I don’t think I’ve seen the mechanic of claiming the power of the enemy that kills you before. That was quite innovative, but I think it is fundamentally a bit strange in game play. Either you encounter an enemy that you can defeat but deliberately lose to just to get the power; or conversely, you have no chance of defeating them unless you have their power, both of which are rather unsatisfying. The power stealing mechanic is the star; but I don’t know if death is the best way to implement it. I can see this implementation respects the whole looping theme, but I think there is something here that would work better without this limitation.
Other than that, here’s some general thoughts:
- Choosing the different abilities should have been mapped to the scroll wheel with a 3 slot inventory instead of mapping to different input keys.
- Mana regeneration felt really slow for no reason other than to incentivize death. Its especially annoying when the aiming mechanic is rather imprecise to one shot the flying enemy so you waste mana.
- Camera control would have been nice. Sometimes the flying enemies went into some corner that was hard to view with the default angle.
- There was a general lack of polish/juice which hurt the experience a bit, paired with the somewhat mediocre visual assets. I don’t mean to take a dig at your work, but it definitely helps with the experience if the presentation is nicer.
Overall, its an interesting entry but definitely needs to be fleshed out more.