I finished the demo. Here's my impressions :
- I liked the art style and music.
- I liked the combination of dungeon crawling and point& click. That works very well, and unlocking the optional paths or finding the hidden treasures is rather rewarding. The different pointers for different interactions is interesting, as it allows revisiting dungeons with a new power to discover more secrets.
- I liked less the battles though. The combination of match 3 and shoot'em up doesn't work as well as the combination used for exploration. I think the issue here is that you are forcing the player to do two things at the same time, which is hard by itself.
- A simplification of the match 3, by removing the chain could make the game a little easier for the player as the match 3 would play quicker. For swapping two feys, you currently need three clicks, while by removing the chain, you would only need two clicks. The chain would be an interesting game mechanic if the battle was turn-based as it allows preserving turns by swapping more than two tiles in a single turn. But here, the game is action-based, with the shoot'em up part that hapens at the same time as matching tiles, so the player should be able to quickly switch between the two modes, and because of this, the player doesn't really have the time to think about chains.
- For the combo spell, I think I would have prefered spells triggered automatically when thresholds are reached instead of having an extra spell to trigger manually that change with the number of combos. But on the other side, it's also a way to reset the combo timeout. Ideally, the combo spells should be different from the manual spells.
- I had a lot of difficulties to beat the boss at the end of the forest. This is the first boss with the ability to invoke shapes, and the main issue here is that this boss can easilly submerge the player with shapes due to her ability to turn cursed feys into shapes. At that point of the story, the player only have two characters at its disposal, with very little ways to improve them (outside grinding levels with random battles), and the link between the combometer and the damage inflicted by destroying shapes has also not yet been explained (the page that explains it is found later in the game). I think this boss should be rethought, and the ability to turn cursed feys into shapes be reserved for a later boss.
- I played the Linux version of the demo. I encoutered two crashes when changing room, but no obvious way to reproduce them. I noted that the game systematically crashes with a segfault when I'm closing it.
- I'm finishing with a suggestion : add a way to quickly travel between the save rooms, as this avoids to traverse several screens when going back to town from a dungeon. I especially felt I would need this when exploring the last dungeon which contains a save room. I guess that quick travel feature should be limited by the story.