Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• The music has a very 80s retro feel to it, like watching Stranger Things. The mazes are unique and the combat is challenging, though having to kill everything in an area to open the doors is more akin to a Zelda game than a traditional roguelike. In fact, this shares a lot more in common with the classic Zelda overhead games than Rogue.
• A roguelite which possibly shows the best use of sound in this contest. While a lot of submissions tend not to include any sound at all, limit themselves to only BGM/a few sounds, or have an obvious mismatch between different sound effects, every single sound here was clearly designed to work together. The starting beat dynamically accelerates to a much faster tempo as soon as the enemies appear, and seamlessly fades back down right as you kill the last one in the room. Death sounds differ for different monster types and the attack sounds are also apropos. Combat is simple enough, but the enemies' speed and the tight layout of each room means that kiting hostiles is nowhere near as easy as in some other roguelites submitted this year. Quite a lot of upgrades are available, but you can only buy them in the starting room - since the game intentionally emulates a labyrinth with no minimap, there is always a temptation to forego retracing your steps back to the start and instead attempt to push on further, hoping that you'll stumble upon the exit before succumbing to attrition. Whether or not that approach succeeds mostly depends on the total labyrinth size you set before starting the run. Labyrinth isn't perfect. The variety of individual rooms is relatively limited and some annoying layouts can crop up a bit too often if you select larger labyrinth sizes. There are also bugs - some rooms adjacent to the starting one may not generate properly, with the player seemingly sinking into a wall instead, or even getting to see another adjacent room from the side, and monsters may at times end up spawned on scenery and end up stuck there. Nevertheless, it is a unquestionable recommend, especially as those issues are secondary to the great core design and may end up ironed out later.
• Cute I like the cube aesthetic I think the design of all of the spaces to just perfectly fit the character leads to a really comfortable dungeoneering experience. The weapon swings feel good the weapons all seem to have their own place and the power ups are appropriate. Wise decision to cap the speed potions at 3 because I was more than really to collect enough coins to clip out of bounds. On that note I never found out what throwing coins actually did, had fun throwing them at enemies and every wall or question mark I ran into but nothing ever seemed to happen. Returning back to center to buy items is interesting but since most rooms are just a time sink on traversal and combat rooms are basically empty space it kind of leads to a really boring slog back to base every time you want an upgrade. I thin having items be found in the rooms/drop from enemies would've helped a lot. its fun i would like to see more im a sucker for hack and slash dungeon crawling. Also major bug report when firing the wand in rapid succession it clips my headset, seemed to happen to my friends who were watching my stream on discord as well not sure what would cause that but you should probably fix that or put a disclaimer for headphone users asap.