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. 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.
When I started this game up, I was honestly excited for what I was about to play. However, it quickly became apparent to me that there's a lot that needs to be done with this game. I want to go over the things I encountered that made this very difficult to navigate.First, the tank controls. While I know there was a point and click option, I had a preference for making use of the keyboard instead. This meant using the tank controls. Mind you, this was before I found out that you could rotate the camera so it felt a little limiting for me. Once I learned about camera rotation it felt a bit better.
Second, stamina usage. Stamina burns VERY quickly in comparison to how fast it recovers. I spent well over half my time waiting for stamina to recover. I was in shock from how slow the stamina recover was. It also gets WAY worse when you pick up an artifact, as you barely move a few steps before you're completely empty. Perhaps there are ways to improve it, but if so then I never figured them out as once I got to a certain point I got really frustrated.
I also noticed that if you dig too much in one spot, you can get yourself trapped. However, visually it doesn't look like you should be. While more digging does get you out, if your shovel happens to break while you're trapped then you might be screwed.
However, what was the most frustrating part was when I had found an artifact and had shown it to the professor. I went to take a picture... only to never figure out HOW to take a picture. I held the artifact to the camera and pressed buttons, I held the camera to the artifact and pressed buttons, I even put them both down on the ground and tried pressing buttons around the camera and nothing happened. I spent several minutes trying to figure this out, even looking for any additional information outside of the game, before I gave up and started writing this feedback.
I feel like this game would strongly benefit from a tutorial where the player has a set first dig site with a set first artifact, where it walks through every step of the process (including saying how to do certain things) as I didn't feel like a lot of things were obvious (such as picking up the artifact. The controls for picking up are a tiny thing in the bottom left corner, where I'm not looking and where my stream couldn't see due to my avatar in the way).