itch.io

Thank you for the feedback!I checked every mechanical point in the code rather than take your word for it - all of them hold.

Knockback ejecting enemies from the pool. Confirmed, and the numbers are almost comic: the warrior's shove is exactly 130px, and a poured pool's radius is exactly 130px. So the warrior's one signature move is precisely calibrated to undo the game's own reward loop - kills in still water pay double. That's a self-contradiction, not a tuning problem. It's getting a guard so the shove can't push anything past the waterline.

Enemies following you across the map. Confirmed, and worse than you saw: ordinary beasts have no aggro radius and no leash at all. They target the player from any distance, forever. The only culling happens at 2100px and only when the field is over its cap, so a pack that walks home with you never gets dropped. That's the worst bug on your list - one wrong turn can end a run permanently - and it's getting a leash.

The 128–160 belt bordering the starting area. True. The map is a 3×3 grid that snakes, so the row directly above the shallows is belt six. You're right that it needs a gate or a warning; right now it's just a line on the ground.

Baiting things into the bubble. That one is intended - still-water kills pay double XP, it's meant to be the central play. But if it reads as cheese instead of as the main idea, that's my failure to frame it, not yours to notice it.

Warrior being hold-mouse-and-walk. Fair, and it's the worst possible combination: it's the only path whose signature is passive, and it's the one everyone picks first.

The intro. You and another tester said this independently, so it's settled - 160 words before anyone has pressed a key. It's getting cut.

One correction, and it's not in my favour: JSON export/import already exists - ⚙ (bottom right) → Saves → Save to file / Load from file, plus a text-string export in the pause menu. You played and didn't find it, which is a complete answer about how visible it is.

Thanks also for the heads-up about the HKM account, and for the point about itch as a venue - that's something I couldn't have worked out from inside it.

Backwater is a top-down action RPG about spending your life to buy time. A **backwater** is a still patch of the floodplain where world time has all but stopped. Step in and the world outside slows a hundredfold — you rest, you train, you breathe, while it barely blinks. Step out and the river has moved on without you.

The twist is that stillness is portable: you scoop it into a ladle, carry it across the map, and pour it under a beast — then cut the thing apart while it barely moves. Two clocks run in the header the whole time. At the end the game tells you how many of your seconds went into each second of the world's. That number is the score.

**Plays in the browser, no install, no account.** A full run to level 300 is fifteen to eighteen hours, but **I need twenty to thirty minutes, not the whole thing.**

🔗 https://artemidius.itch.io/backwater  password: Kikiriki534

### What I actually want to know

Not "did you like it" — what you did and where you stopped.

1. **Did you work out that you can carry water in the ladle before the first keeper killed you?** He sits down at the first backwater around minute two and barely takes damage out in the current. If you got stuck on him and didn't see why, that's the single most useful thing you can tell me.

2. **What minute did you quit at, and what were you doing?** An honest "eleven minutes, got bored walking" is worth more than finishing.

3. **Did you find the training dummy by the water — and did you stand there hitting it?** I recently made it slower than fighting. I want to know whether it's still the tempting option.

4. **Which gift did you take first, and why?** "Clicked one at random" is a real answer and tells me the choice isn't landing.

There's a **Copy run summary** button under Esc — it puts eight lines on your clipboard (path, level, both clocks, kills, deaths, when the first keeper fell, gifts in order). Paste that with your answers and I can line runs up side by side.

### Known gaps, so you don't waste a comment on them

- No composed soundtrack. Music and sound are procedural.

- Packaged as a web page, not a desktop build. That comes with the Steam version.

- No tutorial beyond the system log.

Everything else is fair game — mechanics, pacing, readability, the art, the writing.

**Happy to return the favour.** Drop a link to yours and I'll play it properly and write you the same kind of notes, not a thumbs-up.