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(+1)

I like the aspect of simultaneous management of the two sides, and that the controls are simple enough that managing the two sides is reasonable. The task sprites for the personal side are large and identifiable, so it is fairly easy to glance at that side and react quickly. The responsiveness of the personal side's controls feels a little strange due to the head randomly moving - I expected it to remain in place without input as it does when I don't move on the hero side. The controls on the hero's side feels more consistent and reliable in comparison as I know the hero is in the same place where I left them when I stop moving left and right.

I like the duality of the consequences of collecting vs. missing tasks, and how it affects the gameplay on the hero's side. For example, collecting a chore beats all onscreen bad guys, whereas missing it makes them invulnerable and would result in a loss of potential points. However, missing tasks doesn't directly affect the player's current score, which lessens the need to pay attention to the personal side. As the only fatal consequence is falling off screen on the hero side, missing the heart tasks felt like the only real consequence worth watching out for. The danger that missing hearts poses is  reduced due to the amount of platforms that appear, and that the head randomly moves around and would often catch a lot of the tasks without my input. 

A possible improvement would be to implement a game-ending condition on the personal side when a player misses too many tasks. For example, a player starts with 5 chances that are depleted on missing tasks and cause a  game over when the player runs out of chances. This gives the personal side a similar level of importance to the hero side as focusing on one side too much will cause a game over on the other side.

The sound effects used for the task collection and misses felt appropriate, and the music was perfect for the arcade style gameplay. 

Overall, I like the management aspect of maintaining two sides to keep the game going, and believe that this aspect makes this game fun to play.

An engaging arcade game about maintaining two sides of life.

(1 edit)

Wow, thank you so much for the thoughtful comment and critiques!!

You nailed it, missing hearts is by far the easiest way to lose, and if I were to give players one bit of advice, it's "prioritize hearts." The "floatyness" of the head was an accident that we decided to keep because we liked that it added a little disruption to the right side, but we did hold mixed feelings about it the entire time.

In terms of pure game mechanics, we didn't really mind that the right side is less important than the left side. To be honest, most people have found our game to be much more difficult than we expected, and I think missing X tasks and losing would just be...too brutal. If you manage to stay alive for 2-3 minutes, the right side gets insane, which in my opinion is when the game gets really fun (in retrospect, could have made this happen faster, which was my fault). You basically reach a point where you're constantly grabbing and missing tasks and it's very chaotic, and I'd rather not cut that short. It'll end soon enough anyway, haha.

In terms of flavor, I think of it like this: Fighting crime is deadly. Your personal life can be in total disarray, but if you slip up on the battlefield, it's over. Relationship problems won't kill you, but being distracted by them while fighting could.

I do like the idea of adding some depth to the right side though, where neglecting it is reflected in some additional way. And I think if we were to work on the game further, one of the first things we'd do would be to at least tone down how floaty the head is.

Thanks again for taking the time to try our game and give this review! We really appreciate it!!