Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• A city-building game where other player's hand-crafted cities can end up as part of your dungeons, Echo Down has a really neat premise. I played the post-jam version which added or improved on a few systems, the developer left a comment detailing the differences in the comments section. Echo Down feels like a complete game and was stable during the session. Echo Down has all the staples of a traditional roguelike while showcasing a town-building system as one of the primary game mechanics. The skill and crafting systems feel like early versions and didn't seem to have a lot of depth during the play sessions; this depth may come with more playtime. The game looks great and for the most part feels pretty smooth to play. The UI, menus, and controls felt lacking and were not always user-friendly. The pacing felt too slow, with many dungeon expeditions needed to gain loot which resulted in a player experience that had too much grinding for materials and gold. The dungeons reset with each expedition and you can leave relatively freely so there is little risk unless the player seeks it. You can lose a lot of progress if you do die (all carried items and materials) but you town persists between deaths.
• This game feels like it attempts to cross Angband with Minecraft for some strange reason. You go down small randomly generated floors that are re-rolled every single time, kill most enemies with just a single punch, but are also unable to heal the damage they deal in return unless you go back up (touching stairs upwards instantly warps you to the surface, regardless of how deep you were). There's no levelling or even good equipment: you just gather basic crafting materials, and some of the most valuable loot is floor tiles, so that you can go a little further in transforming the surface from parched red earth to houses and lawns. The more often you go down, the more people arrive at the surface, though they again only sell grass and dirt and crafting workbenches. If you die, you lose whatever you had in your inventory at the time, but the surface world stays the same as it was before, so it's really more of a metaprogression village-building game with no real villager interaction than anything else.