I like the concept, and I love the way they go “boo” when I lose. I found that funny.
Cognitive-wise, I struggled with the tutorial, because it has a lot of text to read, a lot of information to absorb. To me, it is okay to read one page of tutorial like this one. Once I got to the second, I skimmed. Once I got to the third, I simply skipped it.
I know how this sounds, probably. It might sound like I’m not trying hard enough. Like i have a short attention span and am embracing it, instead of challenging it. These two things might be true. But it is also true that interactive tutorials, short sentences, smaller sections of content between each set of instructions (instead of the whole page) and less information at once is proven to be easier to understand. A lot of information to take in at once is hard when you don’t have the real-life experience of knowing what it all is referring to.
Which is also why players tend to skip to the game itself.
It is a game with a lot of information and rules to take in. So I feel that it is the kind of game that would work better if the tutorial and instructions had more images to go with it and exemplify the concepts. There are some good boardgames with great manuals. The way they explain the rules ensures you can understand it better before playing. But they still take time and effort to read through, of course. There are boardgames I take days to read, because we are trying to learn the information. And still the first time we play is also like an interactive tutorial, because we need the manual to set it up and through playing need to keep checking the rules. So I suppose in a videogame there’s also the question about how long do you want the player to take to read the tutorial? And there’s also the risk of them losing interest / patience / focus as they read through it. What is also harder is that with a digital-only video game I can’t be playing the game and checking the manual at the same time, as we used to be able to when we had CD-ROMS and game boxes with great manual, or as we can do with boardgames.
I am glad that the game isn’t time-sensitive. I was scared it would be, because I thought I wouldn’t know how to play.
VISUALS:
There are a few problems with the visuals. Namely, especially, with the menu to choose a card after I lost the first level. Each card has its color but the text is in red and green and often with very low contrast. It scares me away from reading but now it’s not because of information overload (or at least not only). It’s because it’s physically hard to read.
But it does have some information overload as well, because I failed the first level, and before getting to try again and seeing how it works, I had to choose a card, and didn’t quite understand the sequence and narrative of things.
Although there is a sandbox mode. A sandbox mode is very helpful for cognitive accessibility, and a good complement to the tutorial, to help us learn. So I think I will quit and try again but start with the sandbox.
For now, these are my first impressions. It looks like a great concept and I’m sort of excited to understand it, but i think it has much polish to do to become less daunting cognitive-wise and also readable and usable from a visual accessibility perspective.