itch.io

This is such an amazing entry for the jam.  I love  how evocative and epic the writing is.  The tower itself is also great, just enough vagueness for GM input, while still offering plenty of structure and guidance when needed.   

My only criticism is that I wish there was a little more complexity with when the final encounter can happen, since as it stands there's a 1/8 chance that the first room you walk into is the final boss.  But it wouldn't be too hard to fix/homebrew on my own.  Maybe something like the roll getting an extra +1 per floor (so d8 the first floor, then d8+1 the second, d8+2 on the third, etc), that way you could make the final boss be on rolling a10 or higher, so its possible to encounter him early, but there's still a baseline  of a few floors of warm up before the end game.

Don't take the length of my criticism as any indication of how I feel about the submission.  Like I said, it is incredibly well made and looks like a hell of a lot of fun.  I definitely plan on running it for my group once we finish up our current Cyberpunk campaign.

That would be amazing!

I absolutely love the lost media/game magazine vibe that this has.   I also think it could be very great as a spring board for a one shot/short campaign where the characters get infected in the first session, and have to journey to find Midnight Tonic before they expire and become consumed

I absolutely loved the concept for this game.  The theming, aesthetics, and art design were all top-notch.

That being said, I think some of the game mechanics and/or design could use a bit of work.  I loved the old "Sierra Game" style that Crown of Zephyr went for, especially when it came to the puzzles and exploration.  But I feel like a lot of what hampered my experience was the combat system and the abundance of random encounters (although the lack of compelling combat no doubt effected my view of them)

The combat system has you use the crank a lot, having a sort of "crank off" between you and the enemy that seems to reward cranking faster and faster (something that probably isn't great for the playdate).  This also makes it hard to tell if you are under-leveled or just need to crank harder/faster.  I think a more technique-heavy use of this idea could absolutely save this for me, and make it feel more like the mini-game battles in games like the Mario & Luigi series or Mother 3. I don't mean to compare this game to those, since they are trying to do way different things, but just to show how a more mini-game centric battle system can work. 

I'm not a game designer so take these suggestions with a grain of salt. But perhaps some sort of balancing act, where you have to crank to keep a dial in the center, or having to crank to match the pattern of the enemy, could help to resolve some of the issues I had with the game's combat

While yes, this game was a little buggy at parts, mainly when using or dropping an item the game doesn't expect you to use/drop.  However there was nothing too huge that ruined the experience or stopped my progress.

I absolutely believe that if the combat system is tweaked/redesigned, and some little bug fixes here and there this could absolutely become a huge hit for the Playdate.  But at it's current state, I was left feeling a little bit unsatisfied

TLDR: It's an amazing concept, with great art, and exciting exploration, but so-so encounter structure, and disappointing combat that brought the experience down.  Overall a 3.5/10 for me

Have you considered making this into a full game