Good game! I wish I liked it more though, because it has a lot of atmosphere, cute monsters and I was ready to get a bit scared. But I didn’t really get what the monsters were doing to me, what my “health” was. If there was a way to “heal” and when I died it felt like “why did I die now” or “what could I have done in this situation to survive”, in other words that it didn’t feel fair. Which took away all the scariness. So some clearer feedback with how the systems worked and when something was hurting you from what direction would have been needed, I think. It looks really great though, so it’s a pity it didn’t really work for me.
It was neat running around exploring the map with the flashlight. I didn’t sneak / crouch anything since it required keeping that key pressed, which would have been much too taxing. If that was important and needed for prolonged periods it should probably be a toggle mode. Or at least have that as an option.
The controller was fine to me in the underworld. There were some odd cases of the camera ending up inside furniture and decorations, which could probably have been solved with adjusting the near clip plane. But not being able to strafe made the initial bit feel extremely awkward as it was layout a bit organically and moving towards the goal zigzaging with turns didn’t feel human. It probably would have been nice with strafe in the underworld too.
There were a lot of trees when I got the axe and I hadn’t seen the fallen one, so it was really weird for a while why I should cut down a random tree. And stranger when nothing happened.
Because how a lot of stuff didn’t align with the grid and there was no strafe it was also quite often unclear what could be investigated or interacted with. For example the tree you actually were meant to cut down could be reached from quite a few places and in several angles but it didn’t give any feedback that I was doing the right thing until it was gone. And so was I cutting all along or not. I wasn’t sure. Also after having cut down the tree, I sort of expected the game was teaching me I needed to cut things that stood out in the dungeon. But I didn’t find anything that seemed to react to my ax.
I might have been inclined to continue exploring if not the map was partially (randomly ?) reset after each death. The in-world logic for resurrecting where you were killed with all equipment you had but no map (memory?) of where you’ve been but a little from the previous life was hard to grasp.
I also felt like the flashlight before I died the first time illuminated the surroundings better than it did after the first death. So it became very dark and only walls shone up a bit.
Don’t take my complaints too much as such. I’m mostly a bit sad. The game had really good graphics, sounds and atmosphere in general.
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/5RSOfIjnTCg