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DERELICT's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Enjoyment | #2 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Audio | #4 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.133 | 3.133 |
| Execution | #4 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Metroidvania | #5 | 2.333 | 2.333 |
| Visuals | #5 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team/Developer
winterbraid
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Comments
Hello, the first boss is to strong for me but I really like your game. It’s fun.
Thank you!
Visuals/Audio: 3/5 and 4/5
Enjoyment/Execution 4/5 each. Despite a great many things below one might call a 'complaint' I have actually enjoyed it a fair bit!
Audiovisuals are solid. Thematically coherent!
MV is a 3/5. There's a bit of gated backtracking, and some platforming! But exploration isn't a super-strong aspect of the game experience as a whole.
TBH I think you could've toned down the trolliness of the end which as far as I can.
Runback with hard to jump spikes before a boss is a definite "do not do that please".
Maybe once a save file has seen the bad ending--I assume--once, there should be a marker so you just respawn at the save. Neat art in the ending, though!
The game as a whole could have been a mite slower and I wouldn't have missed it too much, but the player movement speed is the killer here.
Boss context: Unless one boss is another form of another, I missed Unreal or Unity. I never beat the final boss.
Some of the bullet patterns felt nonsense. On some level the first boss felt more nonsense than the others and a fair number of things feel kind of unfair. I realize this game has a strong danmaku element.
My kingdom for a health or damage upgrade. Something to take the edge off the boss fights a little. They're actually pretty learnable all told, even the first one.
Really questioning why it seemed at all appropriate to start what seems to be aiming for a fast paced, high action bosh rush game to with a boss where the optimal strategy seems to be to move as little as possible while holding down the fire button and pray that its obscenely janky ai doesn't just stuff you in an inescapable box anyway.
I don't know that I'll rate this since I didn't get past the first boss, but I was really disappointed with what I played, and especially to look at the jam version comments and see tons of comments about this exact same boss which seems to have been improved in mostly trivial ways - frankly the thought that this was at some point worse in the jam version is just kind of terrifying. The boss just needed a much more severe rework than what it got - the boxes and drones were not the big issue, its the bosses core behavior that is just not fun in its current state. I could see it maybe working with more vertical mobility, so you have the ability to actually lure the boss around instead of just moving back and forth and praying it responds appropriately - so maybe a more complex arena with multiple tiers of platform would be better? That way you could actually make some kind of concerted effort to control the boss' movement and avoid getting boxed in, as opposed to right now, where it feels like a choice between "move slowly and have 50/50 odds of getting stuck in a tiny box of snake and blown up by drones" or "move quickly and have a 100% chance of dying when the floor turns into snake"
Alright, after giving it another chance I seem to have reached some kind of ending now (though after beating only one more boss, Rust) so here's some more thoughts on it:
- Rust is a much more enjoyable boss that actually felt like it was designed with the player's actual moveset in mind. Felt challenging but fair. I wouldn't call it outstanding necessarily but it was good and if it were the first one I'd fought I'd have had a much better first impression of the game.
- Neither the game nor page description mention that you have the ability to... quintuple jump? I wasn't counting how many exactly you get, but its some excessive number. This is a pretty unintuitive ability to have at the start of the game and really warrants some explicit mention somewhere. Would've probably made python a bit more manageable, though I still think it was a really poor choice to make it the first boss.
- I don't think I care for the chargeup mechanic the player's weapon. It didn't feel like it added a whole lot to the combat and mostly just felt mildly awkward? The fact that you couldn't turn it sharply without releasing the button was mildly interesting but I don't think the charge contributed to that in any real way.
- Oh my god please tone down the weapon noise. I am so tired of hearing a million lasers going off every millisecond and drowning out every other noise in the game. It does not need a full volume sound for every individual laser when it is firing this fast.
- Do not like the level design mostly consisting of deep vertical pits designed so you cant climb back up, especially when theres missable content at the top of them. Its another design choice where I really just cant understand what the goal of this was. Aside from making half the content needlessly missable it also just makes the world feel repetitive, uninteresting, and kind of just nonsensical? Like I can't really tell what the setting of the game is meant to be.
- The platforming I attempted felt really bad. Even more than the bosses I fought it really feels like it is not taking the player's high movement speed into account. This is a player controller that feels suited for leaping around a wide open racetrack, not trying to precisely navigate cramped tunnels.
- The visuals in general are solid enough, I like the limited palette, its very appealing. Music also sounds pretty decent, at least when I could actually hear it over the endless ear-shattering drone of laser fire.
Thank you for giving the game another shot even despite the poor first impression, and sorry if you didn't have the best of times! I wanted to make a game that would test the limits of both the developer and the player, and I guess I succeeded in both regards.
The goal was to add some more polish after the main gamejam, but... the adrenaline drop hit pretty hard, and various distractions happened. For all it's worth, I was never planning to change the movement or boss mechanics significantly, but I definitely would have liked to improve the sound design and make the level a bit more interesting.
That said, at this point I'm kinda leaning towards considering this a closed chapter and a "time capsule" for the time being. It was always destined to be more of a niche project at best, and I think I'd rather take this experience and feedback into a possible future project in a similar style. But either way, thanks again for the honest review and for taking the time to push past the first boss!
Really good game with distinct and well thought out boss fights.
There are nice little intricacies in character movement and shooting, but I think an in-game tutorial wouldn't hurt. I got stuck on Rust until I checked the controls and found the slow walk.
Finding optional bosses was fun, but aside from that and one upgrade, there are not a lot of Metroidvania elements.
I died a couple of times right after defeating a boss, specifically on Python and Rust.
The respawn fade-in could've been a little bit faster. It was quicker to just go into the menu and load the game.
The platforming on the way to Unity and the fake save station was a nice change of pace.
Overall, it's a cool little game, and I've had fun playing it.