Like all of my other reviews, I'll try to be objective and balance the pros and cons on this project. It is not intended to be negative in any way, I'm just trying to be honest and help the creator to improve the game and their own skills.
So the Mighty Sloth takes you in a funny spaceship in which the situation is critical, because the rest of the crew has been killed by an alien, the terrible Polymorph, and you're the last survivor. Of course the Polymorph will try to kill you too, and your only chance of survival is to... err, what is it? :D I'm not sure you really stand a chance against it in fact, because you're just supposed to stop thinking! Isn't that synonymous of being dead? ^^
In this funny context, we awaken in a stasis pod. Immediately the player has to press one of the 2 buttons. I like to try the less obvious solutions so I immediately pressed the red button. I've been asked 3 times to confirm my choice and it ended up in horrible screams and the death of my character in the worst sufferings! I don't think I was prepared for it and I don't want to live this experience again! So next time I was asked, I immediately pressed the green button and could finally walk freely in the first room. Phew!
The art in The Mightly Sloth is nice with a cartoon style, which might not be my first choice for an alien scifi game, but still is ok, particularly because there's humor and second degree in the different situations. Technically, the textures are quite detailed and there's a surrounding inking around the modeling made with some kind of cell-shading tool. There aren't a lot of objects in the rooms and they are quite lowpoly, and the 3d render parameters (lighting, shaders, global illumination, ambiant occlusion etc) are very basic, probably to save rendering time, and I have absolutely no issue with that, knowing very well the complexity of that kind of technique. Overall the game looks like a solid game from the 1990s, with the addition of high resolution, and the graphics do their job. I find the art mainly lacks of post-process (visual effects) to add a more modern touch, but we can say this is mainly a question of personal tastes. Once you start playing you don't even care about the art, the renders are neat and do their job, and overall the game looks fine.
The main interest of The Mighty Sloth resides in the setting and ambiance. We are mainly between horror/scary spaceship on the one side, and humour/cartoon on the other side. That works very well, and despite the fear that the Polymorph can induce, every situation is just fun and absurd, which is accentuated by different jokes in the texts. The game never bored me, I wanted to see the end of it, and the challenge wasn't unfair. I was only stuck once or twice, because I couldn't find a hotspot (yes I'm talking to you stupid chest next to the "work bench"!) but the game is fair and never too hard or too easy. You progress in the story in a very usual way, and it's interesting if you like the genre.
Technically the game is not perfect. I've talked above of the art, which is subjective, but there are a couple of other issues here and there that can bother you if you're a perfectionnist:
- I went through a few bugs that I listed to the dev, so there might be a new version available to download than the one I've played.
- Sometimes when an object appears on screen (such as the blender) you see that it's a cropped picture that was placed over the background, but it causes a shift of a few pixels, which makes it obvious that the blender doesn't have transparency around it. Anyway I might be one of the only players who notice it, so it doesn't matter.
- Along the other issues I found, I think some of the sound design and music is not always at the same level, and for example when the main character dies and screams, the sound is very loud (even more shocking!).
- I finally noticed a few typos here and there.
Globally, as a conclusion, I would say that The Mighty Sloth might not be the most polished and the most impressive game ever, it is quite classical in its form and might not impress young players, but what it does, it does it well. I really enjoyed the experience, I laughed a few times, was caught by the story, and the Polymorph idea is interesting. The dev of this game (and another person I think) said that this project finds its inspiration in an old UK tv show called the Red Dwarf. I don't know it, so I can't compare, but if you saw it and are a fan of it, then just go ahead and play The Mighty Sloth without hesitation: it's really a good game, quite long for a Jam, and with plenty of good ideas! I liked it!