I remember watching your channel at YouTube for the first time and was blown away by the art style! This video only reinforces that moment! Keep rockin' man!
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I remember watching your channel at YouTube for the first time and was blown away by the art style! This video only reinforces that moment! Keep rockin' man!
I don't usually do reviews here, but I'll try my best to tell what I liked about the game as well as a few critiques I have. I may or may not come back to rewrite and/or add more to this later.
-The 'ZX Spectrum' art aesthetic is unique, and the retro sounds add so much to the game as well as making it stand out amongst the rest. The story was decent, and I liked the ending where it's revealed that Babel.EXE is less of a benevolent technological achievement and more akin to a parasitic entity roaming the towns to feed on the ignorant devotion of all.
-One such critique I have is around the combat mechanic of the game. The attack control feels a bit slow when you use it (the delays after attacking take longer than desired). It didn't ruin the game for me that much, it just bothered me a bit. Furthermore, sometimes when you attack, you're unable to move, which does make the moving experience feel stiff.
-While I like how you added a few unique enemies to the game to make it more fun and challenging, they sometimes don't die when I attack them (hitbox, maybe?). Also, (and this is a personal take, you're free to disregard this) I don't know if their "linear" movements were intended for the experience, but you might want to make their movements a bit smoother.
-Lastly, I wish you added some music for the different areas of the game. No music kinda doesn't add much to the game. Perhaps some droning music around the part that you find Walter's corpse in the forest as well as when you kill the others and feed them to the tower can add more to the psych-horror tone of the game. The music that plays around the end did sound a bit muted, so you could turn it up a bit.
-Overall, while this game has some drawbacks, I do think that this was an enjoyable experience that didn't take too much of my time! :D
Thank you for the feedback!
While making the game, I had noticed that the combat was a bit slow. I also caught that sometimes enemies just didn't die (I thought I fixed most of the bugs relating to that). With the bugs and overall jankiness around that that I wasn't able to really nail down, let's just say it was from my early computer inspiration lol.
Your comment about the music really struck me. The ENTIRE development process I was going back and forth between adding music or not. From my experience, music and ambience add so much to a horror game. However, in this case, I wasn't sure if I wanted to strike that horror in the player with music, or lean into my ZX Spectrum inspiration and have limited audio, which lends itself to this sort of uncanny valley.
Thank you so much for playing and this wonderful write up!
Neato. I love it.
I am a plague doctor who's currently isolated from the rest of society in the middle of the woods. I am currently losing more of what's left of my sanity drawing doodles and trying other stuff.
Age 17, Male
An unmarked forest
Joined on 8/28/23