itch.io

Oh 2 other things that I realised I missed:

• Might just be me - The discards area confused me, as I thought it was meant for me to drop cards onto
• Potential fun useless improvement - I enjoy sneaking in education, and given allot of the game elements have historical references, adding small info tid bits somewhere with each card would be neat

So I don't comment on many games, though this one I really enjoyed and feel has so much potential for more.

Here is my thoughts in no particular order, where I go Good, Needs Improvement, Bad:

• Good - Solid game loop with good variability due to the number of cards
• Needs Improvement - I found like allot of people have commented, if your RNG is right and you get the right cards in the early rounds, the rest of the game just spend all cards, end turn, and you don't have to worry or think because your standing resting army outnumbers all but the last round main boss.
• Bad - Lack of tutorial, though I did pick it up, a nice tutorial is one of those things that is always appreciated
• Good - Art style, it's consistent, simple and does a good job effectively communicating what is what. It makes me think of Watabou and their map generators which gives me nice vibes
• Good - UI, it's clean showing only prudent information without flooding the player with too much info, and the way you consolidate unit counts shows you've thought how to keep a consistent aesthetic
• Needs Improvement - Super minor, but a simple tooltip over the sword, armour and hp icons, as though as a reasonably seasoned gamer I intuited them, you shouldn't assume everyone knows.
• Needs Improvement - Not such an issue once you get to that steam roller phase as it just stops mattering, but with the mods you provide to units, you do show in the popup when hovering over city areas what the are does, but don't have a way of viewing the consolidated aggregated mods for units.
  • Or even allowing a hover tooltip for the unit icons
• Needs Improvement - Mentioning the city area hover, I really like it, the small improvement, which I think might be a bit challenging due to be aware you are keeping the "card" format, is that when you have an area above level 1, I would expect the panel to show the aggregated effect, not the standalone.
• Needs Improvement - You have overall picked a really good colour palette, strong contrasts, and again, I see influences of Watabou. A few minor tweaks that I think are needed to improve both accessibility and legibility:
  • The `Income` field (and value counter) is too close to the background colour, I could read it, but early on it didn't catch my attention and took a bit to notice
  • The `Merchant Guild` cards suffer from a similar problem, since the background is cream, while they are yellow, and the gold icon is yellow, the are legible just not comfortable and it feels a bit over saturated

Definitely a strong foundation, with many directions to go, and a really solid experience overall :)

Yeah I had this bug myself, I also noticed that other things had bugged out but it took longer to notice, like I stopped getting offered to buy the org upgrades which effectively locked me out from progressing since I couldn't do something available later in the game since every reincarnation I lost all my org progress

I normally don't comment on games, but I have had my hand forced by this game.

tl;dr; buy this game, I have no affiliation to it, just buy it and your welcome.

The itch version of this game is absolutely horrible in the way that every game developer hopes their demo will be, in that it makes me want to know what happens next and makes me want to pay to do so.

The great parts of the demo:

• it's engaging and well paced, with a gentle intro to the mechanics
• the art work is brilliantly executed showing a beautifully rendered world in a pixel aesthetic
• the voice acting is nicely synced to the actual animations and carries the personality of Mick well
• the story line has a good pace with when information is revealed
• the main character isn't 1 dimensional and has depth shown through effective environmental story telling, dialogue, his internal monologue and the narration.
• the post edit scenes showing the gameplay set a nice tone of what is to come.
• Super controversial part: All the voicing and the backdrop is Australian, and being an Aussie, and one who knows Sydney, makes me very happy.

With all those compliments, there were a number of small things that I felt could be done better but don't detract from the overall great quality and polish of the game. Even if these small quirks weren't changed I wouldn't hesitate to buy this game still, so ignore this if you want (but I do try to give constructive feedback where I think it isn't obvious):

• No option to go back to the main menu was a bit frustrating
  • honestly I wouldn't have noticed had I not decided to do this comment and needed to restart the game a bunch to double check I'm remembering stuff right
• Black screens instead of animations, there were several times when a black screen is used to transition to the scene after Mick has done a thing, this did feel like it broke the flow of the scene at times. An example without spoiling anything is when you remove the tarp at the beginning.
  • I recognise this is likely a limitation of dev resources, drawing up all the frames is costly in both the art and the time to add the animations and transitions, and I say this all to make it clear I understand the reasoning, I just think omitting it is disingenuous.
• This may just be me, the help arrow at the beginning to denote where the inventory was, I mistook the arrow as the border of a hot-zone initially expecting the inventory to come from the corner.
  • Since it could just be me, the only fix I would thing is making the arrow point slightly wider.
• The help arrows for when you use your first item I feel have 2 friction points:
  • The arrows move with the inventory drawer, which can impact readability a little.
  • They disappear when you click on an empty space, so it's possible to miss them through a mis-click (guess who did that). I think ideally for UX this could be rendered:
    • When you click on the item in your inventory when there isn't the chance to use it on anything.
    • When you click on the item in your inventory when there is a chance to use it on something, and keep the help text till you use it
• I accept this is being a PITA and I only noticed since I have been replaying it a bit to write these comments, the backpack in the car, vs the one that's torn, the fact one is a duffel and one is a backpack is something I can no never unsee.
  • No need to change it, minor continuity error isn't the end of the world :)
• The colour scheme used for the torn pack and the ground after the car makes it blend into the background, where I did't even notice it until I needed it, though when looking for it it wasn't hard to identify.
  • This comment is more along the thought the backpack could benefit a very small bit from being a fraction brighter to contrast better against the ground.
• Being unable to recover dialogue already said can be a bit frustrating, it does help to not let the user go over the dialogue repeatedly expecting something different, but it would be nice if there was a way to "flashback" or get conversations repeated.
  • I do recognize that hovering over the option gives a summary from Micks point of view but having maybe a tab at the top of each option with a repeat icon to rerun the dialogue would be nice with a help text explaining it's purpose on first display
• It would be nice if there was a way to make Mick run or walk faster within a scene
  • This is more for navigating a scene, rather then moving between scenes which I recognize has the double click feature
• Going through the accessibility options to figure out what was available, I noticed the Lock Cursor defaulting to on, was annoying, especially when using on window mode.
  • Also it didn't feel like it's an accessibility feature.
• Not 100% sure why having the end-periods is a thing
  • To those unsure what it does, it did exactly as I though, in the subtitles, when enabled, it makes it so that sentences where appropriate end in a full stop
• The Options interface is probably the weakest part of this game, which is not bad. Things that probably could be done better:
  • Accessibility isn't really Accessibility, it's a "more" option which has accessibility features and more audio controls
  • Changing the language only changes the text, not the audio
    • This is again likely limited dev resources, and is understandable and forgivable by all measures, just something noted
  • Inability to map the hotspot highlight button is frustrating, as I can see this being a big accessibility pain point given you can't guarantee the device someone is using has either the H key OR a middle mouse button
    • Potentially when enabled request to set with a sensible default
  • End-Periods is such a weird option ... I don't hate it, and don't want it removed, but ... weird
  • Font scaling would be a useful accessibility feature that I'm surprised wasn't included in the HD dialogue font.
• No confirmation when restoring to a save meaning you could accidentally restore to the wrong save
  • Not the end of the world, but could also be bad for those who click quicker then they thing and accidentally lose progress.

I haven't gotten to the full game, but I have high hopes and look forward to continuing the story and if it carries on the quality of the demo (which all the steam reviews suggest it has) I know I have a good time ahead.