This game was painful to play in the sense that it felt like a wasted potential. The individual parts are good: custom art, cool world building, neat concept of deadline and activities: but putting them together with the rest doesn't make it shine as it should.
- My biggest problem with presentation was the mapping: art was pretty and custom, same with facesets, but the maps using he materials were slipshod and barebones. In general it would have helped to make maps smaller and size up tiles to x2 or x3 the size. Small, nice maps would have been much preferable to large, messy ones with tiny graphics. The mapping wasn't very good either, too much empty space that made it look unfinished.
- It feels like there's not much to do at all, and everything you can find costs too much time and money. Obviously I only played through once and the game wants you to repeat the cycle, but if the first go didn't hook me I don't have much reason to.
- Balance felt off: the mine job was purely positive, giving money and stat, but the job at the waterways gives money an takes away a whole whopping 50 MAX Hp, not even current HP. That feels like a very large penalty for an activity that doesn't have that big of an upside.
- I could only find one follower: the jellyfish girl. I saw a couple other portraits which I assume mean they were playable but one disappeared (the jellyfish dude in your hometown) and the other didn't give me a quest (the demon girl in your hometown gate). The other one in the game page (big person) i never even saw.
- The bandit running around your home town is bugged: you automatically win.
- The demon lady in the bar (i think) of the demon town doesn't talk.
- It feels like the game tires to cram a bit TOO much world building in, especially terminology. Some looser, simpler terms would have been welcome.
- With nothing else to do and NOT at all prepared I went to the dungeon to see what it was like, and got my ass rocked, of course.
- Again, the custom graphics were very pretty (faces and tiles) but the tiles are wasted being so tiny and used in barebones maps.
Balance feels iffy, but I'm not sure how to address it. Some suggestions off the top of my head:
- Improve the mapping and double up tile size.
- Make time NOT advance from walking around in maps,activities already take up a lot of time.
- Have more activities to do, even for smaller rewards/times.
- More hints as to activities would be nice, especially related to party members.
I might be wrong but this feels unfinished, and that's a pity. It could have been a very neat game.