Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A room-based twin stick shooter, so doesn't really belong in this event. The music is nice, at least. Pressing escape directly exits the game while playing, which is not a good idea since that's a common key to press when looking for more info or options. The game was rather easy to win on a first try, and that's without activating any items until very late because clicking on the boxes was challenging to do and required causing the game window to lose focus in order to get the cursor to pass over them properly. Also there was never really a need to switch to a different weapon since the first one found (snake) was easily the most powerful due to repeatedly hitting and stunning enemies. It's not always easy to tell that an enemy is dead amidst the chaos of some rooms, so it would really help to have a sound effect for that
• TOTEM is a roguelite in the style of The Binding of Isaac, where you go from room to room and shoot things until you find the exit to the next floor. However, not only does it have pretty cool, psychedelic/vaporwave graphics to go with its New Age-y theme, but there are some substantial differences at play. In particular, you are not locked into the rooms you enter until you manage to kill everything inside, so you can pop in and out of them, or quickly move on past the horde if the room has no significance. However, you shouldn't do that too often, because in another difference from most Isaac-style games, you are allowed to go back up the stairs - in fact, you are required to go all the way back to the exit after beating the final (and only) boss on floor 8, and this will spawn new enemies in each room - potentially in addition to those you have not cleared before. Since the game does not mark rooms with stairs on the minimap, this also means that before you are about to fight the boss, it becomes a good strategy to go back up floor by floor and mentally map out the path from the down stairs to up stairs, so that you would not stumble through fights you do not need to have. Meanwhile, the combat is determined by the titular totems - animal masks which allow the protagonist to use the powers of their spirit in combat, with a room containing a random totem always present on each floor bar the boss one. You'll always attack the same way, through clicking/holding down the mouse when the enemies are near your crosshairs, but both your character's stats and the attack stats will vary widely, and there's a decent choice of totems available. Moreover, your stats can be modified further by using gems which occasionally drop from the enemies (alongside HP): up to five can be carried around, but only two can be active at any given time, which still gives substantial room for build-crafting. I.e. Eagle, a fast totem and the only one capable of shooting across the entire room, also has mediocre damage and so benefits a lot from totem multipliers - however, even stronger glass cannon leaves it too fragile even if also offset with a defence token. Meanwhile, the funniest way to play the game is to get a knockback-oriented Elephant totem, and modify it with MORE knockback gems - the end result throws monsters out of bounds almost immediately. While it's not very helpful in the long run, since they'll still be respawned in the center of the room when you come back, and with only minor damage sustained, it is certainly worth trying at least once. For actually winning, however, the totems with high rate of fire are far preferable to everything else. I have beaten the game with a Wolf totem and defense + glass cannon gems, but I have beaten the boss with a similarly rapid-firing Snake earlier, and the Bee is roughly as good as those two, any differences between them minor next to their superiority compared to slower totems, like the aforementioned Elephant or Eagle, the starting Bear or the Bat. After beating the boss, Tree of Life permanently replaces your current totem, and it is strong enough that the best move is to swap to dual defence gems to minimize danger from stray hits, especially from the one ranged monster type, whose 8-directional burst is only slightly weaker than the punch from lumbering troll monsters, and substantially stronger than the melee strikes from the other two. An unfortunate issue with the game is that while the four monster types all have good designs and serve distinct roles in combat, you'll likely see all of them on the first floor, and the subsequent floors and ascension run will simply gradually increase their numbers per room. At least you get to survey the carnage you caused every time you re-enter the room since dead bodies remain on the floor, forever frozen in whatever animation frame they were on when their HP ran out. In all, a roguelite with some great visuals and spins on the usual formula, and which could be really promising with more variety!