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.
So I'll be straight here: I dislike the design of this game a lot. The character moves so very slow, you had a completely hidden stamina bar system, trying to attack enemies is a pain and can often result in wasting shots.
The requirement to push a direction when you press attack is just needlessly complicated. I know it's because you reset the facing direction of the player when they're not moving to face down/towards the player, so if you just allowed attacks they'd always go in that direction without input... but why do this? Just make it remember the way you faced and remove the need for input.
Next there's the way the gun works. This is not intuitive at all and... honestly, sucks. You have to do everything I described to shoot, but then you have to hold it. Then the character will fire after a delay, which they'll keep firing following the same delay. This means that a player having quick reaction times doesn't matter; instead, having distance between enemies does, which only requires the player to run away. This just wastes the player's time. On top of this, this system can easily lead to the player wasting bullets. I noticed that enemies of the same type don't always have the same amount of health. The click and hold system is great if they always have the same HP, as you can always just let go once you fire x number of bullets. However, the randomness means that now you need to keep holding in case it has more HP. If it doesn't, you wasted a shot. This just sucks, because it's not like you can just do the four shots, wait to see and then quickly fire a fifth shot because you can't fire quickly.
It also feels like it's not possible to not get hurt from enemies unless you're using the gun, which is just generally not what I consider good for game design. I could be wrong, but this is how it looked.
Trying to go through any story item with multiple pages just felt awkward to do. Rather than pressing E to continue on, the player has to press... D... but you also use WASD as one set of movement controls... this is a weird one. Why not just make it E to progress?
And speaking of multiple page story items, looking at maps is just a pain in the ass. You have to first press tab to open your inventory, go to the right tab, find the map you're after (items are displayed in the order you obtained them and can't be sorted), then open it. Now when you want to close it and get back to moving, you have to press D first, then press E and THEN press tab to exit the inventory. Rather than have something where you can press a single key and exit the entire thing, you have to do three completely different key presses.
This then brings me to the dual menu system; an ESC menu and an inventory menu. Why not instead make it all be in the one thing, with the ESC menu options all under a singular tab? That way, you can use ESC for the inventory menu as well and reduce the number of controls you need.
There were also a few bugs I encountered. First, hearts don't respawn if you die and allow the game to restart you; you also don't still hold them. This means the game gets harder, as now you can't heal. There's also the fact that if you're looking at a story item and press something besides E, it'll reset the input and force you to wait to do another input. Then there was the bug that ended my playthrough, where I got to the institute through the tunnel, went up and then went through the door nearby (I expected it to take me further into the institute) only for the game to freeze up.