This is a really, really impressive game. I love the concept of using ASCII art for a metroidvania, and your use of color and light intensity, the feeling of refraction when in among the crystals, etc., really breathed life into the idea. The way the narrative and new areas cascaded was very well designed, and I thought the difficulty level was perfect -- frustrating/puzzling at times, but I always wanted to keep prodding and pushing to figure it out (I played to the end). I haven't played ASCII games much (or at all?) so I'm not sure what's drawn from the classics, but the way the terrain had its own set of rules that you made learnable to the user was very creative and fun. It's also very difficult to
make games where the player truly looks forward to reading the narrative texts, but you accomplished that for me here. My experience in submitting to a recent SuperMVM was that it doesn't generate too many comments, which was a reason I came here to try out some entries -- so glad I did, and I hope this game caught some people's attention. Awesome work! I'll watch out for your future games!
Hi Hinman, thank you for such nice feedback! I'm so happy to hear that all the elements I tried to put into the game came through for you. Making games is fun but hard work, and hearing player's experiences like yours is what makes it all worthwhile! Thank you.
By the way, I checked out all of your games and I think they are great. You really have a nice pixel art style, but what stood out to me the most was your strong sense of composition on the screen and dramatic/comedic timing in your narrative elements.