Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!

Something about this reminds me of old text based DOS games where you just had to figure out everything for yourself. The design of it is more simplistic and it's a lot more clear about what you're doing, though. I can see this being pretty fun.

What isn't fun, however, is how hard parts of this game can be to read. There's a lot of small fonts and heavy use of italics, all combined with font colours that don't stand out well enough against the dark backgrounds. I found that I had to increase my browser's text size to 130% in order to ensure I could read everything clearly enough. This shouldn't be necessary, though.

What also isn't fun is having to scroll back up the page to check on my health and stamina while in fights, then scroll back down to choose what I wanted to do. This would all work far better if everything was contained on a single screen without the need to scroll. Currently, you dedicate a lot of space to a piece of artwork. It'd be better if this artwork encompassed the entire screen and all of the UI elements laid over it. It's not as important to see the entire image as it is to have the UI elements. Then when it comes to fights, you can ensure each fight places the UI elements such that the enemy in the artwork isn't covered.

From here, I want to bring up some gameplay issues I felt should be addressed. Let's start with equipment: what does each piece of equipment do? Since each area boss drops both a weapon and armour, as well as a ring, each of these must have different stats. I'd like to know what these stats are so I can make more informed choices about each one. Otherwise, it just feels random.

Next, there's a rather obvious flaw in the game's current design: there's no reason to ever use Attack. So if I'm not in a position where I need to restore stamina, my options to deal damage are Attack and Parry. The problem is that Parry is superior in every way; it takes less stamina to use, it completely prevents the enemy from dealing damage AND it does more damage than Attack does! There's just no reason to ever use Attack.

Now for what I feel is the biggest problem in the game: the dice rolling. When using Attack, Parry or Dodge, there's a random D20 roll. It seems to be that so long as you score 7 or higher, you succeed. This means that your ability to do anything is based on pure luck. If the player gets a string of failures, there's just nothing they can do about it. There should be something to give the player a bit more control on this.

For the last bit of this, I just have some notes of things that didn't quite fit into the other areas above.

First, I think that the player shouldn't have the option to return to where an NPC is once they've gone through the scene with them. It just clutters the options available to the player.

Second, what's stopping me from searching the cell anyway after freeing the prisoner? It's not like the prisoner is going to stop me. It'd be nice to see some logical reason for why I can't search the cell after they're gone.

And last but certainly not least... my name escapes me? What do you mean? The game literally JUST asked me my name! I said it was Bananaman! How can I not remember my own name when I just said it?! I'M BANANAMAN!

Using New Game Plus to reveal the truth is also a smart narrative promise that gives players a clear reason to return.

Because the itch page repeats a substantial amount of information in French and English, I would add language jump links near the top. If automatically matching the player’s browser language is not possible, lead with whichever language best serves your primary audience and make the language selector much more prominent.

Since this is mostly a text-based game, I would give the interface another careful pass. Players should not need to scroll just to see all the choices for a single decision. If there are too many options to fit comfortably, condense or reorganize them so the complete interaction stays within one screen.

I would also enable the music by default. I initially assumed the game had no music because the option was easy to miss. Players who prefer silence will find the mute control, but everyone else should hear an important part of the atmosphere immediately. On Chrome with Windows 11, I also noticed that the music button overlapped the scrollbar.

The dice-roll idea fits nicely, but the current animation feels more wobbly than weighty. I would refine the motion and add a satisfying rolling sound. The physical feedback of dice is one of the best parts of board games, and recreating some of that through animation and audio would make each roll feel much better.

Give BEAT BAES two minutes and see how a busted loadout handles in a fast, physics-driven mech clash. Drop your first reaction in the form so I can make the next build hit harder.

Release your BAE · Report the aftermath

Have to admit I'm not a  big fan of text based games, so I'm not sure how useful my feedback might be.

For me it was very cool to actually have an image that represented whatever was going on in the scene. It made it way more interesting :) The D20 Combat is very clear, but I never managed to win even one fight. I fleed succesfully, but besides the 2 flask I didn't knew how to rest or restore my hp/vigor. I leveld up once and chose +1 strength, but it did not really feel like I'm much stronger after that in combats. Maybe it would feel more important when there is a visual representation of the better stats during the roll phase?

The Ui and Story are pretty good ^.^