- Absolutely nailed the classic tone/aesthetic! Very well made.
- Perfectly incorporated the theme! Though I was definitely confused when I came out the Shaman cave – I initially thought I just took a second hall leading to the same exit and the same town got corrupted by monsters while I was away, so I was lost for a bit.
- Should have custom mouse cursor art to go with it though, lol. It breaks the immersion a bit when I have to use the windows mouse cursor to close a dialogue and so on.
- A map would be nice.
- Could use a torch hotkey since I just swap it out for a shield every time an enemy is a tile away… or so I wrote, but I just found the “torch shield”, haha.
- Guessing it’s not true that the Beast Sword claims to have a -15 attack roll. It feels like an accuracy upgrade over the +10.
- The momentum system is interesting, though not as sophisticated as having other more varied moves besides accuracy modifiers, like status effects would be… Hard to cover that in a week, of course. I only really had to ramp up from careful to heavy attacks against the necromancer. On the whole it felt reliable enough just spamming heavy.
- The 8-legged ones respawn when I load my save and I’m not sure that’s intentional, I get no new dialogue from the oracle after killing both. I went on to beat the necromancer anyway, but didn’t hit any new conversation triggers. I guess I beat the game?
Viewing post in The Dark World jam comments
Thank you for the kind words and thorough write-up. I'm not sure about the cave being a clear transition to the Dark World. The idea was cool, go into a mystical cave for a long way and come out in what you thought was the same spot but actually in another world but a lot of people were confused by it.
I 100% agree about the map and mouse cursor. This is a painful one to play without a map but these things were cut.
I'm glad the "torch shield" is a hit, it's something that I figured would feel very rewarding considering the tradeoff between shield and torch. But I'm not surprised people are switching before every fight - I originally figured it would be outside vs inside but then I made the outside darker and ... you know how it goes!
I was hoping the momentum system would give you fights like the Necromancer fight through the whole game but I think the balance is out of whack. Heavy attacks are very OP for sure.
The "you beat the game" transition got cut, it was supposed to happen as soon as you kill the Necromancer.
I dunno if the beast sword is buggy or not, but I suspect the monsters are mostly just bad at dodging.