itch.io

You can beat the boss without needing to heal. Make sure to be off the ground when he lands and you can find a good rhythm to fight him.

This is so polished and beautiful and it's great that there are these two characters. It's working perfectly under wine for me.

Messing up and retrying is such a big part of the game and maybe that does just mean that some people won't get on with it, but I'm not sure that that's true. You just need to get people trusting that the challenges are possible and satisfying to overcome as soon as possible. I'm sure you can find a way to do that without sacrificing the things that make the game so good once you do get into it.

It's so tricky, because my experience at the start was pretty much the same as this person's, but then I retried a few more times and by the time you get through the cave you have a good sense of what the game is and you can have fun playing the rest of the demo (which I love and is actually pretty much a full game in itself—you must be working so hard on this thing). I've been trying to think what you could do to stop some people from having a bad experience at the start and I don't really know. These things like the HP/SP/clothes system and the way the enemies behave are actually so great, but at the outset you just don't have any sense of trust in the game design and people's first experience can quite easily be running out of SP and dying and getting frustrated.

I do think that the concept of lighting fires and resting should be made really obvious. I can't remember where you first get the matches, but somehow lighting the fire wasn't obvious to me at first. (I was pleased when I figured it out.) What about if the game  were to start with you washing up on the shore with SP already lowered and then literally the first thing you do in the game is find matches, light a fire, rest, and save? I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but it would make it so that the first thing you do in the game is gain SP, rather than start losing it, and maybe it would make people feel better and give them a sense of having a base. I don't know. The other thing I didn't find obvious was that you can shoot off-screen. Again I figured it out, but it's probably something that should be made obvious. (The shooting off-screen mechanic sounds like it should be terrible, but it actually works really well.)

I've just completed the Forest Sanctuary so far, but this game is so good! Not only is the art and gameplay good, but the game itself is just really well designed. There's a real sense of exploration and survival and the mature elements actually help with that rather than just seeming tacked on. I also like how it's challenging enough for you to get to see all the bad things that can happen, but then they're over fast enough to get you right back into the action. It's also impressively polished. You really seem to know what you're doing with this thing.

OK, I can work with this. Perhaps I misunderstood something, but what determines the fundamental rate at which the paths iterate and why is there no option to change this (to retune the instrument)?

This has a lot of promise. The art and animation are really great and the gameplay is pretty good. There's something weird about the way the camera scrolls, though. I can't figure out what's bad about it, but it's giving me a headache. I think it's juddering back and forth. Is it just me? Also, I hope you don't mind me saying, but the writing needs some serious editing and proofreading. It's currently very rambling and ungrammatical. Those two issues aside, this looks like it could become a great game. I'll follow your progress and wish you good luck!

Thanks for this. It was interesting.