Hi, I've played for a while and defeated the first boss. I'm really enjoying it and will play more later. Here are some thoughts so far.
First, a few technical items:
- I was not able to install the game from the Itch client; you should set the platform for your download to Windows so that this will work. This will also allow the game to appear in search results for Windows games. I recommend using Butler to upload your builds, I find it pretty handy.
- When selecting Continue when no save file is present, the menu does something weird. It showed me a yes/no confirm box, and selecting yes stopped the music.
- The 3-2-1 countdown graphics have some pretty bad artifacting, especially around the edges (see screenshot); I'm guessing this is a scaling issue.
The sprites are charming and well-animated, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that weapons and armor change the character sprite. It's clear that a lot of time and effort went into doing so much art and animation. I also enjoyed the music, and the books and dialogue are particularly well-written and often erudite. There is a lot of lore, world-building, and character dialogue here, but it was easy to digest it at my own pace over multiple rounds.
I played as the orc. Combat is fun and well-paced, and hit detection and combat feedback work great, for the most part - I did have some trouble when attacking enemies below me, where the hit zone feels short, and sometimes didn't hit when it felt like it should. I found it difficult to attack enemies below me without getting hit, so I usually maneuvered around to attack from the side instead. This was particularly evident with the Mama Slime, which I simply could not hit from above at all.
One thing that bothered me was the starting feat selection; I chose regeneration, but after playing for a bit and looking through the available feats, I found that the other available starting feats cost as many as 40 (!!) feat points, while regeneration costs 1 or 2. This is a huge disparity that I wasn't aware of; it would be much more advantageous to spend the free feat on the expensive ones (especially if resetting your feats also refunds the starting feat - I didn't reset, so I don't know if it does).
A couple of minor things I'd like to see would be a more pronounced parry animation (it's very slight) and a popup of some kind telling you what item you just picked up or were given.
I didn't find a use for the slime lever in the slime warrens, so not sure if it's used later or if I just wasn't paying close enough attention. I would have checked around more thoroughly before fighting the boss, but I didn't think about it.
