NTC3'S PROFILE

Not quite. It certainly makes the game a lot more tolerable, but idle animation aside, it doesn't do anything to make it more interesting. That 25-minute playthrough I linked to is entirely devoid of drama and surprise: people who play it know it's a horror game, so the town being haunted and the presence of monsters are not surprising at all, and after that, there's absolutely nothing interesting going on. The opening before the action is used in horror to either establish the characters and/or the location and neither works. The town feels utterly generic, and because of the semi-side-scrolling movement you have, it's not even possible to explore it properly like you could in Silent Hill games.

It actually pains me to say it, because I quite like your voice actress, so please, give her material worthy of her time. Right now, your protagonist has no character; we don't anything about her other than her name and that her car broke down while she was going to a party. That's it; we know nothing of her interests, her family, what she does for a living, who that friend of her is, etc. There's not even basic consistency at play; she enters the town to look for a mechanic, then she goes into a hotel for basically no reason; she appears to be ordinary girl, but as soon as she gets her hands on a machete she can backflip and stuff like nobody's business, etc.

If I were to suggest something gameplay-wise (besides ditching the 2.5 D mode that cripples exploration and makes the player feel like they're on rails), it would be to a) remove the backflip from Amber at the beginning of the game, and re-introduce it only when she hits, say level 5. By that point, she would go through enough trials to make it believable that she's had learned to do so. Balance-wise, you also remove the teleport from early enemies and make it so that they can defeated with attacks, blocks and counters alone, only re-introducing the teleport when Amber learns backflip.

b) Make enemies even slightly different from each other. Battling the same creature three times in a row is tedious rather than scary; if you say, made the second one darker, faster but with less health and easier to be countered, while the third, is, on the contrary, stouter, slower and hits harder, this would introduce a whole different kind of challenge, and make people physically uncomfortable by forcing them too adjust their strategy. Right now, if they learn how to kill one without taking damage, then they can kill all of them without taking damage, and that's not what horror is about.

c) If she has a phone, then make it relevant. Even basic things like using it instead of a flashlight in dark areas would help a lot, and forcing one to fight in the dark or at reduced speed with flashlight/phone light and machete would be particularly frightening. I'm not even getting into supernatural messages and phone calls here, the way Cry of Fear did.

In fact, it might just help you to take some time off development and play []. It's also a survival horror with strong Silent Hill inspirations, but it's a) popular, and b) completely free. I think it's more than reasonable to work on your game until you can reasonably call it superior to Cry of Fear before you start charging for it. After all, veteran players will compare GP: R to CoF regardless.

What's up with that really large bird skeleton? Is it from a vanquished enemy or something? And a small thing, but shouldn't "Reward" also be plural since all the other menu headings are?

Still looks cool, though. Subbed.

Well, this and the other image you have uploaded certainly looks very 16-bit in a good way. I like it a lot, but what's up with the "pure" black squares in the ravine? They look a bit out of place.

Just happened to stumble at this yesterday. You probably know about it already, but ... yeah. You might want to seriously reconsider one or two (dozen) things about the project now.

Thanks for sharing! I like the track; not exactly the first thing I would associate with Nordic myth, but still quality. Reminds me of Elder Scrolls themes, or the similarly violin-heavy Arcanum OST; if you haven't played the game, here's its main theme, just for reference.