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!