Foreword / Disclaimer

I recorded a couple hours of gameplay footage for demonstrative purposes. Unfortunately, when the game client is changed to Fullscreen, it is no longer considered part of the designated display in OBS / Windows, so my recordings only captured audio along with a “frozen” image of the Options menu. This also means I won’t be able to provide specific details (including screenshots) of certain things I will be referring to in the write-up.

While I imagine this is an engine issue – though I am unsure which specific game engine this is built in – I’d consider it a reasonably high priority to fix, to ensure LP-ers and streamers don’t run into the same problem. I imagine a workaround to this would be to manually resize the game window instead of using the fullscreen option, but I just simply didn’t anticipate that being necessary. On a related note, the game client hijacks all mouse functionality when in Fullscreen mode, which results in a few extra steps when trying to exit out of the game.

Visuals

The general visual style of the maps and windows is appealing. Character portraits look very old-school and some of the parts vary quite a bit in terms of quality. Enemy sprites I am not a fan of stylistically, though they are competently drawn and align with the game’s dark / dungeon crawler aesthetic.

The lack of attack and spell animations is somewhat disconcerting, and icons are somewhat awkwardly placed and hard to differentiate during battle. I get that many early PC and console dungeon crawlers didn’t use animations (or reserved them for very special effects, like the original Phantasy Star did IIRC), but this is one aspect of the retro aesthetic I could do without; it makes it more difficult to parse what is happening in battle, and takes away the “impact” from certain skills. Particularly with how “squishy” most player characters are, I would like to be able to more easily see who is getting attacked, and by what. Since a lot of offensive skills (the majority I’d wager?) inflict status ailments, I found myself wishing for more digestible ways to see what states each actor and enemy have, as well as what those states do.

I’m not a fan of back row enemies being partially obscured by the front row. I get why this is done in a front-view / first person system, but it just makes the game interface and combat targeting feel awkward. (more about this when I get to controls)

I am not keen on how NPCs are just regular “search here” icons on the map rather than being full sprites – it doesn’t feel like an homage to old school technical limitations but rather more like a series of placeholders. It also makes the base map initially more confusing than it needs to be (though after a bunch of return trips you start to memorize the layout).

Audio

The map music is ambient and not particularly memorable. It’s not bad per se either, though the Subway track might be more interesting than the Hospital track, and you spend a lot of time in the Hospital stumbling through the map since there’s a very big jump in terms of complexity from the prologue to the first “real” dungeon, so it can get repetitive. I think the Base music is fine – it is very reminiscent of TES: Arena for some reason, possibly the samples used?

I’d like the sound design to be a bit more dynamic overall. What music is present adds some mood / tension but could go a lot further to enhance the experience; for example, I don’t remember if there is no regular battle music or if it’s just extremely subtle. Sound effects seemed generally in line with what I’d expect from a retro game.

Story

The world building seems fairly extensive, and I think the twists on both magical girls and magic-as-science are well done. I had a feeling that the Hate was named as a sort of socio-political commentary, and this was sort of evidenced further by one character’s dialog about how trans persons had been poorly treated historically. I am not sure if the magical girl transformations are intended as allegorical to other transitional experiences, but perhaps that is explored more later.

The dialog is competently constructed (I didn’t spot a single grammatical error or typo) but I feel like we only scratched the surface of having a full plot structure. That is OK, mind you – for a dungeon crawler, just having a justification to jump into the dungeon is fine, provided we uncover more lore / backstory / etc. later. I also felt like there was a bit of a lack of character voice – I don’t think I would be able to differentiate each NPC’s personality from one another’s without the context of A) what their job is, or B) what other characters have said about that person in their various dialog options.

There’s a few points where it is just a tiny bit too close to “wall of text”, which I think would be partially mitigated by having NPC sprites that had simple animations or something.

Gameplay

I love the create-a-character system. Party building is one of the most fun parts of CRPGs in my opinion, though occasionally that leads to a misfire like Drakken where building the team is more satisfying than actually going on the adventure with that team. While that wasn’t the case here, I did come away feeling like the game really wanted you to start with the default party, at least on a first run, as there wasn’t as much detailed game information as I would have liked to understand the choices I was making during char gen. So while the party builder is a highlight, it could also frustrate players that end up making sub-optimal choices (which seemed very easy to do, by the way, given how some of the Class and passive ability combinations had little to no synergy).

Equipment requirements being “soft”, resulting in attribute penalties rather than just being unable to use the item, seemed cool in practice but I don’t think I ever utilized that system. Without knowing more about how the various numbers and calculations work and being a risk-averse player in most cases, I didn’t feel like taking a chance with -10 Defense to gain +2 Armor, or whatever the case may be. On that note, is Defense just what other game systems call Evade? Or do they both influence incoming damage from physical? In the brief time I hung out on Hythrain’s stream of the game (I ducked out early due to wanting to play this game as “blind” as feasible), I noticed he had a lot of questions about stat abbreviations; though I was able to intuit what most stat abbreviations meant, I still didn’t feel like I knew what the actual effects of said stats were in many cases.

Balance is probably the biggest pain point for me with this game right now. Magic-users’ regular weapons deal near-insignificant chip damage, and their MP pools are very shallow considering the sheer number of enemies faced and how many hits each one takes to bring down. At the same time, player health pools are balanced on a razor’s edge; if an attack can successfully get through a target’s mitigation, it hurts a LOT, with magic attacks quickly taking down front row characters and physical skills often two-shotting the back row (thankfully comparatively few seem to have adequate range, but back row members are nonetheless always in danger of being sniped). A single dog-pile turn on any character (except maybe basic physical attacks against a heavy armor user) will result in a KO, which feels really bad when you had just set foot inside the dungeon again, after having left to restore everyone to full.

This leads me to the economy. I like the fact that it isn’t money from a narrative standpoint, even though Rem functions as money from a utilitarian sense – however this creates a bit of dissonance to me just because of how difficult it is to build and maintain any reserve of Rem while having to pay out frequent tolls of 30 or 60 bucks (though after a while I started save-scumming to avoid taking full party wipes, to be honest). Healing items cost a staggering amount of money for what they do, incremental upgrades cost about as much as you’d make from an entire dive of the hospital (barring the good fortune of locating a treasure box or two), and the player very quickly runs out of cheap upgrades to enable them to maintain a sense of progression and momentum.

This would not be quite as much of a friction point if not for the slow levelling. In the roughly 2 hours I played Minerva Labyrinth I only leveled up once, and that was from the first boss. It wouldn’t surprise me if, despite showing Exp after each fight, the actual level ups were somehow tied to story or exploration milestones, because I spent ages at level 2, only accumulating small upgrades through the occasional item find or shop visit. Encounters simply didn’t seem to yield enough experience to matter (and I don’t recall being able to see my Exp to next level shown anywhere). I also can’t be sure due to the loss of game footage, but it seems like stat increases from level are very small or non-existent. This isn’t necessarily a problem, though having that information might influence how a player does their initial party configuration – for example, if we know that END never increases, then we can plan accordingly during character generation, and not (for example) expect for our medium armor wearer to eventually graduate to heavy armor, as they do in many RPGs.

Skill design felt solid to me for the most part, with none of the skills in my chosen party (War, Moon, Earth, Storm, and Hunt) coming across as lacking a use case, though the specific numbers sometimes felt “off”. In particular I felt like War – or perhaps just greatsword users in general – dealt substantially more damage than other melee classes, and in fact their basic attacks were about on par with Moon or Hunt’s skills. I did like how the Hunt skills were designed around applying and managing debuffs, while the Moon skills worked predominantly with MP recovery; Storm and Earth didn’t use mechanical congruence but instead had abilities that felt “on flavor” for their respective elements, and I felt those were well conceptualized also. I should add that the DoT skill from Storm was very powerful, and it was welcome for the damage proc to occur before an enemy acted, which could sometimes finish them off and thus prevent incoming damage.

UI and Controls

The default enemy targeting scheme feels backwards to me: up / down would intuitively change rows and left / right would intuitively change targets within a row, IMO. This is an opinion / preference thing and in any case, I believe it can be changed but felt worth mentioning since I found myself frequently fumbling when trying to target the back row of an enemy group.

It took me a while to understand the various menu hotkeys (playing on an X Box 360 controller by the way, I should have mentioned that before!) and it seemed easier to just go to the main menu by pressing Start. This may be less of an issue on keyboard, where the default key binds would ideally make sense as a sort of mnemonic device to help the player remember (M for Map, etc.) I didn’t think to try that as I eventually got acclimated to the controls well enough anyways.

Map movement itself felt fairly responsive, and the addition of sidestep / strafe keys was quite welcome. Some of the glyphs on the minimap were a tiny bit odd (letters instead of icons for example) but it didn’t hurt anything in terms of readability. Just having a minimap is certainly an upgrade from some of the very old-school dungeon crawlers, after all!

Closing Thoughts

I did enjoy my time with this game overall. The core gameplay loop felt satisfying and I think it could end up being quite addictive with some of the details and balancing tuned just a bit more. The cycle of exploring, returning to town to recharge, and upgrading before going on the next dive did remind me a bit of the SNES game Arcana, now that I think about it further. The experience wasn’t quite compelling enough for me to clear the entire hospital dungeon, but I am confident audiences looking for a crunchy dungeon crawler will be engaged.

Had a wonderful time playing Minerva Labyrinth today!

I don't play a ton of dungeon crawlers, although after this and another one I've played fairly recently, that might be about to change!

I found the movement to be fluid and easy to remember, although I would sometimes forget which interactables interact upon coming in contact with them, and which required actually interacting.  Combat was intuitive, and openly difficult for early levels, which, as I noted, it was open about!  The Labyrinths are clearly not meant to be done in one attempt, which I like as an added layer of gameplay.

The story is also quite interesting, and I am a sucker for magical girls!

Overall, very solid game, and I'm excited for full release!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2551305111

So I don't have a ton of experience with the first person dungeon crawl. It's one of my rpg gaps that I'd love to fill in more, but I do have some experience. I think what is here calls back to those classic rpgs quite well and I thought it controlled well and was easy to understand what was going on. The music and sound could def be expanded though, but I also understand doing music for an rpg with a lot of repeated music for battles is rough. Like a recent rpg that did well with that literally had like 4-5 hours of it's 8 hour soundtrack for zones and battle music to avoid it, and that's not feasible for everyone. Something a bit longer and maybe a few tracks could potentially be possible though and would help some. But like I'm prone to just turning off the music in a game like this regardless of how good it is and just vibing with my own music, so I don't really think it's a big deal, just worth mentioning.

I will say it also might be nice if the characters could get a small amount of MP back (maybe even just 1) with a base attack (I didn't defend enough to see if that restored any) as especially the mages feel really useless as soon as they run out of MP, or when they aren't using MP and they don't have a ton of MP in general. 

Overall though I think this is a great attempt at the classic dungeon crawl though and that you should be proud of what you have made and I look forward to seeing how the final project turns out.

This game does a lot of stuff well. I think with a bit of trimming on the tutorial and focus on pacing for the big "yay" moments for players, this could be one to keep returning to! Thanks to feedbackquest for putting this on and for the dev for sending over a build!!

Video review here: 

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.

First comment!
The demo is QUITE long, including the tutorial and first main mission. I streamed for approximately 4 hours and didn't finish the first mission. That's not a complaint; the dungeons are large and you have to explore EVERYTHING. I died several times, but that's not a game over, which is helpful. The enemies can be BRUTAL.
I was able to move back and forth from the game to my other screen (2 screen setup) and the mouse moved between them comfortably and the game didn't minimize when I clicked on the other screen. WOOHOO (a lot of games do that, c'est la vie)

Controls are easy enough to use, and controller is supported. Yay! Each level is a bit of a grind, but once you get used to the "go in, fight, return, fight more, upgrade" style, it gets easier.
Solid graphics, fun music.
You can find the vod here, or on youtube
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2543545974