Hey! With FQ9 ending soon, I wanted to let you know that I won't be able to cover your game until after the event. If you're okay with waiting, just keep the game on the event and I'll be getting around to it over the next couple of months or so. :)

Overall:
This was one of my favourites from the last FBQ, and honestly one of the most surprising game genres I never expected to enjoy. Cody’s revamp is a really noticeable improvement. The levels feel tighter and much better paced, which I really appreciated.

Suggestions:

-Dark levels: These were a bit of a struggle for me to navigate, although I was still able to figure them out eventually.

-Radial menu: Could use a bit of refinement. Being able to hot-swap between selected guns would also be a nice QOL addition.

Positives:

-Minimalist creature designs: The silhouettes are super distinct, making it easy to immediately tell which monsters are after me. Simple but very effective.

-Guns: Still pretty fun and satisfying to use.

-Sound design: Very ROTNG in the best way. The sound has such a specific identity that it really helps the game stand out.

Thanks so much for asking me to playtest this game again, please feel free to dm me for playtests even if it's outside of the FBQ season. I'm down to clown anytime for you!

Here's the link to my VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2880744501

Welcome back to Feedback Quest!  I remember your game from last year and how much fun I had with it!

As with all Feedback Quest 9 games this year, I played the game for about 30 minutes or so.

Overall, I once again enjoyed the game and loved seeing the changes you made!  It seemed like you added some new music, and OMG, the one area where the music goes into a Pirates of the Caribbean-type song, I was like, "oh yeah, time to kick butt!"

The updates to the opening areas were well done and for sure helped with getting the idea of the controls before getting into big frays.  Also appreciate the weapon wheel being fixed :D  The horse monsters are much clearer in their movements and still hard as heck to kill.

The only issues I really noticed are that the title page's fonts are a little hard to read; it would be helpful for the music to have a separate volume slider; and the jumping height felt a little inconsistent, like sometimes I'd go much higher, other times I'd barely move and get stuck in a corner.

VOD link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2880630045?t=02h19m45s

I think this game is pretty interesting so far and has a lot of potential. I only made it past the second large temple level (the one shown in the first screenshot) so my feedback is based on the game up until that point.

-The art is great. The first big open area really impressed me with it's weird ethereal atmosphere, and the levels inside the temple are appropriately moody with the dark corridors. The environments make great use of contrasting darkness and light, and some of the really huge canyons and temple corridors are just a marvel to look at.

-The gunplay is generally pretty good. Although I thought the weapon balance was a little weird. The shotgun is clearly the most versatile weapon and my go to for like 80 percent of encounters, with the sniper rifle being amazing for taking out anything from a distance. The flare gun has it's niche uses, and the summon weapon is good for baiting enemies and playing defensively in certain areas. I think the lack of a good machine gun is maybe an issue here. I realize that the smg is intended to be kind of a subpar fallback weapon with it's one upside being that it has a massive amount of ammo, but I think a good automatic weapon would round out the roster and feel good to use in those big hoard encounters (as opposed to just using the shotgun all the time).

-I think the movement is interesting but also one of the roughest parts of the game right now. It really fun to slide jump and build up huge amounts of speed. And I think the jumps being floaty is also a good idea given how enemies swarm you.  But I think a big issue is that when you air strafe side to side, or front to back it feels really jerky. Like when I jump to the left I can press right and it immediately sends all my momentum to the right. This unfortunately make jumping feel a little hard to control and it becomes more and more of an issue the further into the game I get, since trying to jump around while avoiding the hoards of enemies can feel very unwieldy. And trying not to fall off ledges (especially on smaller catwalks) also feels like a bit of a chore since my jumps feel very unpredictable. I can tell this game wants to be like Serious Sam sometimes and sometimes it wants to be a more methodical exploration shooter but both feel kinda hard to do when I don't feel like I'm in full control of my character.

-Moving through water is really rough right now. You go so fast that it's really hard to control, and combine that with the fact that it's harder to see underwater and I'm afraid to fight anything underwater.

-The level design is varied and interesting. It has a great mix between dark corridors that you need to explore methodically and wide open arenas where you're free to jump around battling hoards of enemies. The levels also make great use of the different tools in your arsenal here. I like how the level where you find the archer summon is clearly built around baiting enemies from down the hallways into the larger rooms with the water, which are the perfect place to summon the archers and watch them shred the enemies. I also like how the level that comes immediately after you find the sniper is a huge open area where you can make great use of it. The pitch black maze where you can only rely on the flair gun to see is also amazing and genuinely spooky.

-I think the flair gun's light radius could be a bit bigger. I feel like I really have to spam it in really dark areas.

-I noticed a bug where if you pause while in the middle of a reload animation it causes the animation to freeze. You can get it to unfreeze by switching weapons.

-The music is a bit of a mixed bag. I think the levels that just contain ambience sound great, but when it comes to the actual music, it's kinda easy to tell that it's royalty free.

-The weapon lore is pretty cool. It reminds me of Dark Souls with how they give interesting context to what the story of this game is.

Overall I think that if you clean up the movement, make the gun roster a little more interesting, and fix some bugs I think this game has the potential to be a really great, strange, and atmospheric shooter. The level design shows some real intentionality here and the art is really cool to look at. I'll definitely be interested in looking at future updates.  

Hey I gave the game a play.  Overall it's pretty fun.  Here's some random feedback/notes I have

--Art style is nice for this type of game.

--At first I was thinking the enemies are a little too easy and dumb (first open level), but as you layer more on, it gets more interesting.  I especially love the creepy horses.  I stopped at the level where it's a bunch of rooms and enemies, and eventually it just devolves into back pedal strafe, but for the most part the encounters and level layouts are interesting.

-I like the floaty movement, and it didn't take me long to figure out the slide jump combo to get going really fast.  This was in the first open level.  I would definitely recommend more levels like that.

--Weapon sound effects are not good.  Feels like you're firing a air gun.  Here's a good library with gun sounds that I've used that may help: The Free Firearm Sound Library | OpenGameArt.org

--Also along the same lines as the sound, the weapon feedback in general is poor.  I don't know if you're opposed to adding screen shake, but there's other things you can do, like more weapon kick and stuff, to make it feel better.

--Some other sounds are weird, like the jump.  But enemy sound effects are great.

--Making it more clear where buttons are and what can be interacted with would be good.  Like that first boat button is in a ridiculous spot.  And then the level to open the temple doesn't look like a level at all and just blends in.  You need to come up with a visual language that to tell the players when something is a button/interactable.  Then show them at a time when it's really obvious, and as long as you stay consistent (and it doesn't blend in with something else), the player will always be able to tell.

--Using the mouse wheel to scroll through weapons, it's frustrating that it goes to slots that are empty.  You should just skip the empty slots. 

--I'm not a fan of the dark areas where you need to use the flare gun.  Might just be my taste though.

I realize a lot of this sounds negative, but I'm only giving all these specific notes because I really did enjoy the game, so I want to offer some suggestions that could make it better.

• Youtube Link / Twitch Link
• Graphics : "Minimalist" , but fine. I like the weird monster designs.
• GUI : 
  • Some things could definitely use a touch-up , font escaping text boxes to name one.
  • Your arms/guns look like they're entirely detached from your person, as if FOV was on an extremely high setting despite only being circa 80-90
• Performance : Flawless
• Music / Sfx : 
  • Music : Some of it works, some of it doesn't.
  • SFX : Many SFX I assume are done in house by dev making mouth sounds , this is fine.
• Gameplay :  
  • Air control is an enigma , sometimes it feels incredibly slippery, other times it's fairly responsive.
  • The ship addition / intro level feels a bit slow. Enemies are spaced out , Ammo is pretty far and few between (Practically could only find the smg ammo). The ammo situation made the boss fight in the small arena even worse considering the boss can just shoot an explosive round that can 2 or 3 tap you.
  • Many of the weapons feel relatively useless , made worse by the quantity of enemies. 
• Misc Issues : 
  • Water makes it practically impossible to see. A slight impedance to sight wouldn't be too bad for hidden secrets, but as it is right now, I believe some bodies of water are needing to be dove into to progress and with the severity of the blue 'fog' that covers the screen when diving it becomes a hassle.
  • The floaty/slippery nature of movement is suited far better for the wide open areas, yet a bit perplexingly you're dumped into catacombs that seem to be smaller than what I remember from the last demo (last year). I found trying to enter the wide open doorways to be a bit of a struggle , especially when being chased.
  • Navigation feels like guesswork.
  • Door hitboxes need improvement, it's very easy to look at a door and just not get the prompt to use E and move on thinking it's the wrong door.
• Notes : 
  • I wasn't able to get as far as I would've liked in the time I gave it. [In the stream]
  • I remember there being some more options like magic / summoning and I had an item I could equip in relation to summoning cap but I couldn't find anything correlating to either in the time I gave it. (Aside from the Incense Burner thing)
  • Trying to get out of water can be a strange hassle, it seems like momentum might be kept if ascending rapidly , but in the catacombs with the small pools of water, you can get somewhat trapped.
  • The restorable armor via kills/headshots is a nice thing. 
  • It'd be nice if clearing an area stopped enemies from respawning on revisiting. If feels somewhat like you're punished for exploring.
  • The Silent Hill-esque enemy (I found it first in the dark maze room) is probably my favourite monster.
• Final Thoughts : I was kinda disappointed this time around , compared to last year's (from what I remember) , the level design and changes were maybe for the worse. It felt longer to get into areas and start finding new weapons or secrets.
  •  Most of the above was wrote in regards to experience with the stream, some of it I was rewrote or added (at time of writing) the following day as I played more of it offstream to get a better idea of the current state of the game for critique.