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Dweller's Empty Path

A small RPGMaker game exploring the life of a lost being from another planet. · By temmie

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A topic by Cubic John created Feb 13, 2021 Views: 215
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I know I'm chiming in pretty late here, but I still wanted to comment with some suggestions that I jotted down while playing this. But first let me say that overall, this game is a big improvement over Escaped Chasm and serves as an effective introduction to an intriguing world that I'm  now interested in learning more about through your future works! The following notes are meant purely as CONSTRUCTIVE criticism and suggestions for the future.

  • Even with the run option, movement still felt a little slow, and especially many of the large, empty, maze-like areas (which I wish there had been a bit less of) felt pretty long and boring to get through, especially while going back and forth or combing for anything you missed. In my opinion, I think the experience would have been better if your running speed had been just about 50-100% faster. Or, ideally, there could be a setting in the options menu or config settings to adjust how fast your running speed is to whatever the player  is most comfortable with.
  • I think that, for the purposes of making the game's overall goal and the player's progression through it more evident as early as possible, the graveyard hut with the journal should have been placed much earlier in the game; even though that would have required some kind of justification as for why the girl had probably never come across it before. Or maybe you could find journal pages EVERY time you make progress, rather than only when you've unlocked a new journal scene (there could still be a separate message for when you cross those thresholds).
  • This one is probably a matter of personal taste, but I feel like the game is really held back a lot by the deliberate game-boy-style graphical limitations; maybe I'd feel differently if I had a lot of nostalgia for the game boy graphics, but I don't, really. I think this would look a lot better at around 16-bit resolution.
  • The block-pushing puzzle in the "Fire Crystal Dungeon" should definitely have SOME kind of visual distinction between the boxes that you can push and the ones that you can't; it's quite confusing and frustrating in its current form.
  • This one is VERY subjective, and there are certainly benefits to this approach for introducing these characters and this world; but I'm not sure if there was a good reason this story couldn't have been told in more chronological order. It feels like it would have been more interesting seeing the past events we head about events unfold in front of us rather than just hearing about them in hindsight, IMHO. I'm reminded of a prompt that serves as a piece of advice for storytelling: "Is this the most interesting part of these characters' lives? And if not, why aren't you showing us that, instead?" The lack of any real conflict or drama with this approach makes things relaxed, but provides little tension or direction and makes it difficult to sustain interest.
  • I'm disappointed that we never learned anything about these previous nightmares from Zera that were alluded to, or got more specifics as to the past relationship between him and Yoki; and it was very unclear to me why, if Yoki truly believes that she could take Zera in a fight, she doesn't threaten him to knock off the nightmares or get his ass kicked. It also seems unclear why she's OK with leaving the RPG heroes to their implied doom at his hands when he  refuses to agree to any mercy for them. It's not a problem that Zera remains a pretty mysterious figure by the end of this game; but I think it IS a problem that we seem to still know so much less about him than Yoki does by the end, because it leaves many of their interactions feeling frustratingly confusing.