I’m quite late to play but I was curious to come back and check out the judges’ top pick eventually!

Very robust Dungeon Crawler gameplay fundamentals. A bit on the easy side, and equipment quality ramps up unexpectedly fast, but that was appreciated for packing a full experience into a short jam game. Your endgame twist was very cool – I didn’t expect all that extra content in the last couple minutes, including the outdoor map. It made me a lot more invested in your story/world, too.

I found a coin item that said it raised my strength by 5, but I never did figure out how to use it. It wouldn’t equip to any slots and when I passed it between characters, their stats didn’t change. I wonder what that was about…?

Congratulations and best of luck with your next game.

This is a truly fantastic entry, from all points of view. You did everything well in this, from the atmosphere to the old-school gameplay and inspiration, to the theme implementation (I was wondering where the duality comes in right before I approached the altar haha). 

Really enjoyed this one quite a lot, it's one of the strongest entries in the jam.

Man, I almost got a hitless run if it wasn't for those fireballs.

Really solid entry. I find it a little annoying when I tried to use left-click to attack by clicking the icon.

Excellent game!

It has everything for a great RPG, it's beautiful, it plays well, exploration is rewarding, there are stats. I definitely enjoyed it a lot!

The only things that are missing are some information about the stats and their purpose, and also little information on how to fight (I died like a noob at the first wraith because I had no idea how to attack before trying all keys and mouse buttons and then finding out)

Though if it was the price to pay to have such a complete game in a week, I definitely would tell it worthed the sacrifice of the tutorial! haha

Excellent job!

Really nice!  Took me a little over a half hour to get through to the end.  All of the graphics and visuals come together very nicely, and there's a surprising amount of variety in environments, especially at the end!  My only complaints is that I wish it paused while I was in the menu, the first time I got into a fight I was trying to save before the fight and almost died while re-reading the intro text after re-loading =).

Very nicely done, graphics are of a very high quality, whole story is laid out and game feels almost complete in terms of features. I was surprised by the endinge section of a game in terms of how good it looks.

I wish there were better hit reactions and more feedback from enemies' attacks to make combat feel a bit more responsive, and movement be less constrained in terms of queueing, but overall game is really solid.

Hey, I finally played your game :)

• felt that before even starting, mainly from the screenshots, that this is a top-notch work, at least in graphical and atmosphere department.
• great title screen, very atmospheric and with a nice background music
• I really appreciate the time putting such an "Options" screen, not many people did that, including myself :) And you put many settings in there, that's a commercial-level options page :)
• I love that you started the adventure in the most traditional and efficient way ever, in a loud tavern.. Great vibes. Pretty nice that you multicolored the text, I like the technique myself, loved it :)
• I really like good D&D-like PC games and this one is really oozing this kind of inspiration.. Loved the whole text, the screenshots and lore being explained before even starting. Presentation was outstanding!
• unfortunately, the game seems to be built for high-end PCs and couldn't managed to play a lot. I am left with a crappy laptop these days, I will check it again when my new monster of a machine arrives :)
• It also crashed twice on me when I entered on that dungeon; definitely need to be checked on lower-end machines. Lovely graphics by the way
• regardless, I loved the movement and field-of-view, such a classical implementation, I loved it :)
• you seem to put a lot of work there, content, puzzles, graphics polish, for such a small time-window, along with lots of lore around :)
• I need a week myself to fully appreciate this game and you made it in a week, ha!

Overall, although I didn't it played much due to hardware constraints, I loved every second of that. Will definitely bookmark it for later :) Please, continue on it!

Wow, insane how this game had a full story with optional lore and twists! Loved the sense of power growth it had too with the items and stats. I think you could have made it so there was only one inventory since splitting it up felt a little pointless, and the health potions weren't super useful since the health regen usually fixed the damage I got. Felt a little bad that I killed all the guards but I'm glad you could still kill them, it gave me a good laugh! Really cool game either way, super impressive what you were able to do in just a week!

Stunning! Great visuals, great atmosphere.

Though a bit long in the beginning, dialogues and story are well written. Love the dynamic between the 2 characters.

There are some bugs, sure, but for something like this built in only a week that's totally acceptable.

Some issues I encountered:

* Items disappearing when accidentally dropped. I knew this could happen so I saved before and after picking stuff up.

* I could kill all the guards in the guard room. And could still talk to them. It gave a lot of xp, after that my characters were very OP.

* In some places there is light visible from the other side of walls.

I really liked this entry but 

- All of my items fell through the floor (i know you mentioned this but i'm just dumb and accidentally threw boots on the floor - found another later and accidentally threw it again lol) 

- Didn't know i can use other spells than the one you already have equiped until it was almost too late 

- The outdoor area looked fantastic but my framerate kinda died there

-The duality part was fun but it felt kinda forced and i didnt know why i was there and it just did not matched the story + i don't know if it was intentional but i was unkillable in the duality corrupted part 

Overally if we ignore those small thing the game was brilliant and i really enjoyed it! Really strong entry i'd say

we accept "life and death" as the duality.

A nice looking game.

I enjoyed doing some voice acting for the various characters.

I think that the old dude in the tavern was Graham.

(that wont make sense to most people, but I don't care!)

Good job.

All the stars.

Excellent work on this one! You managed to cram a full story in here that was rather cool, especially for a one week jam! Over all, I don’t have anything major to criticize with this entry, but there are a few thoughts…

• I love that there was usable inventory items and I was definitely in “horde all the items” mode, but the potions seemed… unneeded. Health and mana regenerated automatically, so the potions seemed to have little meaning.
• Equipped items and spells, I think, shouldn’t be changeable unless the inventory is open. There were a few times in the game where I was fighting a wraith and sometimes I left-clicked instead of right clicked and nearly lost a spell or weapon. If I’m only allowed to change these when the inventory is open, there’s be less of a risk of me loosing a spell/item… or, at the very least, loosing the fight while I try to wrestle the spell/item back in place to use it.
• Once the twist is revealed, I think it would have been better to automatically equip the characters abilities. I didn’t realize they weren’t equipped until the worst possible moment and that could have sucked!
• Near the end, the outdoor area was setup in a way that, while gorgeous looking, made it difficult for me to know where the grid was where I could walk. There was a path that I thought was a wall (foliage seemed to block the way) but it wasn’t and confused me for a moment.

Over all, very nice game! Excellent entry into the jam! Well done!

Here’s a link to me playing your game during my stream!

Beautiful to look at, great to listen to, smooth movement, fun to play. It checked every box for us. Absolutely brilliant. The AI generated art really added a lot to the story and atmosphere and is something we'll look to do ourselves in the future. We played the game to completion in about 30 minutes.

It's hard to find fault in what you've done here for a game jam but in  the spirit of providing some constructive feedback, this is what we'd do to improve things:

• Less wordy introduction maybe? Get into the game quicker.
• The cursor pivot point was off on your inventory icons so you had to drop them off where your cursor wasn't.
• Some items fell through the floor when you dropped them. (You did mention this in your write up)
• The icons weren't always self-consistent, for example the apple filled the whole inventory slot box where some other icons fit nicely inside with a small margin around them. The Scribbled Note too overflowed the inventory box slightly.
• The duality at the end felt a bit forced. We weren't sure what our motivation was or what the point was from then on.
• Not always clear what is and isn't a pickup.
• Wardrobes feel like they should be openable but didn't.
• The default armour we were wearing was a low poly seemingly untextured asset when we dropped it, which was different to the other assets. It was like you grey-boxed it and forgot to switch this one out. Had we not dropped it we wouldn't have noticed though.
• Barrels weren't breakable - we wanted to smash them apart!

It would be great to see a write-up of what you created during the jam, what you did before the jam and what was part of the Unreal Dungeon Crawler Toolkit asset. 

Great job. You're sure to do really well in the final ratings and so you should.

Wow, great job! Lots of content, an enjoyable battle system, loot, and a complete story! I appreciated that it let me lure enemies into traps to do damage to them; it showed a good attention to detail.

very cool! One of my favorites so far!

Hehe, I thought just using two characters was a lazy take on the theme, then I advanced through the game and well, there's definitely more than that but you already know this.

The game feels quite polished with very good movement and control feelings. Also a button is almost already enough for me to like it, I started by bumping onto the walls (even a bit further away) then went OK it must be a button then. A dungeon without dungeon mechanics feels a bit pointless to me so I'm always happy when people put some in their game.

That was cool, thanks for sharing.

Just ignore the question if it's inappropriate, but did you comment on my game just a bit earlier? I think I got an alert then saw a message then it vanished (I might totally have deleted it by mistake).

OMG, what a game! I forgot I was playing a jam game, and when it ended, I was, “what? where’s the rest of the game?!”

Amazing graphics, solid sound design, and great combat mechanics. It had me engaged every time.

The only thing I would consider would be that if the player initiates combat, it would be good to know what the enemy will pick as they’re at a disadvantage, but perhaps that’s part of the balancing.

Amazing game, amazing execution. Excellently done!

Wow! That was a big download for a jam game! But, it was totally worth it!

I love a good puzzle game and really enjoyed the graphics and sounds effects. Overall, looks and feels very polished!

A great entry here!

A very complete package, very well done. 

Not to sound nitpicky but the explorer in me missed a bit of exploration, I mean puzzles and pressure plates and traps are there but you really can go only one way and the chances of getting lost are close to zero, or I am missing something? I bumped head a lot, did not find anything other then the stuff that was in plain sight. 

After all we only had seven days and you cant do everything.

Overall a very enjoy full experience. Graphics & sound are top notch so this is as close as you can get to an sell able product in 7 days I guess.

I know there asset packs in use here and quite a bit of re-used code but this is a really nice crawler and with more content and polish I'd pay to crawl it. Great job!

The art is amazing. I know it's AI generated but I don't care. I love it!

The dungeon graphics is great too and you nailed the movement and perspective view 100%

Wow at the inventory system and character abilities.

Combat is traditional real time dance routine but I don't mind. It works as advertised.

LOL at credits screen: "This Game has been made by a person".. Well except for the AI generated art ;)

+1 for arrow keys and numpad controls