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(+1)

Hi! I REALLY liked your game. Congrats on making it in one week!

Since I liked it so much, I'm going to leave some honest feedback, please don't look at this badly, because I really enjoyed it!

You write really well! It was creepy and atmospheric and all your wring was superb! I really liked the level layout, although the camera could have been a bit better, especially with the super fast and low acceleration movement (it ended up clunky sometimes).

A big bummer for me was the fact that you had to return the bodies to progress. I mean, I found a lot of bodies with good info. The story was saying to me "you better leave that because if you die, there will be more clues for the other divers" or "you shouldn't help feed the beast!" while the gameplay was saying: "You must return the bodies to progress"...

That kind of story x gameplay conflict is very common. There is an awesome lecture about it on Youtube.

The biggest problem, though was that the game took some time to get to the point (rescuing Sussanna) and when I was finally close, I got stuck on a stupid coral and lost all my progress.... That was really fustrating that I ended up not finishing. The gameplay shouldn't be an impediment to the story, especially one such well written like this. I know one week was not a long time, but the fact that the gameplay is so unforgining is going to make a lot of people (like me) miss out on the story.

Bottom line: you are a super talented game maker. Keep up the great work. Focus on making the gameplay serve the point of the game. If the point is finding out the story (and not stop giving the bodies, for instance) it shouldn't be unforgiving that this. (But now I'm super curious about the end, but don't feel like going through the exact gameplay again).

Again, I just wrote all that because I really liked your game! :)

Congrats! Maybe if you have time you can check out mine? :)

(+1)

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, it's hugely appreciated - and is all really constructive, too!

I fully take on board all your points about the tension between the story-play, as it were ("returning bodies leads to bad things happening") and the gameplay ("return bodies to progress"), as well as the frustration of potentially losing all progress at any given moment.  I actually experienced some of that myself while doing my final playtesting, and you're absolutely right that it's infuriating!

I'll consider all your excellent points in further detail, and may well rework/rebalance some of the game aspects to make it less punishing (or at least less frustrating).  And yes the camera is...uh...interesting at the moment!  ;)  There's a lot of very clunky code going on in the background, and I think it potentially needs a full rewrite.  Version 2.0, perhaps!

Huge thanks once again - I'll definitely play and review Liar's Map, it looks very interesting!  :)