itch.io

Fairly difficult to see the beat indicators in the heat of battle, which is amplified by the fact they weren't synced.
Other than that, pretty piss easy with a cool mesh of two concepts, even if they don't blend that well.

Good foundation, it was hard to tell current speed and fuel left (I'm used to KSP, capital S Sorry), and using the Forward command at Elliot's Relay seems to have wiped the quest, HUD to tell the player the current quest might be useful.
Also, the solution for predicted trajectory is a bit costly.

Freed SOOS and found all the weapons, got no further directions, restarted and crashed after getting kollector again.
For what I've seen though, I really dig the style and the smoothness in (would-be) the combat, shame I never got to test actual enemies.

God I love the type of game that has my eyes franticly latching onto every detail to eek out just a taste of the end, great.

Didn't, just replicated the same problem when toggled.

The drill tends to rubberband, otherwise decent incremental.

Incredibly unique and engaging concept in form and function, usually games that play with concepts of bacteria try to cutify the bacteria and it's fresh to see a game where they're as ewwy as they really are.
The game loop is incredibly fast and the room design is small enough to condense an area into just a couple minutes, though the cap of each area is a big difficulty jump than the rest of the enemies (or maybe the regular enemies are too weak).

The modifiers are unique and their combinations are intriguing, even if the pool is too small and filled with modifiers of varying efficacy like the minion (who went out of bounds) and Dash Explode modifier, unfortunately the weapon combination is caused by more of a limitation of space rather than the benefit of higher tiers of weapons (and recycling is arguably better).

There seems to be a performance issue whenever enemies spawn and bullets are shot, FPS heavily drops whenever an enemy is hit or shoots (or is shot at), which could be equal parts softbody physics or not having a minimum specs recommendation.

(Also, stomach area, main character is green in the green background? really?)

Level 2 wasn't as hard as much as it took a bit to adjust to, also the camera is too close so enemies can sneak up on you.

Level 3 was really busy, I think segmenting it into different themed areas could help with telling if a key is in a radius or not, also I hadn't noticed the door until I got three keys (gamers never look up)

The ice spawned too much especially with the boss, I found fire and rock were the least likely to spawn for some reason.

I never figured out what was the start button.

I pretty much turned everything down and the render scale didn't help that much weirdly, I didn't see whether the CPU or GPU was maxed out which is mb, but it definitely wasn't a memory issue.
Also the steam deck does have some pretty good hardware.

Edit: I tried to get back in the game to measure what it was stressing but all 3 times (2 from main menu, 1 after the tutorial) crashed, one of them even crashed my computer, it might be a GPU issue in that case.
I don't really know why I expected to run a shader heavy game 😅 Sorry!

Really slow pace, the line of fire isn't close to where the cursor is (which might be a resolution problem)

I tried to take notes about what tweaks I felt could help the game, some of these are subjective but things like coyote time are must-haves.

ice rock is fun
rock rock is fun
fire is fun but needs bigger bullets
lemon is fun
fire rock is too limited, needs more charges and abilities
fire fire is OP but needs more static projectiles, think suns instead of fire rocks.w
lemon ice is good for bossfights and not much else
ice fire needs to add momentum
rock is boring
lemon is neat but needs more damage
lemon lemon is fun but needs to turn off collision, think katana slash
rock golf needs to have changeable direction
enemy stun sometimes doesnt activate
invincibility frames
camera sens needs to be maintained and have a higher default
level 2 was very fun and challenging, but this isn't to say classic level design in 1
3's open ended design was more enjoyable than 1, especially the second area (even though it's a bit more confusing)
you should be able to collect more charges of the same element
each element needs more uses
level ranks are a bit too hard to get
ice spawns too frequently
recharge orbs need to recharge more
level 3 boss is too slow and has too little hp, HP bar
coyote time
no heals within carrot cake, restart button cant restart

Seems like they're not visible for me, all the other UI is fine.

I meant the charges for each element when it's not in use.

You really need to be able to tell what charges of each element you have in your inventory, as well as being able to toggle the move help at the top right since it's only triggered once in the tutorial AFAIK

Not sure where to progress after the 15 pillar center, also a skip cutscene option might be neat.

No inputs seem to advance past this, the options and wishlist buttons do not work either

Color code the tubes, make the doors between each tube obvious to where they go, have at the end of the level some stand-out monolith, etc.

Yeah

It was hard to track why residents became upset, or why certain structures were getting less electricity than they were supposed to, or were being left unmanned especially with the turbine, I couldn't tell whether the residents were being upset by food shortage or turbine sound, or why there was a food shortage if the cannery was disabled, I don't know how the sleeping residents stat works since it regularly goes negative. does that mean they're working?
It's very easy to overspend or destroy your cannery and be stuck waiting to get back to 800.

what

While this game easily excels in style, it's hard to appreciate that with the confusing level design and navigation, especially in the second level, I couldn't progress because I couldn't find what to do.
The obstructive enemies and ball obstacles weren't fun either.

Not sure how performant the game is designed to be and what its minimum req are, but I might as well report that the fps was alright in the tutorial, but dipped to 3 FPS after I launched in the first level.

This is obviously the reason I said not sure, since my comp is quite weak.

Pretty unique approach to TDS and progression, with a clean artstyle despite some kind of generic designs.

The hero-centric approach is certainly a standout, and I appreciated it despite the imbalances of the heroes or varying memorability.

The main takeaway I had is that the game is somewhat boring and slow, without much real challenge or need for strategization in placement of heroes, stacked with the fact that heroes like the archer outclass almost all other heroes and heroes like the rock hulker are too slow to be appreciable outside horde waves.
Heroes like the swordsman or the potion slinger need lower XP threshold because they won't get as many kills as main line heroes, and in the case of the swordsman, are almost only useful in combo with the rock hulker.
The wave makeup is also repetitive and too easy, compounded with the necessarily exponential length of each new wave being farther from the main crossroads (the spirits are too weak to take out the waves on their own).

I think with some playtesting and a UI style change, the game could become more memorable and become a candidate for a successful steam release considering it does have a great foundation both conceptually and technically, I never saw a bug.

Oh i got confused by the FR and ignored, mb.

A very striking, attractive and polished art style and aesthetic with the promise of also doubling as a good Bmup?

Well, it's an unkept promise but I appreciate the effort.
Unfortunately I genuinely couldn't finish the demo because of two main compounding reasons.
1-The performance, as I found out through queenfaith's video was supposed to be much better, the gameplay was significantly slowed and probably contributed to the feeling of the combat being tanky and sluggish, though didn't comprise it fully.
2-The combat was sluggish, the enemies were repetitive, tanky, numerous and worst of all, completely defenseless.
The enemies could not reply to the player in any meaningful way and wore out whatever novel countertactics quite quickly, which I'd theorize was picked up on, hence the fact they are spammed literally everywhere.
This is also partially not just because the enemies don't have any meaningful tactics or abilities against the player, who themselves is quite overequipped.

I do mean overequipped, while the grab and parry functions were left unattended (the former is useless against most enemies, the latter is useless because it does mostly nothing against enemies), the sliding kept all the enemies stunlocked, which meant most of the gameplay, whenever I wasn't trying to find the elusive fun way to beat the enemies, was just spamming control.


Overall I think this game could complete the package of what it's got going for it and could become way more fun with tweaks to the combat, enemies, and level design (all the levels are either horizontal corridors or vertical corridors, the latter which is less fun).

Sorry, the notification didn't go off because this website is made by a pile of bones.

Yes, no, no, yes, it was stuck at around 2-5 FPS so while I couldn't confirm if it'd go later on in the level, I definitely couldn't play with it.
While I have a lowly PC that's been known to not run some games the best, a 2D gamemaker game causing this severity of issue is somewhat new to me (though not unprecedented).

A regular laptop? the hat is supposed to propel the player upward when theyre hit by the gusts of wind produced by the mushroom looking things.

Very cute game concept following in the very long tradition of desktop narrative games, ending with a kind of whiplashy lore drop, very good!

yep, I had the hat on and I couldn't get through the very first part after you get it.

Can't seem to buy anything even with 20 FI$H

Figured out click to move, can't seem to jump?

The hat doesn't seem to work for some reason?

Interesting worldbuilding exposited through an intriguing story hook interlaced with a unique tactics and bullet hell system.
This happened after the fight with the ambush after a puppet slices ly's head off

the vertical arrow keys' direction is flipped and I can't move sideways for some reason

Neat

I asked myself this while playing and...I genuinely didn't know, there's a bit of glow around the projectiles and can tend to hide other projectiles, you can tend to miss gremlins, I guess? I genuinely don't know how to improve the clarity.

Two incredibly novel game concepts merged together in an interesting way, I think this is one of the more experimental roguelikes which is both saying something and not a lot at all.
Really the only thing that bugged me was the projectile clarity and telegraphing.

the UI elements do not adjust correctly, the build menu is off-screen.

Pretty neat, I'd say the difficulty is too static and easy until the first boss, which has no real indication on how to beat.
Oh and, include the steam link on the page.

the window starts out too small to select any of the main menu options