itch.io

It's fine, it works well and the menus are nice. I tried it twice and got stuck on round 5 on both times, the board remaining between turns is pretty limiting, which makes it ramp up in difficulty quite quickly. 

Managed to beat it this time! Ammo feels a lot more generous, and I was able to pick up most of the weapons in this version. Probably because I didn't miss out on the elephant level this time, so I went into the boss with a lot more resources. I think ammo might be a bit too generous right now, since I never really worried about it unlike my previous attempt, although I found a lot more secrets and had more weapons to use this time. 

Elephant: Only the projectile attacks seem unfair. It's hard to see it in the dark, and it tracks in a weird way that I don't really understand. Unless I managed to get it stuck between some trees or something to block it, it would always hit me a few times. 

Chieftain: Overall much better, but his jump slam attack seems to trigger even when he lands on objects that aren't the ground, so the hitbox ends up being higher than I would expect, and this killed me a few times. 

Only played for a short session up until I died to one of those bigger enemies, but it does feel like the world is quite empty, or that it's too big at the initial sections without much else to do but walk. I'm sure there's some upgrade later on for it, but I'd like to have a melee attack option to deal with the small enemies when they're up close. That's pretty much all I have to complain about, everything else is insanely good. 

Seems like some of the ambient audio tracks kept starting without stopping. It stops once I move on from the Spaceship, but starts again shortly after. 

That aside, menu is fantastic and the gameplay is everything I would ever want from a speedy precision platformer. Just that I am not someone who really plays precision platformers. 

I played up till a little past the first introduction of the blue lines (or whatever colour you usually play it as, the number of colour palette choices was pretty crazy), but everything up till then was surprisingly really intuitive to understand. Love the star fart key blocks teaching you that you can fart to go downwards faster too.

Made it to the 3rd floor, then had no idea what to do with the fish slope. I guess I should do something with shooting, but I cleared everything before with putt mode only, so I don't really know when I should be using shooting over putting.

First time playing it. Some of my deaths just happen too fast and suddenly that I don't even understand what happened. It took me a while to start noticing the vending machines and drones exploding out of nowhere. 

It can be hard sometimes to locate the hat. Slow-mo focus on enemies dying always feels weird, because it's also used when I get hit, so it just feels like I messed up if I'm seeing it. 

I found the UI to be really small on my screen, probably needs some scaling. The in-game HUD was fine, though. 

Tutorial was mostly fine, but I have no idea what to do in the 2nd level. 

The cannon tutorial could do with some more direction, because although it's already facing the right direction, also saying that I can turn it around makes me try that and fall a few times before I figure out that it already was facing the right direction. 

Interesting style, just that some things tend to blend in with the background. Only being able to fire forwards means that it's hard to shoot at enemies when they're too close, which could be a part of the combat as some kind of positioning check, but there also isn't much space to move around in the small maps. 

The results screen has a black fading overlay that gets cut off a little bit at the right side of my screen. 

Art is really good and cute. (I'm just going to ignore the blurred elephants in the room.) 

But the level design is shockingly cruel for what's the very first level of the game. Gave up on the section after the penguin with ceiling spikes. 

Doors that you need to somehow shoot while managing the rest of the platforming is just a lot of inputs to consider for being this early in the game, and I still haven't even managed to really get used to X>Z because I'm too used to jumps being on X from other games I've played. Would definitely appreciate a way to rebind those keys. 

It's certainly a choice to be going for such high difficulty, but I think there should at least be more checkpoints to  help isolate each of the skills you expect a player to be using. It feels like a puzzle game mixed with really strict execution, and I'll admit that I'm probably not the target audience for this. 

I don't really get it. I guess it's some kind of clicker-adjacent number go up game? 6 to start/stop is really weird  controls though, I'm not sure why I'd ever need to stop it.

Animations broke in the middle of the 1v4. I've seen this happen before in my own games when I update the animation clip and reimport it while the game is running (with custom playable graphs), never happened in a build for me though. 

Also, "2 to return to main menu" didn't restore my cursor. 

Here's the logs:

```

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.HandleCombat () [0x00288] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.MovementStates () [0x000af] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.Update () [0x00017] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

i am moving

i am moving

ArgumentException: Each item can only be used in one IndexedList at a time.

  at Animancer.IndexedList`2[TItem,TIndexer].Add (TItem item) [0x00032] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.AnimancerGraph.RequirePreUpdate (Animancer.IUpdatable updatable) [0x00000] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.FadeGroup.StartFade () [0x0000a] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.FadeGroup.StartFade (System.Single targetWeight, System.Single normalizedFadeSpeed) [0x00019] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.AnimancerLayer.Play (Animancer.AnimancerState state, System.Single fadeDuration, Animancer.FadeMode mode) [0x000e2] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at Animancer.AnimancerLayer.Play (Animancer.ITransition transition, System.Single fadeDuration, Animancer.FadeMode mode) [0x00008] in <d2ceed881e3a485e952eb02a4de046d7>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.HandleCombat () [0x000dd] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.MovementStates () [0x000af] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

  at CharacterControllerBehaviour.Update () [0x00017] in <267283b3a0eb498fa9913587e5ca69ed>:0 

```

Controls were alright on controller, but I think the camera needs a bit more smoothing. Some areas that seemed problematic was just circling the left stick when locked on, and walking up and down the long stairs. 

Combat feels less difficult than it is tedious. Not so much in an annoying way, but in the sense that if all I can do is swing/shove/block for the next couple of hours there's not a lot of options for dealing with groups who have basically the same options and can parry to stop me from hitting the others. At the very least, I think the turn rate on some actions should have some end lag to allow for a little bit of circle strafing, since at the moment it just feels like they can always just track perfectly. I think being able to hold your thrusts for a bit longer to wait for enemies to come in or overextend could be good? Could even do something like thrusts > blocks/parries and parry > normal attacks and normals > thrusts in a kind of rock paper scissors arrangement. 

patch notes changing genres entirely is crazy

Eye guys are funny. I think there might be a bug with the item pickups disappearing, since I went to both chests but still wasn't able to open the door to the next area. Inventory didn't show any keys either. 

Esc menu is totally covered by inventory/skill menus. Couldn't figure out what to do with the skills menu when it showed up, or maybe the pickup for that was also bugged since I didn't have anything show up. 

Without combos to perform, the basic puppet enemies just become a matter of spamming left click, and maybe the only thing is to try and group them together to hit them all at once. 

The block pushing only worked when I was at the corner of the box rather than on its face, which I initially thought to do. 

Thanks for playing! Each call to block reduces the perfect block window, so eventually it'll just become a regular block. It's exploitable to a small extent when your stance meter is still low, but you can still get stance broken through normal blocks, so it's still limited by the stance meter. 

You can play this through Proton. I believe 9.0 and above work for this, last I remember.

Thanks for playing!

• Yeah, this is a text bug. I do remember one of these having to be inverted to have the defaults both be off for what I see as normal, haven't really seen what the standards are here.
• Haven't been playing with my gamepad plugged in, so I haven't thought of this issue before. Will try it out some other time.
• camera the bane of my existence
• It's similar to DMC's style switching. There's a lot more complex inputs that can be done when they're dedicated buttons rather than something like R2+X. Generally they're all somewhat usable in all scenarios, but they're pretty important for dealing damage. 
• The window for each attack more or less matches their active damage frames, so you have to experiment both with your own attacks and the enemy's. 
• There's 8-direction snapping because movement gets really wonky at certain angles. 

You can access the new boss by talking to her in the hub area and clicking "About the challenges...".  It's meant to be a 2nd tutorial before Louise, so try beating her off first before beating off to Louise. 

Some known issues:

• Settings -> Invert Horizontal Look is duplicated, this is only a text bug. The top invert is for vertical and the 2nd is for horizontal. 
• Keyboard and controller remap menus haven't been designed yet, so it's still using a placeholder. 

Thanks for playing. Sorry for the late reply, this was stuck in approval hell and I didn't see it until now. (and SOMEHOW bots posting phishing links don't get quarantined)

Actually, her grab attack is meant to be easy to dodge, since it's quite deadly if you get hit by it (although it doesn't directly kill you). In the setting, this technique is supposed to be really hard to use effectively, which is why you need to practically be standing still to get hit by it. The somersault kick is a little fast, and I'm planning on adjusting the timing next update. 

For the shuriken blocking, just like how you can parry some projectiles, enemies can also parry yours by just attacking. I think the speed and effects on this are set too high that it immediately travels across the map to hit you before you can see it, so I'll look into fixing that next. 

Louise's AI is frankly quite a mess at this point and I plan to overhaul it at some point. 

There's also been some other updates to the game since this post was made, so please do try the new changes. 

Thanks for playing. 

• Parrying takes some getting used to and it's not easy to explain succinctly, but since it's a core mechanic I left it as a compulsory part of the tutorial. I'm still trying to think of how to improve on this. 
• The game auto-saves, but there isn't a lot of things to save. Specifically, only dialogue progression and clearing bosses will get saved, but I guess that's why games have that "Game is currently saving" icon at the corner of the screen. 
• Middle-mouse button allows you to unlock the camera. 
• There's still a lot of bugs I have yet to iron out with the foot placement system, unfortunately.
• The sit animation is a dogeza, but it's something I left in partly as a joke apology for the problems with the previous playtest. 
• 

Thanks for playing, just watched the video. 

It looks like you were playing the version before the update I pushed yesterday at first, and there's a lot of things that should be better in the latter part of the video after the update. (The sections where you can see her silhouette through the walls are after the update). 

I've also just nerfed the poison a little bit earlier today, but in actuality her grabs rarely end up connecting as long as you keep moving, and it's really a fight that's meant to push the player into making full use of their abilities and mobility. If you're up to try again, you can try to use the other abilities more, since they're all quite powerful in their own way once you figure out how to use them. 

This has happened a few times in the past couple days so I need to point out that any comments talking about this is 100% some kind of scam or hacking attempt. I delete all of the posts that I get notified for, but I'm leaving this post here just in case I don't get to it in time. 

Early 20s.

Thanks for playing! 

Yeah, the intended audience is mostly for those who are looking for something more after Sekiro, which is admittedly pretty niche. 

1-4 is more in line with style switching like in the DMC games, and the advantage of this approach is that every ability is at most 2 inputs away, with the currently equipped ability only being a single button press rather than something like R2+X. It also allows for much more complex use of each individual slot, although this really only gets used to its full extent with the iai stance. 

• Wind when outside the  portals never seemed to do anything. 
• Fossil didn't seem to do anything, even though I could hold it down.
• Fire+ was the one that showed me the targeting cylinder once before never showing up again. 

I've only played TH7 and got filtered by Youmu like >10 years ago, so I don't have much experience with shmups. Regardless, this is really well put together, and I appreciate the shorter area level structure in not having to play through the rest of the level after dying to a boss. 

My only complaints are there being a bit too much visual noise that distracts from the bullets, especially the stars that enemies drop. 

Very well made. I got to the statue puzzle and decided to stop, only to realize I've been playing for almost an hour. 

Never managed to cast the R abilities, though. Fire was about to cast, then I died and I wasn't ever able to enter the casting state again. 

It works if I call it near the start of the level, and even after playing for a bit it still worked. I suspect it might be due to position, since there's certain areas where pressing the key doesn't seem to call it, and there's floating ships sometimes visible off in the distance. It finally worked when I made it to one of those, but any attempts to call the ship didn't seem to do anything until I reached it. 

Mouse kept moving off to the other screen, need to confine the cursor. I wish there was a free mode that didn't end the level at just $10k. 

I found the whole middle-mouse rotation thing really confusing, but I think it's just the tutorial being told mostly through text instead of just making you do the thing, so I figure it'll get better as you iterate on the tutorial. Everything's really satisfying, but the current levels are pretty much tech demos, so I'd like to see what else you can come up with in the level design in future. 

Accelerating and dragging the bat horizontally across a table has got to be my favourite thing to do in this game. I want to see a fancy ultra-long dinner table with all sorts of plates and glasses on it just for this. 

It's a good start, and most things work pretty well. 

• Selecting targets is a bit imprecise at times, especially when things group up.
• Not really sure what the progression system is, or how I can make my character get stronger apart from maybe trying to get the treasure in the snake place. 
• There needs to be some kind of auto-save or respawn after death. Kinda weird that my guy just drops dead and nothing else happens. 
• Really just needs a bit more direction apart from only introducing the settlements, although I think I'm probably not really the target audience for this amount of undirected freedom at this point of time. 

It runs well even with hordes of NPCs. The escape ship didn't work for me too, so I just let the cops shoot each other while running around. I didn't feel like I was taking any shots apart from the baton police, although it might be that the other cops were just blocking the bullets for me. 

Also, Windows tried to block the game from running.

Thanks for playing! 

Yeah, this is going to be a really hard game lol. I don't think I'll go with the portraits since I don't have 2D art skills, but I do need to figure out a better way at showing who's speaking. 

Thanks for playing!

• Not really a bug, but more that I just need to rethink the phrasing on some prompts...
• Some of these prompts have been fixed, not sure about the cushion. 
• Fixed the softlock in the most recent update.

Thanks for playing!

• Yeah, this is a known bug that I'm gonna fix later today. It has nothing to do with the boss execution, but it's tied to a interaction prompt used at the end of the fight. 
• That's really weird, since hitboxes are tightly coupled with the animation system. Is this the poison grab or the izuna drop grab? 
  • It could also be that you interrupted her dash, but the startup for izuna drop looks quite similar to the dash and she just started it again. 
  • Will probably need a video of this to know what's happening. 

The controls didn't show up for my wireless PS4 controller... (it's probably a bootleg xd). Compound assignments for the keyboard was broken too. Please confine/lock the cursor in gameplay. 

I'm okay with this having longer commitment, but there's not much you can do to avoid getting parried. In my own game, even when the player gets parried, I never leave them at a significant frame disadvantage, since they can always dodge out of the way to avoid damage, and in Dark Souls the parry only happens during specific enemy stances. 

The other major issue is in any kind of gank. Since the stun duration remains constant and you can't cancel out of it in any way, getting hit in a gank is basically a death sentence. This will only get worse as you implement more complicated attacks and encounters, so you need to figure this out ASAP. 

As it stands, if you're only fighting humans like these in small encounters with roughly similar timings, then maybe it's still okay, but if you plan on adding non-humans like the infamous dogs from souls games then the slow windups and long recoveries might start to feel insufficient in dealing with those. 

I don't think the gun or the absorb did anything? 

Plays really well, but damn it's a hard game. 

I think the Chieftain area could be a lot brighter, since I just end up losing track of him in the darkness and it's already a crazy hard fight with all the mobs on the way there. Started the fight with nearly nothing but what was in the supply crate (somehow I was at 0 HP when I reached it), so it's probably impossible to clear it with those resources. I might manage to get a couple shotgun shots off, but I just don't have the resources to do the rest of his health bar, especially when almost any attack he does will kill me at that point.  Also, his grenade always gets me, and I have no idea how that hitbox works. In general, a lot of the monster attacks have hard to read attack hitboxes, especially the slugs underwater. 

Never found the grenade weapon, so that might be why I was struggling so much, but when weapons are so easily missable it might be worth considering how a player with only a specific weapon type might still be able to clear the level. Ammo feels a bit too scarce, it doesn't feel like it's enough to kill everything in the level with despite having that show up on the score at the end. Checkpoints are pretty well-placed for auto-reloading without having to backtrack too much and without much manual saving. 

Not really my kind of genre, but the entire interface feels polished enough to be in a full release already. 

Since there's a lot of waiting around for the guys to do things, I'd appreciate a setting to not pause while the window is inactive. There's a few other bugs:

• A tree randomly shrunk right in front of my eyes for no apparent reason.
• Sometimes, animals or characters will get stuck on things and start vibrating in place without doing anything.

The new dark area with the lantern genuinely made me question if you should just pivot into making horror instead. Totally expected some eldritch abomination to pop out and chase me, unfortunate that I just got a couple of basic enemies after that. As always, the art in this is crazy good. 

Ran into loads of bugs on the first fight. 

• Action selection UI disappeared, but seems like it still responds so stuff like moving around is possible.
• Attacks just never seem to hit no matter what. 
• The guy on the right gets stuck on the campfire and continues walking for a couple seconds until it gives up. Probably needs to have some kind of pathfinding. 

New puzzles are great, but I only managed to get 16/20 and 15/20 stars respectively. I did around 5min challenge runs before and after playing the puzzles, and it definitely feels a lot smoother after going through the puzzles, even if it feels like some of the puzzles were testing a similar concept.