Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Creepy atmosphere!
• Tenement Hell is essentially a roguelite equivalent to Silent Hill 4: The Room: a horror game about the claustrophobia of being locked within a confined space, while also being in danger from supernatural assailants. This is very cool concept and I really hope it gets an expanded version down the line. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Tenement Hell in its current state. It appears that much of the week's development time went into creating the art, and it is absolutely the game's strongest point. Every single screen has this shabby, uncomfortable look: the monsters are all very creepy (with the exception of comically oversized rats that appear to be more of a comic relief) and even the peaceful Tenants look soaked in misery. Day-night cycle changes the view from the windows seemingly every other hour, and even if you keep the curtains closed, the changes in natural light remain. The soundscape is less developed, but it's still more than adequate. Unfortunately, the above appears to have taken so much time that a myriad of other intended features are left half-implemented. Some of it is to do with the visuals: locations like offices, toilet stalls, elevators, laundromats or a rooftop completely lack unique backgrounds and instead are represented by default empty rooms, which are often completely void of interactivity as well. Some gameplay options are present in a stub state: i.e. you can talk to the Tenants and gift them items, but both are completely meaningless right now. (At the same time, Tenants are completely apathetic to the player looting their apartments.) Likewise, the "examine" option that's designed for flavor text simply returns "An unknown object" for the majority's of interactable objects, including such everyday stuff as bedside tables and kitchen counters. I would have ignored this if that was the extent of missing features: sadly, missing or poorly coded content also impacts the core functionality in a drastic manner. * First aid kits are unusable, and there's no other way to restore HP. * Tins of beans are a food item that requires tin opener to consume: the game may not ever spawn that item anywhere. * Defeated enemies neither disappear nor are replaced with a "dead" sprite: instead, they just get stuck on that location's screen forever, no longer targetable or active, but visually unchanged. Moreover, it seems that defeating a certain kind of monster once prevents them from being a problem again: after killing one hostile Mannequin, the others stopped being targetable or hostile when they showed up. Subsequent rats were targetable 50% of the time, but never attacked. * Stamina is a resource that is consumed when either moving from one location to another or attacking. Waiting or resting is supposed to help restore it: instead, waiting always sets stamina to 12, regardless of its current value, and resting sets it to 26. * Sleeping is the only way to get stamina back up to 100. Sleep is broken as well: even if the character is not hungry and there are no lights on, he will still say that he normally goes to sleep at a time that's invariably hours away from the current time. However, he still gets stamina restoration from choosing the option, even as the text says he has not slept. * The bug with enemies stopping being targetable also appears to them being spawned. After you finally kill an annoying Split creature that appears heavily inspired by SH4, and bring down two location-specific monsters, no other creature ever appears. Then, there's nothing to do but to wait for the timer. * The player will run out of food about 5 days into the game. However, hunger bar is not programmed to kill the character once it runs out, so this is ultimately meaningless, and the only way to try and end the game then is to wait for the timer. * The 50-day timer was already unreasonably long, but it becomes truly interminable because many key actions simply do not consume any time whatsoever. Talking to the tenants passes no time: the current, broken form of sleeping also doesn't. Thus, the only way to advance the clock is to keep moving around or to wait in place (1 minute each) or to rest on a bed/futon/sofa (5 minutes). More than an hour into the game, I ran out of things to find on day 47, after which it was just resting and moving from apartment to apartment to consume food. By day 45, I ran out of all food in the game, and but since it didn't kill the character, I was again left with nothing to do but rest. I eventually installed an auto-clicker to see if that would allow me to rest until the game ends. However, thanks to the "loading bar" animations that play every time an action is taken, it still takes about half an hour to advance the clock by 5 more days, so trying to actually reach the ending would still require many hours of absolutely nothing happening. These reasons are why I do not recommend this 7DRL version of the game. However, I strongly encourage players to give this game a look should the creator resolve these technical issues in a later version.