Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This was a fun submission. Unfortunately I needed the hints to get the "good" ending because I am not very good at riddles. I know there are four endings but I didn't really want or know how to try to get the other two. Anyway, everything seemed to work as intended for me so great job.
• Grue's Manor is a short horror game, just like the classic horror games on RPG Maker like Ib and Witch's House. It features free roaming as opposed to SRPG style movement, making this entry a display of what you can do alternatively in SRPG Studio. The atmosphere is good enough and the sections are intelligently displayed to showcase them in a single map. Unfortunately for this project, as an horror game is pretty lackluster. To begin with, due to the limitations of the exploration plugin, you could accidentally trigger events that are adyacent while trying to examine something (for example, triggering the note event next to the wall while you're facing the wall). Another problem I had is the way too cryptic hints across the game, that could easily be bypassed by the ol' Trial and Error approach (triggering also some dumb deaths, but takes far less time than trying to figure out the hints the game provides). Also there is no control of events and you could potentially sequence break this by ignoring half of the puzzles. To make it even worse, despite the cheap deaths the game puts you, some puzzles require heavy metagaming that isn't obvious at first thought. The entry had an interesting twist on a different type of game made with SRPG Studio, but the problem lies in the core of the game itself rather than the concept or the engine.
• This is one of the more unique ideas brought to the table and it's done well. The horror tone is set pretty quickly and then the puzzles kick in and are pretty good ones in game. I'm split on the hints that need meta stuff to solve since it's a cool idea, but also less satisfying than figuring out from what's actually in play. There's a lot I like, but there does need to be a periodic ability to save because of how tedious it gets going back and doing each individual piece over and over whenever you mess up.