Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible (tutorials don't count in this). This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
Oh man, this was fun! The concept is cool, the sand surfing is fun and when I discovered the "MP3 player" I immediately went nuts. I didn't get far into playing the entire demo, but I'm okay with that given what I saw and the fun I had.
Okay, so let's get into visuals. While the visuals are more rudimentary in design when you start in the tutorial, that changes once you hit the desert. The desert and the sky looks beautiful, making up for the more basic looking interiors. As such, the visuals work fine as they are.
In terms of sound, it was also really basic. More simplistic sound effects for the most part. There wasn't really any music after a certain point, but when I discovered the built-in MP3 player I realized why. It would've been nice if the player was made aware about the MP3 player, though. I also think that instead of requiring the player to move the files into a specific folder, there should be a way for the player to direct the game to a specific folder to find MP3 files. That way, players don't need to duplicate their files to get them in-game.
With regards to controls, I'll admit that I wasn't a fan of the night vision button being all the way on the N key. Considering this is programmed as a mouse and keyboard game, the N key is far from a player's left hand. While it makes sense to make N-ight vision be on N, I think it'd be better to use a closer key. Also in regards to the binoculars, I'd argue that instead of clicking through to set zoomed points, players should be able to use the scroll wheel to go in and out.
Okay, now onto the gameplay. I'll admit I've never been good with stealth games and this was no exception. While I did eventually get better at it, it took me a while. I also found it difficult to escape from enemies once spotted since they would just always know where I was until the alerted timer went down. If possible, I think there should be a system where if they can't directly see you, they simply move to where they last saw you. If they can't directly see you from there, including if you hid in the sand while out of their sight, then they shouldn't be able to keep tracking you. Since this game is doing the weird thing of being stealth missions in daylight, there should be some things to give the player an easier time to escape from being seen.
One thing I wasn't a fan of in terms of the gameplay was how slow it was to kill enemies when you grabbed them. It felt like the game was very slow to respond to the kill command, waiting a second or so before the animation would even begin. The animation also felt slow, which could really screw the player over if an enemy decided to face in your direction while you were waiting for the animation to play out. I also wasn't a fan of the one enemy that would just always know you were there regardless of which way they faced. They would even sometimes see through objects, which felt particularly frustrating. Maybe this was a bug, but sometimes tells me otherwise. If it's not a bug, being taught about this enemy and how to recognize them would probably be a good idea.
The last two things I want to bring up are some bugs I came across. For starters, if you accept a call from Tucker when item text is on screen, the item text will appear above the call and can cover the call text. This can result in the player not knowing what's being said. Second, while I was furiously trying to remember how to change my item, I somehow caused the game to go very slow. It was very strange. I had to close the game in order to fix it, as it would affect everything except turning the camera.
That should be it from me. I hope to see more of this in the future!