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Heartland
Alright. Super long delay, but I finally fired up the exe, ready to play it, and Norton instantly removed it from my system. Usually I get a "this file has not been verified" warning and I can choose to continue, but this time it was flagged as a medium network threat.
Is it possible the 1.02 copy might be infected?
Is it possible the 1.02 copy might be infected?
Heartland
The link sometimes still goes to itch.io, and I don't know why, but I've got it.
I'll post feedback as soon as I can play a bit.
I'll post feedback as soon as I can play a bit.
Heartland
Heartland
This looks wonderful.
Will you be doing a download that doesn't require an itch.io signup? I'm willing to jump the hurdle of making an itch.io account, I just don't particularly want to.
Will you be doing a download that doesn't require an itch.io signup? I'm willing to jump the hurdle of making an itch.io account, I just don't particularly want to.
Kryopolis
Across the Universe
Project Violet
This looks really cool and please do not worry about how sexy your writing is. The first step to being sexy is existing. Everything else can, if needed, always be fixed in post.
Ashes of Roses
Honestly, an indicator that a fight is going to be an endurance test would be pretty cool. "Survive for X rounds" is way more compelling than "this battle keeps going am I not hitting him hard enough?"
Re: party members dying, I considered smoke-grenading out of the fight where Argent dropped, but I had no idea of whether it would be faster to do so at that point because I didn't know how much hp was left on the enemy.
Re: getting spells, getting spells for clearing areas makes sense. They weren't worded that way, but if you have them explicitly as an object that the roses are finding in the manor (like the treasure chests), I think that wouldn't cause the same cognitive dissonance I got when I thought they were a late boss item pickup.
The text for cleansing aura says attack/defense/speed break. I could swear somewhere the game said it removed 'status effects', but I can't remember where and I could be completely wrong about that.
Re: the narrative stuff, I totally agree. I was getting an incomplete picture of the story, and that definitely informed my experience. Even from the jump, though, I felt like I was missing part of the story. I like storytelling that doesn't explain everything outright, or that starts en medias res and rolls out things gradually, or that has elements just because and the rest of the world just deals with them existing. This felt different than all that, like there was stuff that was in your head that was supposed to be in mine, but I just couldn't access it.
The "dark parody of pretentious nihilism" sounds fine in concept, but I honestly would never have guessed that was the goal from what I played. There didn't feel like there was any nihilism in the setting, but then I didn't really get a glimpse of the setting, just the immediate environs of the story. I don't think I would have guessed "the tragedy of Heath" either, because I don't know enough about him to sympathize or really know if what's happening is tragic. I don't know who he is, outside of him doing communications for the roses and maybe Judith wants to hook up with him, and even those things feel disjointed. If you' asked me what I thought the story was about thematically, I would say I don't know, and that I hope Judith and Heath figure out their issues and patch things up.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like when anyone picks up a game with a plot and a setting other than "move these bricks here" or "aliens coming. Shoot at space", they're investigating that setting and finding meaning in it. It doesn't have to be Big Thoughts deep meaning, but there does have to be a certain degree of managed expectations or else the game feels off. Again, it's hard to put my finger on, so I apologize if I'm doing a bad job of pointing out what felt off to me, but I didn't feel like I knew the characters or had a reason to care about what was going on with them. I don't remember having this issue with Wine & Roses.
I don't think the Henry V prologue would help, or at least not with my understanding of the game. "Sound and fury, signifying nothing" might have, if that was the goal, but it didn't feel to me like it was.
You don't sound like a snooty art game dude (honestly, that's me right now, critiquing something for a reason that I can't properly seem to articulate), I'm just struggling to express the thing that felt to me like it didn't work for the game.
Re: party members dying, I considered smoke-grenading out of the fight where Argent dropped, but I had no idea of whether it would be faster to do so at that point because I didn't know how much hp was left on the enemy.
Re: getting spells, getting spells for clearing areas makes sense. They weren't worded that way, but if you have them explicitly as an object that the roses are finding in the manor (like the treasure chests), I think that wouldn't cause the same cognitive dissonance I got when I thought they were a late boss item pickup.
The text for cleansing aura says attack/defense/speed break. I could swear somewhere the game said it removed 'status effects', but I can't remember where and I could be completely wrong about that.
Re: the narrative stuff, I totally agree. I was getting an incomplete picture of the story, and that definitely informed my experience. Even from the jump, though, I felt like I was missing part of the story. I like storytelling that doesn't explain everything outright, or that starts en medias res and rolls out things gradually, or that has elements just because and the rest of the world just deals with them existing. This felt different than all that, like there was stuff that was in your head that was supposed to be in mine, but I just couldn't access it.
The "dark parody of pretentious nihilism" sounds fine in concept, but I honestly would never have guessed that was the goal from what I played. There didn't feel like there was any nihilism in the setting, but then I didn't really get a glimpse of the setting, just the immediate environs of the story. I don't think I would have guessed "the tragedy of Heath" either, because I don't know enough about him to sympathize or really know if what's happening is tragic. I don't know who he is, outside of him doing communications for the roses and maybe Judith wants to hook up with him, and even those things feel disjointed. If you' asked me what I thought the story was about thematically, I would say I don't know, and that I hope Judith and Heath figure out their issues and patch things up.
Maybe it's just me, but I feel like when anyone picks up a game with a plot and a setting other than "move these bricks here" or "aliens coming. Shoot at space", they're investigating that setting and finding meaning in it. It doesn't have to be Big Thoughts deep meaning, but there does have to be a certain degree of managed expectations or else the game feels off. Again, it's hard to put my finger on, so I apologize if I'm doing a bad job of pointing out what felt off to me, but I didn't feel like I knew the characters or had a reason to care about what was going on with them. I don't remember having this issue with Wine & Roses.
I don't think the Henry V prologue would help, or at least not with my understanding of the game. "Sound and fury, signifying nothing" might have, if that was the goal, but it didn't feel to me like it was.
You don't sound like a snooty art game dude (honestly, that's me right now, critiquing something for a reason that I can't properly seem to articulate), I'm just struggling to express the thing that felt to me like it didn't work for the game.
Ashes of Roses
Feedback incoming (sorry about the delay, my schedule has gotten the better of me five days in a row):
-Battle flow for the first fight is interesting, but prolonged. I think (?) you need to use a grand exorcism to finish it, but building up that charge takes a while, and you're not really threatened while you're getting ready.
-Do all status effects only stack once? A handbook explaining the effects would help, since a *lot* of skills assign effects. I still don't actually know what Jam does mechanically.
-Combat dialog is interesting, but I found myself just failing to notice it most of the time. It's on the opposite of the screen from the menus, and I was practically only ever looking at the menus.
-The plot kind of lunges back and forth between things happening, and the dialog goes from break-out-the-thesaurus to regular-people-talk sometimes every other box. The setting is fascinating and I want to know more, but even with the acknowledgement that it's en medias res, I feel like there's backstory that I missed.
-Having HP bars on the enemies would give a tangible sense of progress in battle. Currently, the distance between "battle has begun" and "an enemy has died" is vast and ambiguous.
-The AP system, the gift and spell systems, the amount of customization you can perform, these are awesome, and they're doled out gradually so you're not awash in an ocean of options at the start of play.
-Cleansing aura does not remove burning? Are debuffs different from status effects? The naming does not make that clear, but it seems to be the case.
-Status effect icons are nice and varied, but it's not necessarily clear from the images what they do, and there's a lot of them. This is another "a manual would be helpful" situation.
-It's weird not to get the "by defeating X, you have acquired Y" messages after each battle, but via an interactible on the next screen.
-I want to root for Judith and Heath, but I know basically nothing about them. Romance, or even a hookup, stems from context. I don't have a sense of who either of these people are.
-I seem to have found a bug where after raising my exorcism gauge to full during a round, and with all team members at 1 or 0 AP, going into the combat item menu shows a blank menu. No idea what the criteria for this happening were.
-Not actually sure how to beat Holofernes. His defense is into the stratosphere, and he heals a ton. Unless this is a "better have picked the right equipment going in" kind of fight, I'm not sure if there's a way to win other than "lame it out until the plot takes over".
-It is phenomenally unclear what is going on in the plot. Judith attacks Heath and then the roses, but then it turns out he didn't attack Heath (maybe?), and he's a demon but also maybe not a demon, and the final scene of the demo is of a crashed spaceship but Heath didn't actually seem to do anything other than stay in orbit, and I still don't know why I should care about any of these characters other than that they're the perspective characters of the game. I know functionally nothing about them and their place in the world, and not in a "I'll unravel it as I go. I know the hints are there" Dark Souls kind of way, but in a "I'm not sure the information I need to understand this game is in this game" kind of way. There's a lot of plot events here, but there isn't context for any of it. Your world is cool and I want to care about it, but there's no foundation of context to build that interest on.
-Game clear, no party wipes, although the fight with the sorcerer and the phoenix did knock out the rose who could revive with her grand exorcism, which caused that fight to drag *a lot*. Losing a party member drops damage output considerably, not to the point where a fight is unwinnable, just to the point where it takes forever to clear. Overall, fights were fun and smooth once I had spells and understood how huge of a bonus the solar/lunar multiplier is. I don't think I ever had a reason to stay off of max solar/max lunar for my casters, since my non-aligned rose was hunkering down behind buffed defenses and a counterattack stance and drenched in pheromones by the end of the first turn of each mid-to-late-game fight. I'd love to see the expanded version of this, since I think multiple paths through the dungeon and more upgrades to scavenge will do a lot to broaden the diversity of combat strategies, but also more importantly because I feel like it will give the plot time to breathe. For a dungeon-crawler, there was a lot of cutscene in this, way more than I remember in Wine & Roses. That's not necessarily a bad thing (especially if it gives some context to the characters), but it sort of overwhelmed the rest of the design in the demo.
-Overall: very solid mechanically, with lots of room to build on the mechanics. Plot is abundant, but not really anchored. Graphics and sound didn't bother me. This is a cool game, the cut content is palpable, and I feel like the full version is going to knock me off my feet.
-Battle flow for the first fight is interesting, but prolonged. I think (?) you need to use a grand exorcism to finish it, but building up that charge takes a while, and you're not really threatened while you're getting ready.
-Do all status effects only stack once? A handbook explaining the effects would help, since a *lot* of skills assign effects. I still don't actually know what Jam does mechanically.
-Combat dialog is interesting, but I found myself just failing to notice it most of the time. It's on the opposite of the screen from the menus, and I was practically only ever looking at the menus.
-The plot kind of lunges back and forth between things happening, and the dialog goes from break-out-the-thesaurus to regular-people-talk sometimes every other box. The setting is fascinating and I want to know more, but even with the acknowledgement that it's en medias res, I feel like there's backstory that I missed.
-Having HP bars on the enemies would give a tangible sense of progress in battle. Currently, the distance between "battle has begun" and "an enemy has died" is vast and ambiguous.
-The AP system, the gift and spell systems, the amount of customization you can perform, these are awesome, and they're doled out gradually so you're not awash in an ocean of options at the start of play.
-Cleansing aura does not remove burning? Are debuffs different from status effects? The naming does not make that clear, but it seems to be the case.
-Status effect icons are nice and varied, but it's not necessarily clear from the images what they do, and there's a lot of them. This is another "a manual would be helpful" situation.
-It's weird not to get the "by defeating X, you have acquired Y" messages after each battle, but via an interactible on the next screen.
-I want to root for Judith and Heath, but I know basically nothing about them. Romance, or even a hookup, stems from context. I don't have a sense of who either of these people are.
-I seem to have found a bug where after raising my exorcism gauge to full during a round, and with all team members at 1 or 0 AP, going into the combat item menu shows a blank menu. No idea what the criteria for this happening were.
-Not actually sure how to beat Holofernes. His defense is into the stratosphere, and he heals a ton. Unless this is a "better have picked the right equipment going in" kind of fight, I'm not sure if there's a way to win other than "lame it out until the plot takes over".
-It is phenomenally unclear what is going on in the plot. Judith attacks Heath and then the roses, but then it turns out he didn't attack Heath (maybe?), and he's a demon but also maybe not a demon, and the final scene of the demo is of a crashed spaceship but Heath didn't actually seem to do anything other than stay in orbit, and I still don't know why I should care about any of these characters other than that they're the perspective characters of the game. I know functionally nothing about them and their place in the world, and not in a "I'll unravel it as I go. I know the hints are there" Dark Souls kind of way, but in a "I'm not sure the information I need to understand this game is in this game" kind of way. There's a lot of plot events here, but there isn't context for any of it. Your world is cool and I want to care about it, but there's no foundation of context to build that interest on.
-Game clear, no party wipes, although the fight with the sorcerer and the phoenix did knock out the rose who could revive with her grand exorcism, which caused that fight to drag *a lot*. Losing a party member drops damage output considerably, not to the point where a fight is unwinnable, just to the point where it takes forever to clear. Overall, fights were fun and smooth once I had spells and understood how huge of a bonus the solar/lunar multiplier is. I don't think I ever had a reason to stay off of max solar/max lunar for my casters, since my non-aligned rose was hunkering down behind buffed defenses and a counterattack stance and drenched in pheromones by the end of the first turn of each mid-to-late-game fight. I'd love to see the expanded version of this, since I think multiple paths through the dungeon and more upgrades to scavenge will do a lot to broaden the diversity of combat strategies, but also more importantly because I feel like it will give the plot time to breathe. For a dungeon-crawler, there was a lot of cutscene in this, way more than I remember in Wine & Roses. That's not necessarily a bad thing (especially if it gives some context to the characters), but it sort of overwhelmed the rest of the design in the demo.
-Overall: very solid mechanically, with lots of room to build on the mechanics. Plot is abundant, but not really anchored. Graphics and sound didn't bother me. This is a cool game, the cut content is palpable, and I feel like the full version is going to knock me off my feet.
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