Thank you, appreciate the feedback!

Thank you! I'm glad to hear a compliment about the tutorial

For what it's worth I skipped the tutorial in an earlier build and it just didn't appear when starting a run in this one because I must have a save file, so me skipping the tutorial now has nothing to do with its quality this time around

From what I'd seen, I had no idea this wasn't poker related until I played. Even the capsule art looks like its a poker game

Leaving the '?' with the X button presses the quit to menu button

The UX is good, but I think the hovering an interactable element SFX is a little louder than it should be. Nice music also

There are lots of keywords that are more complicated than the seem and trying to compute what I was even building was frying my brain by the end

• 'pos' surely means '[n]th position' but I missed it the first time reading through and couldn't figure out why it wasn't activating
• 'upper' and 'lower' are confusingly similar to top and bottommost
• 'Stacked Diamonds count'? Meaning [diamonds in deck] multiplied by count?
  • I had some 'stacked' items but couldn't figure out why they weren't activating even though I had fulfilled their conditions. Maybe 'stacked' only applies for one round and then resets?
• "If card at 2 value < upper card pos" is way harder to read than something like "If [the] 2nd card's value is less than the card above's position value" (although my version could be improved, too) and it doesn't seem like the items need to be as terse as they are

I'm not a fan of games that forcibly add stuff to my deck, since it feels like the game is undeckbuilding my game as I play

The theming of the intro lore is kind of weird, but the cinematography was cool. Although all the other voices being clearly AI made me like it less in retrospect

No keyboard commands seemed to let me out of the cat shop or the main menu

Exploding yourself kills you a few seconds later even if you didn't take fatal damage

I had a bug where a cannon guy started firing once every frame that I think has been reported before. He even fires when the game is paused

Some elements totally don't fit the aesthetic of the game, like the drowning warning just being text that appears in the middle of the screen, the pause/shop menus, or the AI get good voices. I can't imagine anyone being pleased to be insulted by an AI voice every time they die

Some ambient noises are mixed weirdly, I think they felt too loud for how unimportant they were. Stuff like the lore ghost, the windmill thing, or I think something flying the background in the second level

It's a small thing and not worth the dev time IMO to add more of, but I liked the addition of the windmills in the first world. From what I've seen, the game separates itself into pragmatic puzzle levels and overt, unsubtle exposition, but it would be nice to have vistas and visual assets that give me visual story telling about Bokube and the world.

The second level has way too much going on in terms of difficulty scaling 
The last version I played was the early beta build and I liked that one more because progressing felt better and there was less noticeable jank. I get that you're cutting out levels for the sake of the demo, though

Put the exe in a .zip or else Windows warns people that it might be malware

The board feels off-center since it's so far to the right. I think it would be better centered with the books as an element that can slide in when moused over/when they are activating

For some reason the score, goal, money, etc. is harder to keep track of compared to Balatro. I think all the UI fonts being the same with no visual priority is making it hard to keep track of the more important parts of the HUD. Also because the score just increases by however much instead of visually counting up above the text

Oliver Twist gives me no information about if/how much its effect is applying -- Oh, it does but it'd be way more useful if I could see it at any time... No, actually its only telling me how much its increasing... I think? It seems to count drawing new tiles as a discard so it could be only going up to 1.4x even though I think I'm using it correctly

Macbeth changes the game so much I'm surprised it's an uncommon. I would probably make it do that conditionally or something. That being said, the most fun I had with the game was setting it up so I'm just making words on the board that get removed instantly and can then move on to upgrading the spaces and tile I'm using to make words instead of playing real Scrabble

Money is so tight that I don't believe there's any justification for buying single tiles for around half the price of a book
I don't feel like I get many choices in the first shop because money is so limited
Performance doesn't seem to affect payout or the next round which means that you could spend board space trying to make too good of a word and (if you don't have a board destroying build) you'll have wasted space
The most interesting parts are when you get a build going and can afford to make choices or save money, but early game just feels like Scrabble which I find boring

I skipped the tutorial if any of this seems uninformed

Thank you!

I had to look up what a point is before noticing it was hidden in your description.

As for finding the fun, I think the three abilities aren't designed well:

• Shooting the opponent isn't fun if you hit or miss and circumvents the gameplay
• Making the point a triple is always better than a point, so it will always be used
• Making the point better is almost always a good idea, so it will almost always be used

I also think the inherent concept doesn't lead to much fun:

• Getting 'nothing' rolls and being forced to lose with no control on your part is very unfun
• You always have the opponent at a disadvantage with rerolls and abilities
• There's a lot less tension than actual gambling since the amount you win and lose is fixed
• Being caught in a win-then-lose stalemate is unfun

Solitaire Battle with more content since last time. Might be the last DD it enters since the release is in March and I don't have plans to expand the demo. Enjoy!

you're a natural solitaire god (but it gets harder on the higher difficulty levels)

Sorry! I'll look into it, thank you for letting me know!

Thanks for the feedback! Your Heat icons start gray but go red once you become Overheated

It's fun! I thought all the puzzles were clever. It also has really nice music.

The ice effect and its fading on death is a very nice touch.

I had a bug where I slid off on Dual Purpose and then left the room and it kept making an ice sliding sound until I died.

I won in ~26 minutes and spent the most time & deaths on Dual Purpose. I didnt find any of the writing interesting, so I'm glad it wasn't mandatory to advance.

It would be more diegetic if rooms that require you to hit icicles to advance have a frozen door (to imply it melts to open) and monkey statue rooms had a mechanical door, instead of just a barricaded door that opens.

• Distributing the file unzipped makes my computer warn me that it's a virus
• The game starts bordless windowed at full screen size but the toggle fullscreen option just makes it actually full screened
• The UI is true to the Scrabble aesthetic, but doesn't make relevant UI elements obvious.  Stuff like the round goal and current score, buttons to advance to different screens all have the same visual 'priority'
• I skipped through the shop tutorial and got softlocked in the shop because I didn't know I had to click to the items tab
• The shop is too complex in general for me to engage with it

I really like the music in all of your demos so far.

Aside from the menu buttons, it seems like the restart/quit option virtually hides the selected one, making the other option look like it's selected. And the victory screen has tiny buttons for seemingly no reason.

Thanks for playing! The idea is that your ability to extend your turns is dependent on using 'Heat' equipment. The tradeoff is that your limited inventory space means building into removing more Heat means you have less equipment that lets you pick up more cards or whatever other equipment effects you could have instead

Very nice! I hope this does well at release

The visual and sound aesthetics are really good

I beat 'Hex' without using the rocks at the top right and instead by sending the enemies above and then outpacing them from below, which I feel probably wasnt the intended solution

'Avalanche' felt like it required a lot of set up work to dig out the large area even with knowledge of the solution, but maybe I don't have the rock physics knowledge to find the simplest solution

I had a minor dislike of 'The Pale Queen' introducing a new mechanic after making me solve some puzzles when it could have been in an earlier chamber. Admittedly the second 'eye' and the squid guys prevent messing up with the first 'eye' being a softlock, but it was easy to feel like I failed the puzzle considering I didn't have full knowledge of the puzzle at the time

'The Pale Queen' also had a lot of ambient noise even when the queen wasn't onscreen which made it hard to focus on thinking about the right solution

The tooltip for quick restarting when you restart from the menu was a good choice

Your final screen still says "releasing in fall 2025". If you're planning to release on Steam I'd say that this is is good enough to put up as a demo

It's a fun game to spend time on! I especially like the way it auto sorts. I missed a lot of obvious moves but got carried by the hint system

I won my second game by saving nearly all my jello. The problem with using your health as currency is that you have to make everything you spend it on extremely valueable to be worth it, and none of the items seemed to be worth it

In terms of roguelike-ness it felt very one-dimensional since everything was based around one special move

There's not a lot of feedback on spending/gaining jello so it's hard to keep track of your balance. I'd suggest also adding SFX on hovering over cards and when jello are pushed/hovered/clicked on for immersion's sake.

I didn't like the tentacle cursor, something about it is less intuitive for where you're clicking than a normal cursor

I think 'Jello' is trademarked and kind of an unsuited name even without the association to the food considering they're jell-ee-fish, Jell-ee-taire, etc.

In my first game I just had two towers and a level 2 dagger which made fighting seem really slow and made losing to the first boss unavoidable

It grew on me as I played and I wanted to see if different wall arrangements would make the game feel better, but the difficulty ramps up much quicker than your damage and it ends up feeling like Vampire Survivors in a restrictive arena with too many projectiles and not much like a tower defense roguelite

The game gives you plenty of walls and assumes you know how to arrange them in tower defense style, but I think many players won’t. In fact, I was left wondering if enemies could move/attack through diagonal walls but wasn’t willing to risk my run to test it

The second time I played I noticed a text tip after a battle suggests using walls to herd monsters, but it’s easily missed since the mechanic isn’t tutorialized and the message goes away the moment you go back to picking up items, which is what you learn to do after battles automatically

I found it easy to misuse an item since it’s hard to see what you have selected. I accidentally set the wrong weapon as my tower and only realized I could have deconstructed it a few games later

The first boss is way too hard yet seems like it’s possible to cheese it to win just by setting up a long path and then jumping back and forth across it. In general, being able to jump back and forth across a wall than enemies can’t cross wasn’t a satisfying combat mechanic

I've played a lot of Metal Gear Solid (although not 5) but I couldn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped

My biggest problem was that because of the open areas it felt like either I could sneak up on an enemy with no chance of failure or there were too many enemies to ever approach an area

Even when enemies were able to be taken out one by one, all I did was charge at them and then bury their bodies, then move on to the next one, until I’d get seen by an enemy I hadn’t noticed and have to completely leave the area as I got shot at until I had no more heals and died

I couldn’t figure out which enemies have shields. I think I understand the mechanic as explained by the other commenter, but it didn’t feel like it was expressed at all in game

I felt like enemies who I thought wouldn’t have omnivision did have it. It’d be nicer if the omnivision guys were a little more visually obvious

The beeping to indicate that you’re being noticed wasn’t easy to understand at first because of how slow the beeps are compared to other modern games that use a rising tone increasing in volume or something similar

Burying yourself to become less visible doesn’t seem to hide you completely, but IMO is a cheap substitute for actual stealth since you can do it instantly and anywhere

Hoverboarding is cool but ultimately feels tacked on since it’s only* useful in approaching a base.  I spent a while trying to hook onto things with the hookshot but only later found out its only use is for riding worms. On a lore note, it’s funny that a stealth operative in a desert carries a giant piece of reflective metal on his back

*Jumping on your board while running sideways of the faced camera direction gives you loads more airtime for some reason, to the point where I used it to bunny hop around and get on top of buildings

I’d suggest you make codec calls require another button press to advance to the next text even if youre fast-forwarding it since I accidentally skipped some info that way 

I prefer MGS's stand > crouch > prone instead of being able to snap from one state to another

I found the controls hard to use. Diving, specifically, is uncomfortable to do. They might be better on controller

Despite the criticism it’s fun with what seems like a somewhat interesting world and backstory, and the number of references to unlockables or mechanics that I hadn’t seen yet makes me think this is a really deep demo, but I just didn’t click with the way stealth works

Thanks for the bug report! I've updated the demo to v0.9.3g which seems to have fixed it

No worries!

not much different than Painkiller's pre-level screen for example

I've never played it, so I could just be putting expectations on the game that aren't fitting with your vision because of my own inexperience

I played through from where I left off to the end just because I didn't want to leave the boat dead weight comment out there if it was going to bother you and I wasn't 100% sure of it and... the latter zones don't really feel like they're about the boat much at all, so I'm not sure if it's really how I feel
But I know I enjoyed the boat in the earlier demos, maybe because (in my recollection) it didn't always feel like you were always trapped in a small area with the boat and were forced to get off to solve the area before you just ride it to the next zone.

Having played more I still feel there are too many ambushes. The cheiftain zone didn't feel well designed because of how much you could solve by sniping. I must have missed something because I walked around a lot at the transmission tower but couldn't find a way up and just hopped up the side of the tower

The bosses weren't bad, though maybe a bit repetitive. I got the feeling the optimal way to beat the elephant was to lure it to crash into stuff, but I didn't do that since it didn't take much more than circle strafing

Also the sound effects are super bass-y. I got the healing perk first thing,so I'm not sure if it was the sound of healing or the melee attack hit, but every time I landed a melee hit it sounded to me like I was the one who got hit with a thud

The acid explosion perk was annoying because I would start bouncing whenever I took damage - I'm sure I could have respecced but I forgot

And I didn't get the point of the inventory

Sure. There was no crash when finishing the first mission with a spider bomb on v0.8.0b when tried with the old save or after deleting the save data and starting a new file

The game initially kept forcing itself windowed until in the first person section

Mutations took me out of the game thematically - I had thought I was just playing as some guy - and assigning perks for a game that I haven't started yet wasn't interesting.

I don't like the map system. The game gives a nice early 3D PC game vibe that it is at odds with

Something about changing weapons during/after reloading a save let me use the revolver but the first shot after each reload was a shotgun blast. When changing weapons I had to do it twice, so I think it thought there were two weapons out

The water enemies and the ones that lie in wait behind bushes were scary. I don't think the animal enemies should be so persistent in hunting you and trying to jump out of the water to wherever you are. I died because, seemingly, a fish jumped out of the water onto land on a suicide mission to damage me once and killed me

I enjoyed this less than the DD61 demo. I think it was too hard and the new difficult areas didn't give me the feeling of travelling down a river to explore/conquer savages and instead felt like Doom but you have to drag a boat with you to your next combat arena/ambush by a million eldritch horrors. I stopped shortly after the second area

I got

___________________________________________ ############################################################################################ FATAL ERROR in action number 1 of Alarm Event for alarm 0 for object o_mission_end: DoAdd :2: undefined value at gml_Script_scr_test_save ############################################################################################ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- stack frame is gml_Script_scr_test_save (line -1) gml_Object_o_mission_end_Alarm_0

on beating the first mission with a spider bomb. The sound continued although the game had crashed

The option menus are diegetic but a little hard to read IMO. I think it may be the font + how spaced out the text is

I only beat the first level since I didn't want to repeat content, but the stacked munition launcher is insanely OP at fighting from a defensive position and minimizing collateral

Da field is da best. Actually I just go all in on field and try and stack chips that improve field wins. I don't last very long

Windows Defender didn't want me to run the .exe and I suspect it's because you're distributing it unzipped

I'm a big hater on using wojacks in the game

I didn't do the tutorial so I don't understand the new customers (assuming its deeper than that they bet for some reason and sometimes reroll the dice) and heat mechanics. IMO the mechanics should be apparent even to someone who wasn't tutorialized about them

Not being able to hide the shop is a pain because I don't know enough about craps to know why I would want to buy some of the shop items and being able to see the board at the same time would give me more information to make my decisions

The roll button being grayed out while the board is lit up is bad UI when you've placed your bets and want to roll. I'd suggest turning it red or something once you've placed a bet and you're no longer holding a chip

It seems to be possible to achieve victory and defeat at the same time. I don't really understand the condition, but it seems to be easily replicateable when going all on field. It lets you keep playing as long as you have chips but blocks you from buying certain things in the shop

Thanks! I don't like that slowdowns either, so I might add more skills that change up things when the board is static in the future.

I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I think I'll stick with my music, even if it's amateurish, just because it's simpler for me and I wanted to do everything in SB myself anyway.

Some skills need specific conditions to activate (on your next turn start, on removing a bottom card, etc.) so being 'Ready to use' just means they'll activate once that condition is met

Very nice idea and execution, though I haven't yet understood why you'd want to spend module/plug space on modules that move your weapons when you could just stack ones that passive benefits or healing. I won by stacking good effects on a longsword, but maybe in the full game I'd have to be more clever with them

I second whoever said that healing is OP

I'd suggest muting/lowering volume of activating effects (I think it was the capacitor) while you're in the shop

Oh, I was so sure you were describing a bug that I missed the obvious meaning lmao. It happens, get skills that activate when you pick up cards!

Glad to hear it, thanks for checking it out! What did you mean that you were locked in and didn't use your skills?

Thanks for the bug report! I've updated the web demo to fix that.

Whoops, I should have caught that easily. Fixed now, thank you!

Solitaire Battle is on Steam!

I also added more skills, the demo is longer, there are more achievements, and I've mostly been refining the content that's currently in the demo - [Full changelog here]

Oops. Thanks for catching that! I added a fix for it that will appear in the next version.

Thank you for letting me know! I wasn't able to replicate the bug, but I'll keep an eye out for it happening in the future.

Apologies! The web demo not saving is a web-only issue that I'm trying to fix.

Thank you! It's something that I want to add, but I've so far found it hard to create 'enemy debuff'-type skills good enough to put in a build compared to skills that improve yourself. That kind of thing might make it into the game eventually, though.

Oh yeah, that's true. Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you so much for saying so!

I’m glad for the feedback, since I’ve also been thinking about some of the ways that the current red skills are too valuable. Are there any specific skills that you think you choose more often than intended?

As for red-only builds, are they really better? I think at some point it becomes more optimal to diversify into different colors since their effect diminishes, like you said.