Just played through the demo. Tons of potential, lots to love.
Combat is not too bad, rough around the edges sometimes but, growing pains, nothing unusual. The bones are certainly there.
Linda is engaging to drive, the scenes are good and diverse and I liked how there’s variety in the win/lose/surrender scenarios. Shoutout to that bad ending, it was pretty good.
Does feel a bit grindy at times. I got to the labyrinth at lvl 5 and eventually had to give up and grind to 8 back in the ruins and that was a bit of a chore. Since the game progresses in an obscure way it gets a bit repetitive at times.
I played the native Linux version and it all worked smoothly
Other than just more content, I feel like there are some improvements that would go a long way:
1 - Text The font is a bit small, having this bigger or, ideally, adjustable, would be a good idea. The game is also very verbose which is not bad by itself but doesn’t play well with that grindiness. Since you’re fighting all the time and the fights are rather long, in number of turns, the excess of text ends up being a bit overwhelming. I found myself skipping everything, just looking for the numbers some times and this worked against me because occasionally there is relevant information there, and the whole described scenes are actually interesting, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a bit much at times. Finally here, text speed feels fast but, I guess for similar reasons as above, I found myself wanting it to be interesting.
2 - Combat and UI Doesn’t need much but I guess some mouse-over hints would help. The tutorial mentions the fire and ice spells as having status effects but it felt unclear as to whether those actually applied. A lot of the time it felt like I was rolling dice and if the enemies decided to actually focus on a type of attack I was SOL. And since I had to be fighting a lot, first trying to get a good run on the labyrinth, then grinding later etc… It got a bit old. It doesn’t feel like “this game would be good if not for the combat” but the combat itself is not quite pulling its weight proper at this point. Again, though, the bones are there, for sure. This has a nice foundation to get built from
3 - Quality of Life These can be lower in priority for understandable reasons (not content) but would go a long way making the whole experience. A gallery would go a long way, especially as after playing you want to make sure you saw all there was to see (really lucky I decided to use the free-roam post game to go and lose to the Minotaur). And implementing an auto-save would be reassuring. It turned out, in the end, that other than the Minotaur, which has a safety check and I never lost to on accident, losing never had consequences, but I was a bit worried at times and kept navigating to manually save a lot. This is more reassurance to the player than anything else
Anyways, great stuff, looking forward to seeing how the project progresses =3