itch.io

Very cool game. UI is pretty readable. I ran into a few bugs:

-After buying a rune from the shop, you become unable to place a rune modifier from the shop. Reloading from the main menu fixes this.

-Placing a frosty tile after reloading placed two tiles next to each other. I was trying to place the tile before exiting but ran into the bug I listed above where it wouldn't place; I'm unsure if that affected this.

-I was unable to leave the shop for some reason. The "leave shop" button was grayed out. Reloading the game from the main menu also fixed this. I wasn't able to find what caused it.

-Returning to the main menu, continuing, restarting from the pause menu, returning to the main menu a second time and continuing again reloads the first save instead of the restarted one.

-Clicking the draw pile more than once continues to add the draw pile into the scrolling menu. That popout menu could maybe also use a touchup since the scroll bar looks a bit messy.

The buzzword system is a cool idea, but it feels pretty luck-dependent and it's not immediately evident what getting them gives you. I would say maybe add a tooltip to them to make the effect clearer. It feels very luck-dependent, so it'd be a good idea to have some kind of logic under the hood to ensure that hyper-optimal play doesn't end up being to restart until you get good buzzwords. You might already have something like that going on; I didn't really dig into if there were any patterns. A way to reroll them might also help.

For item descriptions, I think a highlighting system for keywords with hover would go a long way, i.e. for something like Dracula, maybe highlight the keyword "Double Word Space" and then let you maybe right click it to highlight the ones on the board, or for something like Metamorphosis, to be able to hover over "Special Space" as a keyword to see what the options are. I'm sure something like that isn't top priority, but it would add a lot of readability.

I think gameplay-wise that it's in a pretty good place. With a little bit of polish and some more visual variety, this could end up REALLY good. The pieces all falling off the board after a game over is a great touch. Nice job.

It's cool. The movement feels pretty good, even if some jumps are very tight. I've been looking forward to trying the demo for a long time, and finally got around to it this time. The level designs are quite compact, and you were able to do a lot with just a handful of mechanics. The game has excellent visual presentation.

I did have a lot of controller issues. I play with a Switch pro controller generally, which I use through the Steam controller configurator (since it's not XInput) by adding the executable as a non-Steam game, which usually works fine. For whatever reason, the standard setup with that caused the inputs to be read as always pressing the Up button. Although Jump worked fine, I couldn't input any directions. That in itself might be worth looking into since you plan on doing a Steam release.

I changed the input settings to use the preset template for Keyboard to Controller, and that let me play, but it constantly misread the up button while pressing left/right (since I played with the stick). This caused me to constantly accidentally drop the bomb out of my hands. This was a huge source of frustration and caused probably around 200 of the 600 deaths (!!!) I had by the end of the demo. If you don't end up doing remappable inputs, I would really like to see the bomb drop key remapped to a non-directional button/key. Any other button would be fine, just not Up.

Having what in most games is the pause button mapped to "immediately exit the game" is hard to get used to. Even just a "Quit? Y/N" prompt would be fine.

The music stopped looping on floor 16. Not sure how long I was playing to reach that point.

You can also make the floor unwinnable without killing yourself on a few stages if you drop the bomb in one of the vertical screen boundary warp shafts (floors 16 and 17, and I remember there was at least one more later on). The bomb falls infinitely without despawning if you do that, and it also picks up infinite speed.

It was fun to see the character get increasingly frustrated as the death counter went up - it's a great touch. You might want to add sprites for that while also carrying the bomb.

I also wish the splash screens between stages lasted just a little bit longer, but I get why they're quick.

Thanks for uploading. I look forward to playing it again later on. Nice job.

For demo v1.02:

I beat the demo on Hard and didn't have any balance concerns. I spent a pretty good amount of time looking for all the secrets, but didn't find them. I think I ended up sequence breaking stage 2 by jumping from a tree up onto the highway; I'm glad the game lets you do stuff like that. Great music and visual direction, and the controls are fluid. Source-style crouch jumps are a nice addition. The further in I got, the more I was impressed. The attention to detail in the city really stuck out, but I shudder to think about what 10% of the Milky Nut is recycled.

You might want to lower the default sound effect volume some. I appreciated being able to break the cacti (PLEASE add a Steam achievement with the full release for breaking them all). The flinch effect on hitting basic enemies feels really good. I did find that the saw-hand enemies had a hard time navigating stairs. The secret jingle is great, but also way louder than the rest of the music.

The controls menu is a little wonky and could use a little work if you get to the time. The setting for which controller you're using being the only text heading in the menu made me think at first that all the settings below it were for XInput Controller No. 1, so you might want to encapsulate the text in a box together with the Select Gamepad UI elements. Gamepad selecting being a scroll bar instead of radio buttons is also bizarre, but if it works, it works. You might also want to add the text about pressing a bound key to unbind it in the popup text where it says "Push a key/button to bind to [INPUTNAME]." These are minimal concerns, though.

I didn't know that alt-fire actually did anything until seeing the "walk while zoomed in" option while writing the above. It might be a good idea to throw up a tutorial for alt-fire somewhere, like maybe when you pick up the first SMG, then another saying "some weapons have a different alt-fire" when you first grab the shotgun.

I did find one tiny bug where walking off of some surfaces would instantly kill your horizontal momentum and you'll fall straight down instead of running off; it happens sort of consistently but not every time with the little standing lights on level 1 (pic related). It also happens sometimes when running off the roofs of cars.

I also try to make a commitment to getting into places where I'm not supposed to be, and in the start of stage 3 where the magenta terminal is (near the mech enemy), I jumped from the boxes to the slanted pipe onto the building, and you can see OoB. If you walk into that garage area on the right, you get softlocked.

I had a great time with Ctesiphon and I'm excited for more. You did a damn good job.

You can exit the game with the mouse by clicking the X button at the top-left of your main hub screen where your digimon walks around.

Hey, we went ahead and took down that download and renamed the "for streaming" download (the more stable branch) to just "PC." That version should work alright, but let us know if you have any more problems. The changes from the version you played need some heavy testing/revision and you'll see them in a later demo. Thanks for checking out the game!

Hey, sorry for the issues. We went ahead and removed that download; the only download listed now is the one previously listed as for streaming. You'll see the menu overhauls in a later upload. The PC download that's there now should be pretty stable, but if you run into any more issues, let us know. Thanks!

Thanks for checking out the game and giving us your thoughts! I'm going through all of the feedback we got and making fixes. We plan on going through and giving all of the encounters a few balance passes, so we'll probably tune some of the fights back a big especially with considerations of the new combo mechanics. We'll also be doing the same with the maps and dialogue. Lots of polishing to be done.

I've updated the diagonal walk speed for the next release to use a "true normalized" vector (instead of the rounding we were doing in this release), then snapping the sprite's visual while storing the decimal position internally. Trying to get diagonal movement down right while working with the low internal resolution constraint has been an interesting challenge. We're trying a few different options to see what works best.

I've also added corner avoidance for the next release. This is a great suggestion. We also plan on adding a keybind menu so you can set the buttons however you like. Run toggle is also a good idea. Type chart crash should also be fixed.