First off, I want to start by saying that I'm super excited to see what's inside of the top of the tower, just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.
The not so good.
Jumping from platform to platform feels a bit strange and not as clear as the climbing, either the jump height feels too low, or the gravity too, high. Usually I'm not a fan of super thight jumps in games where the mechanics aren't helping with a small amount of player expression. And somewhat contradictory to that is the fact that you have so much air drift control, which is unexpected and surprising for this type of games that lean onto a bit more or realism. The reason I say this is because on some sections where you jump from platforms to hanging stairs, one instinctively aims a bit away from the stairs so that when you are about to line up with them you drift towards them. But the drift is so strong that I often bonked myself with the wall or side of the stairs, and if you hit it at a certain angle you will loose all of the momentum of your jump, instead of sliding along the wall/side of the stairs. If you are lucky and in range of grabing the stairs you might be fine, but many times you fail the jump and it leaves a feeling that it's a bit finnicky.
The good
Climbing feels nice, the animations, camera work, sound design all build a feeling that resembles actual rock climbing which is very cool imo. the way you have to slowly figure out what drains your stamina, what recovers it, what doesn't affect (like leaning to the sides) is all a very cool experience that gives a twist to the usual super clear stamina bar. The game ramps up with difficulty at a fair but challenging rate so you don't have to figure everything perfectly at the beggining. You can take it slow, but once you are at the last section, you really want to be as efficient as possible, so learning the optimal rythm to climb is fun but challenging. I just wish it was slightly more clear with some stuff, like when you slip when you climb too fast, which at first I simply thought that I was letting go with both hands and was confusing me a little bit. Also the vignette could be a bit more clear, since sometimes the audio from the wind and the heavy breathing from stamina loss can layer on top of each other and make it hard to tell if you are actually loosing stamina. Although the electric panels were a bit too simple, fixing them while climbing was a lot of fun and an interesting challenge, can't wait to see more variations of these in the future, and I hope to see more uses for leaning to the sides while climbings, looks to me like one of the best mechanics with the most amount of potential and possibly player expression.
The presentation is amazing, there's no doubt about that part. This guy knows what he is doing with the lighting and atmosphere. I would personally remove the railings from the first platform (or at least part of it), and let new players explore the idea of going to the water. Can't wait to see what kind of eldrich abominations will fill some of the spaces.
2 bugs I found:
- For some reason you can't jump on concrete (inside tower and top of tower)
- During the final climb, my hand was cramping, so I wanted to pause and change the climb method to toggle, but if I pause even while holding both climb buttons, you will release both hands, which costed me like 6-7 minutes of climbing.
speaking of which, if there is ever going to be difficulty settings in this game, make it so the hardest mode doesn't let you regrab the stairs if you run out of stamina, it removes a LOT of the tension knowing that you will only loose a bit of progress, or maybe find a workaround for that.
As a last suggestion, probably one of the scariest things I've experienced rock climbing (alongside trying to clip and falling, which is really well portrayed by running out of stamina while fixing an electric panel) is grabbing onto loose handles or a random critter scurries/crawls on to my hand. Usually in these scenarios nothing happen, you just have to maintain composure. Hope it gives you any ideas.