1. It's the whole predators/aggressors thing, yeah. Lot of overt metaphors regarding sheep, shepherds, the oxymoron of "lone wolf" because wolves are pack animals.
2. I didn't think of the animal embryo bit. That's actually genius. I'm gonna steal that idea.
3. Recruitable Mothman real, yeah. In playtesting, I only got 1/4 people to recruit him. Which I'd like to raise to at least "half the playerbase will find him."
Finished the demo
Couldn't solve the water treatment plant's puzzle, I have the impression you have to be gathering items to awaken some creature, and the only item I think was left was the one above the padlock door (between two doors) which I couldn't arrive at no matter what. That aside, the doppelganger encounter was a pretty clever, and I understood it betteron the secong time walking that corridor.
The Dagon battle was a bit good, but mostly I liked the Beak and Flounder interaction. That said, should a LV0 random fish also have 1000 HP?
Ninetails was more interesting for that one scene than Abe across the whole demo. When he accuses me of this and that, and says we are not the same, it's hard to think anything of it when I'm nobody. Four places with some 12 hours sounds pretty doable though. I also got curious about the cigarrettes and burning house you can find afterwards.
I must ask, however, aren't you a bit too enfatuated with status that apply freeze? One of my hydra fights ended instantly because the whole party got frozen in the AOE. The fish encounters underground were essentially letting myself die once to get full healed and actually have a chance at the battle. Had Amy not learned the one AOE attack, i'd have been pissed at the Dagon fight, probably. I absolutely think this game needs more AOE at most, more multi hit at least.
Since both Dagon and Hydra were necessary to end the demo, I have no idea what the three optional bosses are now. I also only found 5 (6 with the mothman I didn't recruit) of the 9 characters that were in it, and can't even guess what I didn't do right to not find them.
Loan Shark was the most interesting skill, Norman's line upon being devoured also rose my interest in him as a character.
I've said most of my pieces, and what I haven't said are things I don't think would be constructive, so if there's something you'd like to know/ask for your research on the gaming experience you've provided, it's the last thing I can do for you at this point.
- The treatment plant doesn't have a puzzle. It's just get in, get the key, get out. It'll probably make more sense when I replace the flounderer with the key with a party member recruit. Like "Oh. So this was the end of that."
- Flounderer is Level 0 cause it can't attack. Only alternative to my mind would be "Lv. ?"
- Yeah, Ninetails is definitely a character I wanted to get right. The burning stuff is his doing, effectively "If you weren't here, he would've resolved things. You're both wolves killing other wolves. Aside from your chosen LARP, you are functionally the same guy." It's something I try to lean into, and will do earlier with the afforementioned Norman-replacement recruit that goes "Hey isn't it weird that you kill wolves? Don't you see them differently as one of their kind?"
- I'll keep the AoE thing in mind. Moth Man is "the AoE guy," but one more wouldn't hurt. Also yeah, the Freeze obsession is a thing I've been fighting against. A problem of my own making, deciding the first area to be "the water area."
- Party members are Amy, Norman, Boyle (standard most people find), Laura (wolf, resident of the house that burnt down), Moth Man (wolf), Buddy Rabbit (another sewer encounter), and Herbert (the guy with the bike lock around his neck who you freed while he was brainwashed)
- I want to thank you a lot for taking the time out to do this. This isn't just me blowing smoke. The fact you really did care to be blunt with your criticisms is gonna do me infinitely better in the long-run than the people too afraid or uncaring to share their honest thoughts.
If I had to ask one thing: what was your experience with the Devour mechanic? It was meant to sorta be like "If you're struggling, here's your out."
-What a fool I've been too late for so long (I wont even say how long I spent going forwards and backwards to see different rooms and try to find the right sequence)
-The level displays really put the mind for a spin, endless tricks
-"The opposite of justice isn't evil, but a different justice," as they say. He kills wolves, he kills people, he believes he's more worth of the cure than you, as a foil he seems solid. We will be there for him no matter what.
-Since battles are meant to last a bit long in general, and bosses even longer, it could just be a two-stage ailment. Water first makes you cold, or wet, and cold/wet makes you more susceptible to freeze. If Hydra and Dagon can straight up freeze with some attacks, it shows their advanced powerlevel and is fine, but the average fishes could have this small nerf to their squad. (Considering the squad too, it could be that one part of it responsible for causing wet, and the other for causing frozen, iunno how you'd prefer to design this)
-The flow was just too good to walk back and check those places once the water level was down... Thoughthe bike guy I almost got right, but I thought itd be a boss battle and left for later. Once I couldn't progress on other places, I went back there to see the fight and instead he just left. (Maybe finding his corpse by the Hydra or before Dagon to transmit the mistake done there would help the player identify that plot was cut short due to the early release)
-After I finished it I devoured the whole team and seeing Abe transform gradually actually made the monkey brain activate. Probably worth playing over again just to see a full lupus playthrough. Being able to learn Shuffle from Amy actually made it seem extremely broken potentially. If it's not planned for the full game, what I think would be interesting would be getting a small memento, equip or key item, from people you eat, just to remind you of what youve done. And a derail about my design thoughts and philosophies: If there's a world where Full Devour route has the toughest encounters known to man and is the technical hard mode, I'd make it so after some numbers of devours, the skill evolves to give you more stats from the devoured, better versions of their skills or multiple of them, and you dont even get the mementos anymore, just a "regurgitated junk you ate on accident" to show how your humanity has decreased so much you can't even control your impulses properly when eating humans (maybe you can even eat wolves at this point?). It's fun, and many more fun things can be done on top of it.
