I think I reached the end. This was both an incredible experience and an incredibly frustrating game.
I think up until about 200 deaths, this was my favorite game of the jam. It just does so many incredible things:
- Melee bullet hell gameplay that actually works well. There is always danger in approaching the source of bullets, but having them be inactive in the beginning, combined with giving the player an invincibility option works really well. In most cases.
- Abstract minimalistic aesthetics that manages to feel completely appropriate. Having everything be unidentifiable geometric shapes means that the player and the player character both start out completely unaware of what the game represents.
- Narrative where both the player and the player character unveil the meaning of things. For me, at the start, it wasn't even clear what the "N1" referred to, until I got to REM, so even the UI was mysterious, as well as who the main character and antagonist is. It's super well done.
- A recurring dream is the perfect setting for a bullet hell like this, where the player has to try over and over again. And you even explain what it means that the squares disappearing means. Every aspect of this game ties together into an excellent creative vision. I think it's brilliant.
Now, the game also has some problems as well. Even after close to 500 deaths, I often ran into bullets the moment they activated. When an enemy spawns next to me, I have to quickly update my plans to either go for them or avoid them, and I often just make the wrong split-second decision and get hit just as the bullets activate.
There are a few "solutions" I could think of; I have no idea if any of them would actually work, and they might also clash with the mysterious atmosphere of the game:
- Have the bullets spawn/activate and enemy spawns synced to the beat of some music. People can react more quickly to audio cues, and with a regular rhythm, people are even more precise. If I know the bullets will activate exactly on the next beat, it might be easier for me to make the correct split-second decision and not rush the enemy when there isn't enough time. The downside is that a music with some percussion might ruin the dream-like mood. Maybe maracas or chimes would work? The BPM could increase gradually through the different stages of sleep.
- Enemies could have circles around them indicating the distance at which their bullets become active.
- Have the enemies be visually distinct depending on which pattern they fire. Again, this would make the game less mysterious.
- Have the invincibility ability refresh after killing an enemy. I often used it to make the final stretch of approaching an enemy safe, but it sometimes remains on cooldown when I approached the next enemy. This would also serve a bit as come-back mechanic if the screen gets flooded with enemies.
These are just fixes to slightly improve the core "melee" mechanics, which are already quite good. The game also has more general problems with how the RNG can sometimes just give you really difficult patterns.
- Sometimes, several enemies will just spawn on the opposite side of the screen and start firing to create a maze of bullets that is too hard to navigate.
- This basically almost happens during N3, which is fine, but only after the player has figured out that they just need to survive for a bit longer. If the player tries to dive into this maze to clear up enemies, which they will do since they don't know that they just need to survive a bit longer, they will almost surely die. It might be a good idea to indicate to the player the time they need to survive (but it would make the game less mysterious, so it may also be a bad idea).
- The boss is... the absolute worst part of this game. It feels like I got screwed over so many times by pure RNG, and the stage is difficult enough that I can't even reach the boss most of the time. I think it's good that the boss is difficult enough that the player has to go through the stage enough times to somewhat master it, but it just feels unfair when bullets spawn almost on top of you while you are dodging the previous waves of bullets.
Also, the game crashes on exit for me. And thus it crashed after the final dialog (after 'Good night'). For jam games in particular, it's good to have a proper "The End" screen, just so the player knows that the game closing is intended, since jam games are sometimes unfinished or buggy. I'm not even sure I reached the end. Can the developer confirm? (I took a screenshot of the earlier part of the ending sequence.)
Also, I'm not sure how this could be done given how your game looks, but you need to market it better. The sad reality is that people don't have time to play all the games. I almost didn't play it due to how the screenshot looked. At least, have the screenshot be an animated gif. Well, I'm not sure it would have helped, but this game really deserves more players.
In the end, it's a brilliant game, both gameplay wise and in terms of its narrative vision. I decided to write down every flaw and potential solution I could think of because I loved the game, and would love to see an even better version at some point.
