Just finished my playthroughs, I took a few notes and wrote down a couple of suggestions in case it can be helpful:
Favourite points
- The gameplay loop felt satisfying and well-balanced (and pretty fair despite the perma-death)!
- The visuals and audio were nice and came together well to create atmosphere!
- The premise was cool and intriguing, and really made me wonder about the backstory!
- I appreciated that the recharge was instant!
- The mechanics for item collection worked well! I loved how easy they were to pick up, without too much fiddling to step in just the right spot.
Suggestions & bug report
- I would have liked to see some kind of distance indicator for the “navigation” upgrades, maybe indicated by transparency? It might also be nice to make the dot for the machine just a little more visually distinct from the valuables dots!
- The upgrade system seemed well thought-out overall; the one exception, IMO, is the Idle upgrade path, since in the current version of the game there’s never any reason to stand still. I expected that upgrade path to either lead to an actual “Recovery” skill (energy regen) as implied by the name, or else to have some kind of effect on the ending?
- Related to the previous point, the “destroy the machine” ending drained my energy almost instantly, which seemed to conflict with my Idle upgrade; I feel like it might be more logical and impactful to just let the player do stuff normally after destroying the machine, but then eventually die from lack of recharging (except with the special ending screen instead of the normal death screen)? Unless the intention was to show that all of our abilities (even while unplugged) rely on the machine in order to work—that would be valid, though it’s not the impression I got during gameplay.
- I didn’t have any particular thoughts on the 2nd ending, but I would love to see an expanded version of the game someday with a little more to do and maybe a possibility of getting more information and “closure”, since both of the endings so far leave a lot of unanswered questions! (I wouldn’t expect a fully happy ending or anything, but it could be great if there were some nuances based on how much we manage to achieve or discover)
- It would also be cool if we could eventually enter the houses, or at least try to!
- I noticed a small layering issue for the houses: when I stepped where the roof was, I appeared in front of it instead of behind.
Final thoughts
I thought this was a very enjoyable game overall, well done! I’d be curious to hear if you have any plans to develop it further (or explore a similar concept/gameplay in other games).