This game reminded me a lot of Hyperlight Drifter, the art direction is spectacular with the use of pixel art, and that was the first thing that captured my attention when I booted up the game. I have a few points I'd like to make:
The game felt way too easy, and the first boss music was a bit too short. That's all I can think of really, you've got an amazing project and I hope that it becomes a full-length experience because I'm a sucker for this kind of atmosphere, Bravo!
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Near Singular's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
ART / VISUALS | #82 | 3.731 | 4.375 |
BOSS DESIGN | #106 | 3.091 | 3.625 |
CONTROLS | #145 | 2.878 | 3.375 |
Overall | #165 | 2.843 | 3.333 |
SOUNDS / MUSIC | #199 | 2.558 | 3.000 |
USE OF THEME | #204 | 2.345 | 2.750 |
FUN | #211 | 2.452 | 2.875 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game's take on the theme
Attacking the enemy makes him drop data fragment. Collecting this gives player buffs
Did your team create the vast majority of art and music during the game jam?
Most of the art. Music are from Artlist.io
Did your game use PlusMusic?
No
Did your game use Playroom?
No
Did your game use generative AI art?
No
Comments
This is a really neat little hyper-light-like! The piano music at the start and end was really great. A few things to consider:
- The basic attack doesn’t have any forward momentum, which makes it feel a little stiff. Adding a tiny bit of movement to the basic attack (stopping if you hit an enemy) could improve that feel a little.
- It looks like not all your sprites are ‘point’ filtered (some look to be using the default ‘bilinear’ filtering), resulting in blurriness of pixel art. I think the 4th boss (the lady with the sword) had this issue on her sword animations.
Some of the VFX are really nice. I like the hit sparks when you land a sword slash, and the main player’s animations are solid!
Games like this hit home for me, because I got inspired to start making/releasing games when I first saw hyper-light drifter, and it feels like this game takes a lot of inspiration from that game. Nice work, like others have said this game has a solid foundation.
The art and visuals are definitely the strongest pointers in this game. As someone that playtested the game prior, the improvements made actually do make the game feel much better to play! Some thoughts:
- I must commend the great game juice found with attacking the boss with the camera shake. Overall the combat feels like its standing on a good framework - and now it needs more work on each pillars.
- The changes to the final boss to have anticipation frames are appreciated, none of the attacks in all the bosses feel unfair.
- One notable thing I will mention is that the game is simply too easy. I find that I can just spam attack and walk around the boss. The player can dish out enough DPS such that the boss just dies before they unleash enough attacks.
The game has some real, and solid foundations - and with enough work and polish, it can shine.
Very cool game design in general. The character control is also well executed, there is not enough complexity and explanation of the control. I do not know if this is a bug or not, but I could not attack with the keyboard buttons, and after treatment I could not walk. There is clearly not enough polishing.
The intro was really cool and the menu and visuals are pretty.
However,
So I found two possible bugs the two times I tested. First I lost control of my character in the middle of the fight, in some point I simply could not walk anymore, only way of movement was dodging. I died and then restarted, this time I managed to beat the boss but the door I was supposed to proceed closed before I had the chance to walk through it. I'm not sure if I missed something. The sound of the stomp after the jump was too, too loud, compared to the rest of the audio of the game.
Maybe with more polishing it will turn out to be a great game (:
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