This is in a lot of ways the best of the dozen or so games I've played so far, the atmosphere is incredible, it does a great job of being mysterious and making you curious early on, the art and sound design sell that experience really well too, There's a really solid inventory and crafting system which seems like it does a good job of doing what the game needs without being overcomplicated, you can immediately tell a lot of work went in to this one and it feels super polished from the beginning. I spent way more time playing this then any other game in the jam so far because it did in an incredible job of making you want to explore the town and I love that they went for an extremely difficult game that makes you want to overcome a real challenge, but I think they may have gone a little too far in this direction. My experience after an hour or two of playing was that I was just starting to get the hang of the melee combat, which was also brutally difficult out the gate, immediately 2v1 against enemies who feel much stronger and take a lot of hits to kill, but then you very quickly start seeing enemies with guns as well, at this point in the game (basically the very beginning) on all my playthroughs the only weapons I could find were the lead pipe or baseball bat, and beating an enemy who had a gun using one of those isn't something I'm sure is possible, which makes sense, but also causes problems if the player doesn't have a gun. I guess the idea is you spend the countdown to nightfall finding weapons and items and then hopefully are equipped to do ok after that, but I was never able to find a gun or figure out how to survive against a gun using the melee weapons and that unfortunately stopped me from seeing most of what seems like a genuinely fun and well made game. I get the feeling if I gave it more time and kept looking around different places I would either find a gun before nightfall at some point or figure out how to survive without one but I think I have to move on to other games. I really do love the idea of a brutally difficult game like this but I also think it would benefit a lot from a just a slight ramp up in difficulty at the beginning or a little bit of onboarding for new players. I like the feeling of being thrown to the wolves in some ways and how the tutorial text even emphasized that but for me at least it was just a little too far in that direction, but for other people it might be perfect, difficulty is hard to get right largely because everyones ideal difficulty is different. But regardless a super fun extremely polished game that is well worth the frustration.
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Thanks for checking it out and leaving such detailed feedback! I'm glad you liked it. The difficulty is definitely something I wish I spent more time tweaking, since a lot of it centers around game knowledge. You're right that the enemies with guns are supposed to be significantly more difficult to handle- I would have made them significantly rarer to encounter given a balance pass. The intent is that you'd have to find a firearm of your own to combat them- which you can find in specific locations (Gun store, church) or repair from one dropped by a enemy. I think for a post-jam update I'd include some notes and clues that can be found to hint at those spawn locations more, in addition to adding more ways to acquire them. More so a larger problem may be that I'm missing more ranged/indirect options for fighting enemies, sharpened stick traps, molotovs, electrified wire, were some planned options that got cut for time that would absolutely help deal with the difficulty spike that ranged enemies introduce.
And again, that you so much for diving head-first into the game, I'm glad you got some hours of enjoyment out of it :)