Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• PRESENTATION
  

  Graphics are almost all custom created. They fit together well and look good despite being simplistic in style. The mapping is decent and uses the tiles to good effect. In fact, about the only thing that wasn't custom, graphics-wise, was the window skin and icons.

  The writing is alright. There's a lot of punctuation issues strewn through-out the game, and the writing is a bit stilted at times due to this and some grammatical issues, but otherwise it's alright. The characters are very thin - not much went into the way of characterisation and interaction. What was there was used to inform instead of build the characters and it came off overall as a bit hammy.

  The story itself was interesting - a young boy was accused of having killed another young boy and had become a social pariah. His friends want to help him prove his innocence so they return to the house where the death happened hoping to destroy the evil that took the life of the other boy. It, like the characterisation, is pretty thin but it works as a framing device for the game.

  The music is decent. It fit well where it was used and wasn't jarring. It was mainly RTP, as far as I could tell. Same with sound effects - they were used in the default manner, with no uses to build atmosphere. They existed and they weren't jarring.

  GAMEPLAY
  Gameplay consists of battles and exploration.

  The aim is to open the attic and to do that you need to search the house for items and keys. The items are to help you survive enemies, the keys are to open the next in a chain of doors so that you can progress.

  Battles were a little on the easy side, but they were used mainly as padding to get you used to the skills for boss battles. They also provided item drops aplenty so that you could deal with the bosses with enough loot.

  Skills were alright, learned from cards that you found scattered around the place. They were also default skills, which was a pity.

  Monsters has their own attack patterns which is always nice. The lost boss wasn't too hard since you'd gotten three Pyro attacks by then and could spam that over and over without worrying about his blind skill hampering your damage output.

  Battles were random encounters inside the house and a few non-random ones outside/against bosses.

  ENGAGEMENT (
  It was a cute little game and despite a fair bit of defaultisms, it was mildly enjoyable. Care was taken to make battles not too hard, and you were rewarded for exploring with items, which was nice. I appreciated the art style quite a bit.

  One thing that did annoy me a little was that the areas were blocked off by literal road blocks in the way where you couldn't go. It felt constrictive. I did appreciate the arrows letting you know where you could go, though.

  THEME
  The theme was revenge kills and it showed this via the story aspects of the game. The end line especially showed this off, even if the rest of the game fell flat, theme-wise.

  45/80