pretty sure the game is impossible if you don't reserve a spot for a helmet, so effectively the player only has 3 inventory spots and often 2 because of reserve tanks. I enjoy the restriction. but it makes it very difficult to engage with some weapons (like the laser rifle that has a 2 spot dead zone). In general o2 probably drains a bit too fast, if you don't get a helmet things are going to be tough, and if you don't get a mask quickly either your run is probably over in just a few floors. The o2 problem is also compounded by level design. First having no-look command is punishing, if you end up in an area with no obvious direction to go, or have explored what feels like most/all of the level you just have to pick a direction at random to re-traverse and hope you are lucky that you find something you missed. That's made doubly worse by the tight o2 system making it best to move quickly through rooms. The other level problem is dead-ends. In the worst case I had a dead end where backtracking along the fastest route drained ~25 of my o2 *with* a helmet. Just doing a bit of check/cleanup on longer dead ends would help curve the level. Other than that my biggest gameplay complaint is that monster AI is done in such a way where monsters will prefer to stay diagonally to you, which feels really punishing. It's really easy to be forced to discover an enemy at a diagonal and then be unable to put them on any cardinal direction leaving you only with melee as an option. Given that the melee weapons don't scale as fast as ranged weapons this is pretty punishing. Control wise I do also have trouble with ranged combat. I get the scheme in general, but it's really easy, especially vs enemies with a ranged attack, to think you are in shooting mode and move instead. Having to double-tap the number to enter shooting mode feels clunky. The game should also probably have a wait command. I know there are reasons to not add a wait command, but in this case you can almost always "wait" by dropping an item anyways. It would just be more conveinent to have an actual wait command so you don't have to drop an item, then pick it back up. Overall a really complete experience with some fun tension in the inventory and resource management. Great visuals and changing environments to boot. Well done.
• There is a lot to like here. Having a number of different weapons, some with limited use, a fair number of different monsters, different types of environments, and different types of consumables makes the game complex enough to be interesting. Graphics are nice and clear. The futurama-esque humor is a nice addition. Having facehuggers latch on to you with gratuitous blood is fun, and I like the idea that you almost want to get hit just to get them off. The food clock of oxygen is pretty stringent here. I ended up getting the furthest when I devoted most of my inventory to oxygen items. There is nothing wrong with a strict food clock, but it does make it so that the RNG of level generation becomes really important. You can die if you just happen to not find the exit, and it was the most frustrating part of the game. You can also die if a few tough enemies spawn next to one another. One way to mitigate this type of RNG issue may be to provide very rare powerful items or some kind of escape option. There is nothing wrong with difficulty spikes, but sometimes you end up not having much choice but to die. The user interaction is simple and easy, which I really appreciate. Showing the dice rolls on the map is a nice way to clarify how damage works. Sound reinforces the gameplay well. If the game were to be continued to be developed, I would like to see some ranged options and some items with more interesting effects.