I’m sad to say this of all the games I’ve tried from this jam, this is the one I couldn’t finish. The level with the hands was just too much. That said, the core of this game was really fun! There was just a bit too much friction for me to finish it right now.
I’ll break my experience down into positives, negatives, and ideas.
Positives:
- The Cancel Jump move feels really nice to use, learning how fast it moves you down and figuring out the timing to land where you want to
- The fact that you can buy different cosmetics (even though I couldn’t afford any T^T) is neat, gives a bit of personalisation to the experience
- When this game works, it works well. It feels really good to get a successful run through each level!
- This is a potential negative turned into a positive: You can get stuck in the side of platforms and walls. But as it turns out, you can push yourself out, and when you do you can do a wave dash, meaning you can kind of wall jump! This save a run once or twice, and it felt really cool when I pulled that off. Maybe you could make this an intended mechanic?
Negatives:
- There are too many controls! It’s overwhelming, and they’re not super intuitive. My recommendation here is to slim things down. For example, instead of a designated “speed up” button, just have speed build over time as you move forward. The player can release the movement key if they don’t want more speed. Another idea is that instead of a separate key to slow down, just use the “Cancel Jump” key. If you press it mid-air, you cancel your jump. But if you keep holding it while you’re on the ground, you cancel your speed.
- The milk mechanic was a bit too much on top of everything else. There were a few times when I was feeling good, doing all the parkour, and then I died because I forgot and got over-milked. If the controls were slimmed down, this might be less of a problem. Right now, it kind of conflicts with what the game seems to want to focus on, which is the speedy platforming.
- The level design doesn’t seem to line up with the idea of speed. The pit of spikes with a hole that you can’t get down to unless you know it’s coming, and you have to slow down significantly for, is the first example I can think of. But the entire hand level showcased this - if you don’t slow down, then a hand can be in the wrong place and kill you no matter what. So you have to slow to a crawl for the jumps across the pits with hands in the middle, or just hope you get lucky, since there’s not much you can do to slow down or correct your path once you’ve reached a pit.
- The camera seems to lag behind the player a bit. There’s already lookahead, which is good! But when you’re going fast, you want the camera to look even further ahead, not lag behind.
Ideas:
- Make wall jumping an intended mechanic! It feels really cool.
- Focus on speed in your level design, since this game feels at its best when you’re zooming through the levels.
- Maybe give the player a preview of each level when they restart, so they can look ahead and know what’s coming, without having to find out first by getting there. I died near the end (I assume) of the hand level twice to obstacles I had no idea were there, which inevitably led me to stop there.
Overall: This game is really close to being incredibly fun! With improved level design and a tightened control scheme, I could see it really hooking me, trying to get faster times on each level. Great work!