I have beaten the game, but it was only after lots and lots of frustration. I'm conflicted, because when the game is fun it's SO FUN and there's nothing quite like it. But man, when it's bad it just feels cheap. There's little things, like the fact that the player can get stun locked by later enemies who have automatic weapons. Overall it just feels like no matter the difficulty the player is just made out of paper mache even with fully upgraded endurance and body armor. And speaking of body armor, it lasts for such a short amount of time I'm not even certain it needed to be in the game in the first place. The entire forest and cave sequences were an absolute pain in the butt. I'm not sure why I'm fighting suicidal eagles in a tech-noir dystopian action adventure game.
The story and presentation are awesome, I love the music, and the game as a whole is quite fun at least 60 percent of the time, but it just felt needlessly frustrating for a lot of the experience. I hope soon people will stop equating retro gaming with punishing difficulty, because they don't have to be that way!
Anyway, I'm looking forward to whatever you guys do next regardless.
Doing my absolute best to try and enjoy this game because it is, at first, very cool. But there's QUITE a few design conventions that push back against it. I guess I'm in the minority here and also perhaps not familiar with the type of design decisions that go into new age C64 games. An example; it does not seem like there's a recognizable pattern to the malfunctioning electrical boxes in the utility tunnels. Is that true? Are they random, or is there a pattern and I'm not recognizing it? Because getting past those things is an absolute heinous chore for absolutely no reason.
A few months ago I recall seeing a short youtube video of a demo of a first person, indie, survival horror game. It was set in a spooky mansion, had inventory management, basic first person combat. The enemies were tall red creatures with teeth, kind of like the molded from RE7 but red. I cannot for the life of me remember the damn name of this game to look it up again, but I remember trying out the demo for a few minutes and I'm 100% positive I downloaded it from itch! I seem to remember it being called something like "The Demon Door" but that hasn't brought me any good results.
It's not Nightmare of Decay from Steam or Deppart from here.
As much as I want to love this, there's just small quirks that need some consideration. Consider the lack of hit stun on enemies, which means they can shave off huge chunks of your health while you're shooting them. The amount of damage done by the enemies feels off too, so the combination of those two things means I spent most of the demo really frustrated rather than having fun.
That being said, it looks and sounds so cool, has a really affecting atmosphere, the guns feel great too. Will definitely continue to follow your progress on this.
So I gotta say, I really adore what you've done here. Cool setup, satisfying gameplay, great pacing, awesome aesthetics, and really pleasing music.
However.
You completely lost me on this once I hit the section where you have to find gas. The enemies faced there are so absolutely abysmal to fight. They're damage sponges, the player isn't supplied nearly enough weaponry/ammunition, they hit ridiculously hard, and the sound effects they make are ear grating. It just feels like a bizarre spike in difficulty and doesn't match the quality of everything else up unto that point.
I'm sorry if that sounds mean, I really think you're a talented dev and this game is super awesome, but I don't know if I want to continue playing. I've died multiple times to these guys on the easiest difficulty setting, they simply aren't fun to fight at all.
