Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
Ok, so I have a lot to say about this. I could talk about the visuals and how I like the DOOM-esque style and the monster design but wished that areas had more environmental items placed instead of literally everything being just "told" to the player, or about how I like the music and sound effects but wish the music had a little more going for it... but my gawd, I need to talk about this gameplay and just how brutal it is... and not in a good way.
Let me preface this by saying I like a good challenge. However, one rule about challenges is that it needs to be in the player's control; if things are harder, it should be because of their poor choices and not because the system is designed against them. With that stated, allow me to highlight some major problems.
First, there's accuracy. This game is a miss fest. I'd wager somewhere between 30 to 40% of all of my attacks miss. This is an excessively high rate that unnecessarily adds difficulty. While there are buffs that do improve accuracy, even with them I find I'm missing too much. To contrast this, enemies don't seem to miss anywhere near this same rate even with the miss debuff applied (which, by the way, I find a lot of monsters resist anyway). This is then compounded by the fact that enemies do as much damage if not more than players do. When first stepping into the hospital, my strongest attacks were somewhere around 25, a value that every enemy was hitting me for constantly like it was nothing.
Next, there's how often enemies seem to attack. I can't be 100% certain, but to me it feels like enemies get more turns than players; they usually start first and I'll start seeing second attacks before my fifth girl has had her first. This is especially problematic when you're facing 6 enemies. Again, a problem when enemies hit you for the same amount of damage.
But the part where I got frustrated was when I went to use one of the Vengeance skills, the one that deals damage to the character... only for it to miss but she still took the damage herself. Like, what? Considering most of the Vengeance skills have drawbacks to them, I feel like either the drawbacks shouldn't apply if you miss or they shouldn't be capable of missing. The game is already challenging enough without the player getting screwed over by RNG like that.
Now I know what the obvious response to this is going to be: "you just need to get better equipment." Okay, then make it that players get more currency from fights. The problem is that fights are so difficult that you can only do maybe 4 of them before you need to return to HQ and heal; healing takes 30 currency when you've maybe earned 35-45, meaning I'm earning 5-15 at a time. Better equipment costs range from 150-300+ depending on the slot (I already filled all of their accessory slots with the 30 currency items). That's a range of 10 to 60 times having to go in, fight and then leave and heal per item. This is just unnecessary padding.
In short, something needs to give to curb the difficulty a bit and make it more about player choice than RNG gone haywire. Giving more currency per enemy would be an easy way to fix it without having to rework every fight to ensure they're not being too punishing, since at least then it'd be possible to save up and get gear. However, a better solution would be to retool how the numbers work, to give players a higher hit chance and to drop enemy damage down a smidge.
Beyond the insane difficult and padding, I do like the game and I want to see it do well. It's my hope that the difficulty curve can be improved to make it more engaging.
