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Shield Hoarder is perhaps a bit overtuned; I have never died to anything but it, and have also never beaten it.

This helped, but I have no clear understanding of what notes are helpful for, and it's still throwing me a bit that the pathing isn't actually linear and thus controllable with distance. I have been having a lot of trouble with the level named Mastery.

Biggest thing is to focus on meleeing it as hard as possible, as fast as possible. Long paths followed by circling it. Ignore the other monsters if you can. It thrives on buildup, so don't give it the chance.

Fun game! Some comments:

It seems like the Mortal would be more clearly phrased as "only the third hit hinders you".

It's not clear when bad luck tests would be needed. Do people ever run out of ammo in the source material? I'd expect that to be closer to a serious injury than anything, equivalent to being on your last Hit.

The aesthetic seems like it could be a little more clear - are the crumbling stone Aligheripunk demons not techy? It looks quite a bit like the demon magic is generic goth urban fantasy stuff whereas the angels are clearly quite cybernetic technopaths, and that's a weird lack of symmetry.

Relatedly, it's not clear what rituals do. I'm guessing it's an overtly magical, more-commonly-collaborative version of what the 90s thought being a hacker meant, except that the Cyber-Angels are only partly vulnerable on account of being cyborgs.

(Made from clones? 'Virtuous' mortals, in either the sense of being pious or skilled in battle? Likely all three. Not sure where Demons come from, though, given that they aren't quite the same thing as fallen angels. Something something passcodes? Something something magic computer virus?)

I also think the d6 table for lair locations is a little weak compared to the Named Location Tables, with the important exception of the 'desecrated workshop-chapel'. There's four times as much page space dedicated to home base resources, so stuff like 'a source of hell-ore' seem misplaced here, and also that amount of page space makes it clear that a lot of the game takes place in your cool cyberpunk hideout. Proposed solution: Rewrite the d6 table to be specifically the entry to your sweet secret base.

I think I just followed you from there to your site to Tumblr to here? Sort of wild to realize you had a more active web presence than 'popular webcomic'.

Interesting concept, but a lot of details make the implicit storytelling pretty strange - murdering a harmless villager is somehow equivalent to donating less than the price of a ring to the 'church'; there's lost money all over the place, the traveling salesman is willing and able to sell you a variety of evil magic rings, and getting Humanity to zero took some work but also had no consequence.

Also, the beast hunters are willing and able to kill you on very thin evidence of being a werewolf, but if your Humanity is high enough, you can kill and eat an animal in front of them barehanded and they won't bother you.

I was also hoping for some kind of thing in the center of the forest that'd give me an ending.

Oh cool! Is John Kilgannon working on anything these days, by the way?

I bought this today, but I don't seem to have gotten a Steam code, and it's not because this is cheaper than Steam because it turns out it's actually slightly more expensive here. Help?

It's very consistent for me; I'm not sure what else would be helpful.

Another softlock; some of level three's alligators just... wandered off? And so I can't finish the level.

I am sorry to inform you that the game softlocked in the second area for me with no clear cause; I have 50 Denarii and neither Knight nor Barbarian cost that much, but I can't place either for some reason? I just get their transparent sprite in the center, depending on whether I clicked their buy-tile most recently. Can't even make a barricade.

Edit: I'm on browser, and reloading seems to fix it, but it came back again with the next area. I did buy new characters each time?

Further edit: losing and restarting the arena gives the same glitch. Losing and going to the main menu before restarting the arena... still gives me the same glitch.

Fun! Good aesthetics, decent core mechanics. I want to know what this would look like with more polish.

Survey sensors can't be brought down or passed through, which has lost me half my troops late in the game.

The tutorial is necessary for the energy budget it gives me, but uses soldiers completely incompetently instead of using Scouts that could come back, recoup the cost of training, and also maybe harvest some crystal on the way.

I do not like this essay because it is mean. It's not mean because it makes the to-a-first-approximation-accurate claim that nobody who makes computer games is going to make money off of them; it is mean because it advocates that everyone become a bully.

Don't be a bully. It isn't right.

Or lasers, though that'd take an alternate signposting method and might not be as fun - probably just bullets that move at different speeds would work.

Why the heck does your review list MS-DOS as the worst aesthetic grade? I haven't played terribly many DOS games, but the ones I've seen have often had genuinely beautiful graphics.

Music actually came back for me on return? The link to the bugreport just takes me to unity dot com. I hadn't actually started the game yet though, I think.

Also, yes I loved the game and yes I'm looking forward to a bigger version. I beat it hitless, so treating hitpoints more like lives is a reasonable difficulty modifier I expect?

Nice! I think I might like a slightly expanded version.

Fair enough; if it's mainly a UI feature that's pretty important. Weirdly, I think I'd like it more if the opacity was way higher? More cohesion with the cartoonicity.

Oh, that is a cool effect. (Particularly when it doesn't cover the wheels, like from 0:09 to 0:15.) Any idea why the back wheels do this while the front wheels don't?

I do notice that the game smoke seems a lot more billowy and unreal than this video - partly because the smoke just doesn't look thick enough to me, but partly because it's all one color and thickness. Dunno how easy it would be to copy the 'stuttering cone' effect with the smoke trails, but I suspect it'd look cool.

Huh. That's a lot of work for an effect whose purpose-in-the-fantasy I don't quite understand - when I saw 'wheel smoke' I was expecting lines of smoking rubber on the track. What's this (admittedly cool-looking) 'flying through a cloud' thing based on?

Huh. The fact that you default to 1d6 for skills you don't have seems like it makes 1d6 skills mostly not very useful? Haven't claimed a community copy, just going by the previews in the sidebar. Probably the Push and Pull mechanics are what makes them matter? 

Lots of fun! Hoping the post-jam version will have an ending; I did get to max level in every stat once I figured out that the winning strategy was to focus on keeping the center clear, but I don't find single-entry scoreboards very motivating.

Fun! Do you win if you max out all stats?

Oh, that works? I thought I'd tried that. Huh.

The combat system is well done, but the gambling elements are obnoxious. Also the final stage of the full stability ending should probably have said Channel ??? 1/1 instead of 1/3.

What are speed splits?

I was looking at your other games because I enjoyed Frauki, and I'm nearly certain this is an accident because the thumbnail version of the cover looks clearly like a smoke-ring halo around the protagonist, but the zoomed-in game-page version of the cover makes the visible left side of the smokering resemble a nude and feminine figure partly wreathed in smoke, and I was concerned that this game had at least one sex demon.

Yeah, she's clearly significantly more evil than the robots are. The ending was coherent, including thematically - I wouldn't call it bad writing - just, uh, yeah. I wonder if we'll ever have a sequel?

Maybe you could release additional tracks as 'DLC'? It sort of makes sense to make the bigger game the paid one, though.

So the plot is that the ghost stops possessing you right as you make a huge jump?

I'm pretty sure the Time Out thing does not check if I could in fact have rung the bell. Kind of a bug.

Bubble wand right against most walls can trap bubbles in them allowing for continuous walljump - I figured that out well before I found out you can actually aim the bubble wand up or down (which I learned from the author's notes because I wanted to know how to escape the final dungeon if you start it too early, which I did, at minimum possible equipment). This provides a fun potential speedrun route: walljump up from the third area, right before you'd normally get the phase dash, through the rain, and just get the Big Pearl directly.

This is probably optimal for the 100% run, too, since the Pearl allows rapid equipment switching. You'd probably get the phase dash first in that case, though.

>>only ask to confirm canceling portrait maker if no changes were made

Isn't this backwards? Cancelling and losing your work is a thing to get confirmation about, whereas closing out if nothing will be lost can go quickly.

Hm. Dunno if adding a whole Item Modification system is a good idea, but ascending the glitch might be fun in principle?

Yeah, that much of the solution was obvious, but I still have no idea how. Pushing a box into a cart doesn't do it. Crushing a box between carts doesn't do it. The box doesn't push carts, so I can't push one into a wall. There isn't a convenient turn-right-before-a-wall implied by the architecture to let me push a box into the way of a turn after the train has passed, though I think I can see how to make that not necessary now.

(I never saw the point of the fourth of the three hollow cubes, by the way. Not sure what the 'easy' path was.)

Someone else demonstrating the car-trimming mechanic was enough, I think. Frustrating that it isn't tutorialized in the actual game - I solved several engineering problems that simply did not do the job because I was guessing wrong at what I needed to do - but I appreciate the walkthrough you're presumably giving me behind that spoiler.

This might be unreasonably difficult now, if I'm understanding correctly? The level with the two five-section trains feels like I haven't had a key mechanic or two tutorialized. In particular, it looks like I'm supposed to be able to crash a car with the block, but the trains are remarkably resistant to crashing.

I would expect this setup to crash at least one car of the right-hand train, and thus win me the level, but it doesn't:

Another bug report: falling to your death while having a potion - at least during the wind boss fight - fails to trigger the 'respawn on platform' code properly; it appears that Perla winds up under the screen somehow and can move the camera one screen right - or be moved, by the hurricane thing, which immediately moves her back so long as it's going. The lightning beam sometimes shows up there too. Can't open the pause menu, either. I expect this playthrough would be continuable if I could simply get Perla into a lethal hazard, but it's not working, and I can't seem to get hit by the one petrifying arrow the boss shoots straight downward; I'll likely have to reset again.

(I think, though it was a long time ago, that being petrified while falling to your death also breaks the game. That was the first time I played, and I was fireball-reflecting in order to sequence break to the wind area instead of going down the very long corridor with no save points to get the charge shot and dash.)

Cover art gives a misleadingly skeevy vibe, but I know your works well enough to try it anyway, and it was quite good! Short, fun, and to the point.