Impressed with this.
The balance is really good at the minute, it'd be easy to knock that off kilter.
The fact you have no weapons is a massive boon, it makes you feel very very vulnerable which is part of what makes this game great.
I think having a gun or axe or whatever to fight the spider would spoil the feeling of it.
Having multiple spiders / species could work well but probably you'd have to make slightly larger levels than we have at the moment. If the level is crowded it'd spoil the feel. One of the real boons of this game at the moment is you can go several minutes without seeing the spider at all, and that really adds to the fear-factor.
The only thing that jumps out at the moment that I wish you could add would be an ability to look at your inventory, there are only four items and the flashlight isn't collectible so it's not the biggest deal, but yeah an ability to briefly check what you've got and what you haven't (or maybe a checklist) would be useful.
A thought: Maybe an ability to turn the flashlight on and off as a mechanic for escaping attention from the spider or something could be good.
The only game-breaking bug (!) I came across several times while I've been playing is there are places (such as the office room in the left front corner as you come in from the corridor) where you can end up trapped in the corner by the spider. The hitbox of the spider is too large to allow the spider in close enough to deliver the killing bite, and you're not able to get up to the spider to let it kill you or past the spider to get out so you're just stuck with the spider treading water trying to sneak up to you. I was expecting to that be what the QuickLoad keybind was for but it didn't do anything then.
One thing that would really improve the QOL of the game would be further refinements of the animation/rigging of the spider to allow it to tranverse obstacles or navigate through the world with less clipping. I've no clue how you'd manage that, but for instance at the moment if you're in the starting office, and the spider passes in the corridor outside, you see its legs clip past through the wall as it passes you. Wall/ceiling walking would be amazing but I can imagine getting it to traverse smoothly between floors and walls (or between floors in the level) is not easy, so I get why that hasn't happened.
I thought the position of the webs was fixed but I've been super impressed by the revelation that the web positions seem to change with each playthrough. I assume there's some mechanism in place that never blocks access to particular areas so the game never becomes unwinnable?
I found the game via Tiktok, seeing people play it. I hate spiders but I had to give it a go, and yeah it really is scary.
I guess I was seeing an earlier build in clips where the spider had a much more... I hesitate to say "comically" but more overtly stalk-y kind of animation when it was sneaking slowly. 100% agree with the decision to change that to a more normal just slow walk on the build I played.
I'm going to keep a very close eye on this, if this ever comes out on PS5, I can't wait for the experience of playing this on a 55 inch TV.
Really well done.