itch.io

Really impressive game!!

Your use of lighting is super-effective, and I think you did an incredible job with that. I really loved how you handled the lighting of various elements (you weren't just powering up by adding a light, but the Bible you're holding glows). You handled your 3D assets extremely well, and everything felt very visually cohesive.

The behavior of the enemies feels very natural and intuitive -- I like how they attack for a bit, then wander, and it feels very organic, with just the right levels of unpredictable but kindof predictable.

Gameplay-wise, I liked the in-game tutorial. That felt good! I was confused at first what was meant by the people you were supposed to rescue, and spent time trying to collect / return the bad guys, without realizing that the people I was supposed to rescue were something else entirely. I had to wander the map for a fair bit before I actually found my first person, and I'm just glad I didn't get lost. A minimap or arrows would have helped, but I also liked the feeling of exploration that I got -- maybe just road signs or a minimap that uncovers and grows as I walk, so that it doesn't spoil the whole map for me from the beginning, but it's at least easier to find my way back to the church. That might be all I want -- just a way to know that I can find my way back to the church.

Speaking of the map, I really enjoyed your whole layout. Everything from the little stores, to the gas stations, to the various houses with their For Sale signs and various yard elements like pools or doghouses or things -- the game felt VERY hand-crafted, which was such a welcome sight. I'm really really glad that the houses weren't simply all copy-pasted in a row, and that the roads and neighborhood layout felt very organic and handmade. That was just delightful, and exploring the world was part of why I played it as long as I did.

I think I made it to leverl 6 or 7, rescued 7 people and eliminated over 300 baddies. Eventually the game began to feel a bit tedious (I didn't really know when I should stop?) -- I eventually found a couple of shields (wasn't quite sure what these did but I assumed if I ever got hit they would have helped me), and recharged my health back to full, where it remained for the rest of the game.

The "treadmill" of progression was fun, but would have appreciated having more of a goal to work towards. People keep spawning, baddies keep spawning, the difficulty doesn't ramp up (if anything, it gets easier as I ramp up in level-ups), and so the only reason I would ever stop is boredom. From a game perspective, I think you want the game to end when it's fun, in order for people to walk away in a moment of fun / challenge (since that will be the impression they're left with), rather than leaving because there's nothing else to accomplish.

Regardless, it was a super-fun game. I think a lot of the spiritual analogies were there, but I think there are some easy opportunities to insert more explicitly Christian teaching into the game. Not sure how you would feel about this, but one example that comes to mind is to choose a selection of verses that talk about reading God's word, and to display them when you're charging up your faith-o-meter. Not sure how best to balance that, but I think there are definitely some opportunities to make it more explicitly instructive.

There were a few bugs in the game that I encountered (such as yourself or your followers clipping through the floor), but none of those were show-stoppers, and I was always able to jump to get me (or my follower) out of the ground and recover.

I'm still so impressed at how you handled everything in the game -- especially the atmosphere and the visuals. It's really difficult to balance the lighting in such a dark game like this, and you handled it masterfully. Very very well done -- this game felt like it had a lot of polish, and it was a lot of fun to play!