Great submission!

As a disclaimer, I’ve yet to play Blue Prince, so I don’t know where the inspiration ends and the riffing begins. That said, the overall concept and mechanics had me hooked. The variety of rooms and how they’re placed lead to nearly endless replayability. They’re filled with sonic details like footsteps and environmental sounds that made me feel as if I was there. And they have intertwining systems and unique interactions that give the experience much more depth!

There are many great comments here that allude to additional polish to consider. My biggest blocker already mentioned was how my Xbox controller would navigate the menu and read speech unexpectedly—it forced me to switch to the keyboard to play. Were it fully functioning, I’d love for it to vibrate to emphasize certain actions and events too. And there are many opportunities to streamline how items can be used to interact with rooms.

Additionally, I was unable to get the built-in text-to-speech (TTS) to work for me, but the game worked flawlessly with NVDA on Windows 10. Once in-game, I noticed quite the missed opportunity to print the room descriptions onto the screen, so their vivid descriptions and backstory can also be enjoyed without TTS.

Unfortunately, I was never able to reach the end. I awakened the manticore in my third run, but ran out of steps and died by its hand. A few runs later, I’m both addicted and frustrated by the random number generator and how it’s kept me from reaching it again. This certainly has me hooked and wanting to keep trying, so I’ll try to update you if I have time to revisit this later.

Please keep iterating on this prototype and let us know when you make progress. There is so much potential here!

Amazing game! I am so happy we are getting creative games made with such heart like this.
I haven't gotten back to it yet so maybe I was missing a key item or something, but on the first day of the actual game (not tutorial, Sitrine was yelling at me) I made it to the final room and nothing happened. Not sure if I was meant to make it or not before finding the gold shrine, but thought I'd mention it in case a bug. But fun either way!

Great job on this awesome submission!

I really enjoyed the gameplay here, and I thought the drafting rooms was really awesome. I also really enjoyed the different characters and voice actors for this. I always put plot and story last in my games, but you really did a great job here building an atmosphere, and it really pays off! Kudos to all the voice actors that really breathed life into here.

Like others, I think there's probably a little bit of polish to add with the focus and navigating menus. When using a controller I often ended up moving around the menu when also selecting the next room (this didn't interrupt the action, but caused extra readout that I imagine would be very confusing for a blind player). When opening the map it starts at the top left, and really should start on your current square. I also found that the map would sometimes not reset even when I had started a new game (it looks like it only resets when you draft your first room).

Separately, I wonder how much you might get away with reducing some of the menus / controls. I think while being able to look at your inventory is useful, I wonder if you could get rid of that entirely (and have items auto-apply when you interact with the room). It might also be worthwhile to just get rid of backtrace, just to remove the cognitive load of another item / control. There's probably a little bit of tuning when it comes to the actual difficulty too - I'd increase the steps you give to folks by 5 or something, so that getting to the end doesn't feel quite as tight.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game - I think the gameplay was super intuitive and was a fun challenge to play. Congrats to the whole team on the submission!

This is a great concept, and I definitely had fun playing it! Good ol’ dungeon crawling, hell yeah!

The navigation mechanic is an interesting one, and I enjoyed the challenge of having to manage my steps. Unless I’m missing something obvious though, I believe the map would’ve benefited from a marker showing where you currently were, as it didn’t seem to start me off at my current location, but rather in a corner.

SAPI speech may need a bit of adjustment, as currently moving to another menu item doesn’t interrupt the first one. Of course, when using NVDA, that is not an issue.

The game for me is a little confusing, but I’ll retry in a couple of days. About all that I played and the other comments, your game is awesome. The audio part is very smooth, the sfx and ambience are well balanced. The mechanics for me are a bit confusing, but it´s because of my hability as gamer and that English is not my mother language hehe.

Really good game. Haven't finished it yet but I take that as a good thing. 

Very minor suggestions to reduce friction. Let me switch to map from inventory and viceversa instead of Escaping my way out before choosing the other one. If using the shovel (for example) is the only interaction available in a room, let the interaction key do that instead of having to go to inventory to press the shovel.

The music for the red rooms in way louder than the others. I can easily adjust the volume levels to make it all right but I shouldn't have to.

There's a point in the moon pool and another room where the voice of the creature and the narrator overlap.

I'd love the option to have all the voiced text on screen to read.

But this is all minor stuff and nice to have things rather than must haves. You have a really good thing going here.

Oh my god this game is so fun. I love the puzzle-y nature that comes from figuring out how to best set the rooms. I've literally been playing this for an hour but have to stop because I do want to check out other games. I did finally get to the manticore but wasn't able to to run away successfully. I'm guessing I'll need all of the spirits for that. I don't have any feedback in terms of accessibility because I didn't play not looking at the game, but in terms of non-accessibility I don't really have much feedback besides that the voices should be a LOT louder by default. Oh also if there was a key you could press so that you snap to the next room that'd be cool to speed things up.

The music was just sooooo beautiful. I can't understate how much of a joy it was to travel across the rooms just to hear the different patches of music. It made exploring feel... Quite honestly worth it. I want to eat the music.

What qualifies as a room that requires a key and a room that doesn't? Is it just anything in the right half of the map?

This was really fun. I had to force myself to stop so I'd have time to check out some of the other games. I really enjoyed the way you had to arrange the rooms and enjoyed how it felt to play this on the controller.

Really awesome touch with the voice acting as well. The dynamic music was a nice touch and he gold shrine put a smile on my face. Good work!

The soundtrack, sound design and voice acting are awesome! I was writing some observations but all these features were actually in the game already. In my first play the tutorial and sound glossary weren't shown, the room selection just said "Grouping" instead of name and descriptions and the picked up items weren't announced. At a second play the screen reader didn't speak at all, but everything worked fine when I launched the game for a third time.

I'm looking forward for future updates, I don't remember playing something like this before and it seems really fun.

This game sure was a interesting experience for me. To start off i did like the music and voice acting in the game, it relaly made the game a lot more richer. Unfortunately i fealt very confused playing, i just got thrust into the game without any explanation of the controls or wha tthe controls even did, or any tutorial to explain what i was supposed to do. I was just pressing keys at random hoping something would happen. I had no idea what the overall objective was and i think the game could need some form of interactive tutorial to better explain what you are supposed to do, or have some way to learn the controls before you just get thrust into the game.

I loooove this!! It's like Blue Prince but accessible. It has some bugs, so I hope the dev will polish it, but I highly highly recommend it. Hope it will grow in a bigger project

I personally didn't have much problems figuring out how to play, maybe the only thing I would suggest is to use more diverse sounds for locked doors and normal doors. I find the map very cool too, and I appreciate the simplicity of controlls.

I'm blind since birth

I unfortunately must say that (possibly, probably due to skill issues), I had a lot of trouble figuring out how the game worked, when I was playing with eyes closed and with my screen reader. I am hoping I may come back to it and start understanding it better at a second try, by the first one was quite overwhelming and I had to quit. I’m sighted, so there’s that; I’m not a pro ‘blind games gamer’ - I’m not even a pro ‘gamer’ but I guess I typically understand the controls and what’s happening, if I don’t skill to make things work perfectly.

I might be wrong, but I would try to make a more calm and slow tutorial to understand the controls and what they do. The way I was visualizing the game was not fitting what was really happening, there was a big mismatch that kept making me confused and unsure about how to navigate.

Then there are the little bugs - the narrator starting to speak once we open the game, unexpectedly; one time my screen reader was not reading the buttons, for some reason, but it worked when I restarted NVDA, so I think that one was a bug on my end; and the SAPI and Screen reader playing at the same time (which I was also taught that I could deactivate, so yeah). And these may also have hindered a bit my experience, and contributed to the overwhelm. But I think even with them fixed, I would suggest to look at the game tutorial and also trying to test the game with non-savvy gamers who are blind, because I’m curious to know if I’m the only demographic that’s having trouble with learning how to play.

This sucks! But I will try again, and I hope it’s going to be less difficult. But I’m not. I am so excited to play this game, and I hope this could eventually be brought to my low savviness so I can play with eyes closed and imagine rich environments and things, the way I have done with some other (perhaps simpler) audiogames in the past.

Edit: VOD here for a few days: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2712855875

I've found a major bug. Even though I am in screen reader mode, it's talking using both NVDA and sapi. This is on windows 11. Fixed by making sure that the first option you select is start game. I can't seem to get the read notes button to work, and the h key is for main menu but is also meant for backtracking, seemingly. I think something needs correcting there. Apart from that, I'm enjoying it so far.