Absolutely stunning graphics and quite simple to understand. I played first attempt yesterday and second successful attempt today. And I must admit I don’t remember the story, other than rescue the cats. And that’s a good story in my book.
My first strategy was hugging left wall and see where it got me, and that got me dead. On second attempt I tried to explore every area before going through a door. And if possible explore around the start area before wandering off and I think that made the game like 10 times easier.
I think the information detail in the map worked really well, even though I felt like it might have been neat to know which rooms I had been in and perhaps also if I found everything in the rooms. But the latter might not be good / needed. And the way with the verticality, I’m guessing one can enter the same map grid on two different levels that don’t connect. So that might not work great. I’m mostly happy with the map, but in large part because the game world is sufficiently small.
Now that verticality. That was amazing. It did so much for making the world feel real, fleshed out and gave a great air to the rooms. One thing though, since going up and down was a common thing, I didn’t at all register that I was escaping the dungeon when I did. I just though I was going up to somewhere. It might also be that since there was no compass or indicator on the map of direction of the player I didn’t notice that I was leaving the map… Or I think that I was. Anyways, I felt disappointed when I won, and that’s not great. I felt like I could have explored some more, found some more cats. Gotten som more loot. So I think it needs a bit stronger signalling or a dialogue letting the player choose to leave or find more cats.
The loot. I feel sword and defense worked really well. And of course cats. But the coins felt like they didn’t belong, especially when you already had the cats. I mean there could be a use for coins, like a fountain that you can toss them in in hopes of getting health restored or something like that. But just collecting them when there already was something else more important to collect feels unnecessary.
I also noticed that it had a bit of mouse issues. Grabbing it and then needing to tab to the game twice before it reappeared.
One thing you could consider too is to scale the danger by the number of cats you’ve rescued. Don’t really know if that makes sense, but I get the feeling if one in careful about looking around a lot the game gets quite easy.
But in general a really great game!
Playthroughs: https://youtu.be/_SlCK44rfz8 and https://youtu.be/DBRoxfVlSzs