itch.io

In a way, both the Queen and the Hero are players, just from completely different genres of games. I'm kinda curious if that's intentional or not.

The Hero - this one is obvious. They are a player of a souls-like, obviously. Games which are brutally difficult, but are designed to be beatable. We can see this in Queen's attacks, which are designed to be avoided by all of their abilities. I find it kind of funny though that they know the hitboxes of your attacks so well considering how bad and unintuitive the hitboxes were in the original souls games (they're still kind of bad here, just in an opposite way). It's kind of another instance of "time flies faster in games" trope, which, while not realistic, an easy way to add variety to the gameplay, so I'm not gonna complain or deduce points for that.

The Queen - she is a player of an infinite game. No wonder she talks about eternity so much. But ironically, her true destiny is to eventually lose. These games often start off very easy. But eventually, the game becomes more and more difficult. Some games get stuck in a loop (Tetris and Pac-Man wrap around to level 1), some become impossible and some actually become unlosable (In Alien Shooter, infinite mode eventually stops spawning the enemies).  For her, the "play session" is all of the fights with the Hero from the beginning to the end. I know that the game is finite and the Hero can be defeated but still, the design philosophy is exactly the same. Despite this, her side of the story still very  similar to a soulslike: her enemy gradually gets stronger and stronger, making last, most punishing phases incredibly hard to practice. Now, gameplay wise, this is not a perfect boss design, but I wouldn’t really mind it, if not for the fact that the game is filled with unskippable cuscenes/animations. I know that this is “you’re not supposed to win this” kind of endings but that’s not an excuse to make this ending so painful to get, so points go bye bye. It’s not like I didn’t play levels that took me hours though. In RIP3 “starting weapon only” challenge, which isn’t even supposed to be beatable, I had to do the same thing in some levels for abbout 45 minutes. Emphasis on “same” (making the learning curve more forgiving than you’d expect) and “doing” (there, waiting around was one of many options, and was not forced by animations). There were a couple of other factors that made the experience more enjoyable like fluent controls and predictable enemy behavior but i digress.

7/10 The game has amazing storytelling, but after your second run you literally exhaust all dialogue options, making the gameplay flaws all the more apparent, because there is no more drama to distract you from them. And, fittingly, I’m likely moving on from this game, but for all the wrong reasons. For now, at least.

Just finished getting all of the golden stars. Pretty enjoyable game. Certain stars can be annoying at times but nothing too bad. The levels aren't long enough for it to be a problem. And health is literally never an issue.

I guess it's 10/10? Not my favorite game, but it does well what it wants to do flawlessly.

Fun fact: I was actually misfortunate (get it?) enough to encounter a softlock on the level 12, when I was kicked out on a flat part of a slope with no momentum.  I say "misfortunate" for a reason though, because you won't get there without either a precision or a bad luck.

I enjoyed this game a lot, the graphics are nice, the music is SO GOOD and the gameplay is flawed but still great. I really think that the advanced radar (mines only jam cells orthogonally adjacent to themselves) should be a default because without it the early game becomes really RNG dependant. Other than that I can only complain about hazard view being almost useless in it's current state (every time I open it all I can see is RED). Other annoyances like the softlock-inducing Ultimines or Mind Melting Mirror Mines I can excuse as a me problem. Other than that, perfect game.

P.S. This game should have option of ASCII graphics in the future, just like the original Rogue.

This is the only visual novel I played personally. Honestly, 10/10.  In a way, this game deserves the rank of educational. As in "actually useful  irl" kind of educational. There was nothing totally new to me but it still was a solid knowledge check. My only possible nitpick is when different options lead to same outcomes, which can make searching for different edings a little confuing. But like, it gets completely overshadowed by every other positive the game has: the story, the art, the music, the message. And the other one is that I have an emotionall barrier with trying out some of the endings (1st and 3rd ending with Chloe), but that's literally a me problem.

I'll stay tuned for the future updates.

P.S. I feel like my mom would enjoy this game. I'll  comment after she tries the game out.

Where do I even begin...

The game has many ideas executed well (multiple levels, dashing and bouncing etc). Except for one: infinite gameplay. All "infinite games" break eventually, but this one, becomes unplayable (the intended way) pretty quickly. Especially if you have a lot of upgrades. i have to admit, it's pretty funny seeing how the game struggles to understand what's happening but I digress. If the game had finite levels and was built around them i think it would have been better, but I can't really complain about level design in a game made in 3 days. But definitely see way more potential there. And obviously in that context the upgrade tree must be reworked. Especially dash, which, if upgraded too much, makes navigating between levels very problematic.

GG 7/10

I love this game so much. I know it's just a prototype but god knows how many hours I spent in this game. I especially love to play it as a frostmancer with every single negative charm enabled. Because of this, my perspective on this game might be skewed a little. 

The music, sounds and even graphics (despite being unfinished) are good. I have no complaints about them. The gameplay is extremely fun but not without it's flaws.

Many of the cards are underpowered. As in, there's no scenarios where using them is a good idea or there's a direct upgrade. Fixing them, I think, is essential for making the game more consistent, especially with a lot of negative charms enabled.

Deathly Fumes - the only case when this card is more viable than Poison Strike is if and only if the enemy has 2 poison, which is impossible without 2 Poison Strikes or 1 Super Poison. Only in that ultra specific case it's unique gimmick can even be noticed. Make it so that it triples the poison instead. It would still require 1 card to be good but at least the hights would be easier to reach.

Dagger - completely outclassed by Echo Potion or Echo Strike, which are more reliable shield breakers. Even if it did 3 stabs I'm not sure how effective that would be. With 1+2 damage or no cost this might become usable.

Strengh Boost - Strength potion is indeed easier than push ups. I see no reason to use this every time when you can just use the strength potion once.

Quick Punch - Fatigue is way too strong of a debuff, especially for non-ranged attacks, which become obsolete when "Explosive" charm is involved.

Meditate - powerful if you have enough energy to play it, but with "hesitation" charm this card becomes actually unusable, and with "hand pain" - borderline useless.

Teleportation - same problems as meditate.

The Bishop - technically fine, but the fact that this card doesn't do even a single bit of damage annoys me to no end, because all other chess cards do damage and look like. Make it do at least 1 damage. It won't be as offencively powerful as other pieces, but it would be consistent with other pieces.

Also, I'm very scared of the "Relentless" charm. Considering how hard the game can be with all available charms this one might make the game borderline impossible (this is not substantiated, I'm just guessing).

The crashing is a frequent but negligeble problem. 

Overall, 9/10. Imperfect, but incredibly fun 100 plays later.

Graphics and music: 10/10 no complaints at all but nothing interesting either. 

Gameplay: 8/10. Synergises pretty well with a porn aspect of the game. I like how sex scenes in this game act as a reward in so many ways: as a checkpoint, as a health refill and as a resting period for the player after some pretty stressful attacks. 

In isolation, the boss is perfect, with my main complaint being inconsistant visual feedback. And by that I mean "what do I need to shoot". Generally, you shoot boobs, they bounce, you make progress. EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST PHASE. I did not struggle with this as much but it still could have been done better. We have a similar problem in the final phase, but because the target then flashes each hit it's not that important. The easiest way to solve this issue is to simply add a health bar for the boss. 

Other thing I can nitpick is the fact that keyboard and mouse controls aren't equivalent, with the mouse being noticeably faster. I mean, many shoot' em ups do this because mouse controls instead of directing where your character will move simply teleport them to the position of your cursor. Not in this case though: the speed is higher but not infinite. Pretty annoying mechanic, and not negligible like the unclear visual feedback. I have no Idea why this is the case.

My final complaints are: I want more, and I want downloads, but those aren't really complaints, are they? Therefore, they don't affect my final score: 9/10.

And yes, I've beaten it with keyboard only with no hits. It took me way more than 0 resets and 6 minutes because I used page refresh instead of ingame retry to save time. In reality, it was probably about an hour of attempts. GG