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Clash of Steel at the Mysterious Castle's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Inspiration | #37 | 3.378 | 3.700 |
| Vibes | #42 | 3.012 | 3.300 |
| Overall | #46 | 2.952 | 3.233 |
| Usability | #49 | 2.465 | 2.700 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
This is really great stuff! I would run this (well, a revised version of it.)
I laughed out loud when I saw you turned the pinball table into a dungeon map; so good! The little ice hockey easter eggs in the mercenary descriptions is very fun.
The Kurosawa vibes here are very strong, more-so than 8-bit vibes, but that's a trade I'm very happy to make.
Love the patrol and alert systems, very elegant and flexible for responding to players raiding the castle.
I would really like to have seen additional maps to zoom in on the buildings' layouts, without these I think it becomes demanding for the GM to track what is going on (particularly the castle locations.)
I can tell you were really fighting to fit everything in to the jam's restrictions, and the formatting/layout has suffered. Please do a post-jam revision to give the dense descriptions more room to breath! It would make this much easier to run, which is something I would do!
Cool and focused art direction. You've managed to blend hockey references in a Kurosawa-inspired adventure; this is quite the achievement! Illustrations and maps are pretty beautiful, and the adventure is quite interesting to run either as part of a campaign or a heavily stylised one-shot.
I do have to say the layout is a bit all over the place and inconsistent for my taste. Some rooms and monsters' descriptions spill over to the next page, item descriptions aren't contained in the right column and end up mixed with the names, and at some point, the whole layout switches from two columns to a single one. I feel it detracts from the entire adventure, which, in itself, is pretty good without all this noise.
Thanks for the feedback. I was super crunched for time and honestly trying to fit so much in so quickly that the final pass is below where I'd like it to be! It's my first time actually assembling or submitting something to a jam like this, so the learning curve is real and steep. Thanks for the feedback, I'll aim to do better in revisions and future jams.
Big fan of the art! I also like how you incorporated other inspirations to blend the flavors of your NES prompts.
Thanks so much!
Hey! We also had The Mysterious Murasame Castle as an inspiration game, and after feeling like I've lived in that lore for two weeks, I think you nailed it! The artwork is super cool, the Rolling Cave is awesome, and I am particularly fond of the way you wrote the Tengu stat block. Cheers. Great work.
Thank you for the feedback! Really glad you found things you liked in it!