Tried it out and loved the theme and enjoyed the game!  Some general comments:

1. The Master and Sound Effect volume sliders could use some SFX feedback so the player knows where it's being set to.
2. I liked the variety of weapons, and the choices between them felt impactful
3. A codex of possible / seen enemies and upgrades would be a great addition to allow the player the ability to explore the possibilities

The VOD for the review is linked below, and will be available for 60 days from the day of broadcast:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2863008889?t=1h59m40s

This was a fun little game. The theme is amusing and creative. The upgrades are good. The luck of what you get can majorly impact how well you do. My high score was 2,582,955, in a run where I lost to the boss. I beat the boss with a score of 1,575,676. I enjoyed it enough to keep playing for a bit after winning, and may play some more later to see if I can get a better score and win.

The transition to the boss fight starts to fade the screen out while you can still take damage. It would be nice if things froze, or damage was blocked, so you were not trying to evade enemies when you cannot see anything. My first boss fight I got hit several times during the transition.

The boss was a good challenge. I had a good run my second time, getting the magnet early on, and having good options from each soup. I got the boss down pretty low, but was not able to beat it. My third run was bad. I beat the boss on my fourth try, though my score was much lower than my magnet run. By then I'd figured out the boss fight enough that I was able to pick upgrades that helped me in it, even if I did not get as many.

When starting out, the movement speed feels really slow, especially after a run where I had several speed upgrades. It works, since you have the upgrades, but it does create a challenge. I like that you have indicators when you get close to a treasure. I got at least 1 treasure on each run, and sometimes got 2. I think one of the runs might have been 3 of them, but I'm not certain and may be combining 2 runs. I got each of the 4 shown on the web page at least once. I found the dash to be so-so. If you don't have any speed upgrades it felt almost useless. With some upgrades it felt better, though the range was still fairly short. Add that to the long cooldown, and I only used it rarely.

It's not listed on the web page, but the Fire was one of my favorite upgrades. I also liked the Chef's Hat and Running Shoes. Upgrading the Fork and adding BBQ Skewers were also nice. The others were picked based on what I had already gotten.

The music was nice. Some of the sound effects felt out of place. It was not clear what I was hearing initially. Over time I learned what each was, but it would be nice if they better fit the character and were more clear about what they were meant to indicate.

Fun game! Very strong character designs. 

Hi, I love your game concept! Plus cute art!!

Here's the VOD on Youtube 

Overall, fun rougelike shooter, looking forward to play it again.

Played three runs. Had fun! I will try to describe each run.

First Run

I kept throwing forks but did not seem to get upgrades in time. When I did get one I took two forks and knife. These were greatly disappointing upgrades. The swarm of enemies quickly increased and I seemed to have no way to even kill a potato. I got speed boots so all I could do was run and chip away but couldn’t seem to kill any of the 100s of enemies. They could never catch up to me so eventually it became boring. I was then sent to a boss battle. My two forks didnt even seem to do a single HP of damage. i eventually died.

Second run

Got flame and hot sauce. These were great abilities, allowed me to level up quickly to better and better weapons. I could finally clear out the entire swarm. The difference in first and second runw as IMMENSE. I quickly took down the boss no problem

Third Run

Another bad roll. Better than the first one but definitely didnt get the momentum going fast enough

Conclusion

• I like the concept of the game of making a soup with bodies of dead vegetables.
• The early game seems way more important and therefore RNG plays a huge role.
• There should definitely be less disparity between runs and luck should not play this huge a factor.
• I also found the hurt sound to be very odd.
• Spotted a bug where when we are teleporting to the boss, the enemies don’t freeze but we are frozen. This lead them to attacking our character multiple times and take damage (I think). Anyway i think when the animation is running the enemies should be paused for sure.

Overall a nice theme and a fun spin on the vampire survivor genre. Looking forward to where you take this project!

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Great interpretation of the theme and very solid execution. The Vampire Survivors influence is obvious, but turning defeated vegetables into soup upgrades gives the formula a fun identity of its own. The pastel rabbit, vegetables, and cooking pot make the joke readable immediately, while the soup-selection screenshot shows how the theme connects to progression instead of being purely decorative.

The UI and overall presentation are remarkably clean, and the itch page makes everything feel cohesive. My main accessibility request would be full mouse control. I would also increase or responsively scale the font size because it becomes surprisingly difficult to read in fullscreen on a large display.

If you have two minutes after making soup, try BEAT BAES and smash some questionable mech builds together. Nobody gets cooked, probably.

Throw a BAE in the arena · Tell me how it tasted

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!

An entry we've often had in Feedback Quest events is Feisty Fauna, a game that plays exactly like this. However, where that was in made using 3D graphics, this uses some cute pixel art. I love these types of survivor games, and the design of this one is pretty great. Yet it's not without flaws that could be fixed. I'm going to break my feedback down into different categories, starting with abilities.

First and foremost, I feel like the player should have a lot more control over the starting Fork weapon. I find trying to get your first couple of levels to be really difficult because of how random the fork is. Instead of the somewhat random direction it has now, it should always be thrown in the direction of the closest enemy. I know it doesn't do this because I'd have an enemy RIGHT behind me while the game is throwing forks in every direction BUT towards that one enemy that is literally only 20 pixels away from me. I'm fine with additional forks being more random, but that first fork should be set up to work with the player.

Next, I think that all abilities should be clear in how they work. While some abilities clearly state how they attack (ketchup and hot sauce for example), others are far less clear. The skewers don't state how they choose their targets and the flames don't say that they always fire in the direction you're facing. During my very first run, I chose Fire early thinking it would be good, only to then have the enemies that come at the 1 minute mark essentially screw me over because I couldn't risk moving towards them due to how many their were and how close they were at all times, which in turn really delayed me from getting levels early on.

With the knife ability, I feel that the first time you upgrade this it should always be set on the opposite side of the first knife. Then when you get a third knife, the positions should be adjusted to keep them equal distance apart. This should then repeat for each additional knife.

I also think there may be a bug in the Chef's Hat upgrade. The Chef's Hats states that it increases the number of attacks fired by 1/2. However, what I found that if I got the first Chef's Hat upgrade BEFORE getting the Knife, it didn't automatically add another knife. Yet I know (or at least have seen) that the Chef's Hat is supposed to affect the Knife as I would often end up with 5 knives by the time I got all of the Knife upgrades, even though each level up of the Knife only adds one. Yet other abilities don't have this problem: in a run where I got the first Chef's Hat very early, I found that every other ability I got after that still got the additional shot from the Chef's Hat. It's just the Knife that's broken for this.

With the ability stuff out of the way, I want to move into things regarding player movement and control.

First, if the player stops moving, the character will always face forward regardless of whatever direction they were going. This can make it confusing which way the Fire attack is going to go. I recommend having idle sprites for all direction to better indicate this.

Next, I found a lot of hit boxes to just be vastly unfair to the player. Just about all survivor games that operate in a 2D space tend to make the player avatar small to make this more fair, but the rabbit in this game is huge. Adding into the fact that many of the enemies are also huge, and suddenly you have things like the player getting hurt because they're feet touch the very top pixels of the giant broccoli men who appear later in a run. This just gets vastly unfair for the player, resulting in them taking a lot of damage that they otherwise would've avoided in other games like this. The hit box issue then came up again during the boss in my last run. Late into the fight, the boss fires a volley of carrots in a cone pattern (it could be circular but I can't see the entire thing). Depending on where I am in the field, this becomes either trivial to dodge or just outright impossible. In my case, it learned more to impossible. If you're in the direct north or south during this attack, you have a lot less pixels to be hit which, in turn, makes it easier to squeeze through the carrots. If you're in the direct east or west, though, you now have the entire bunny's height to deal with. Even at the very edge of the arena, you either can't dodge this or only have a pixel or two of room to do so. The best way to fix this is to make the rabbit's hitbox be a square set in the middle of the rabbit. That way, things that graze the feet or ears won't count as hits.

Last in this topic, I was originally going to ask for there to be a dash option so players have some more they can do in the game besides "move and choose upgrades," and to get them some agency in trying to avoid enemies. Then I eventually learned that you can find a dash upgrade out in the field. So instead, this bit has been changed to... make the dash available by default. It shouldn't be an upgrade I have to find in the field, especially considering other aspects I'll be covering later in this feedback.

This brings me to the last category, which is basically things that I didn't think fit into the previous two.

First, it took me a while to realize that you can get healing items in trees. I would highly recommend putting something in that tells the player that these can heal them. Similarly, I eventually discovered there was an upgrade in the field that allowed you to passively regenerate health. Personally, I think this is just a very overpowered item. Instead of this, what I would suggest is that the player recovers some health every time they get an upgrade. I would also suggest they recover a portion of their health once they reach the boss. That way, a player who is only one hit away from death won't die instantly to the boss.

Next, I honestly found the arena to be way too big. At no point during the 5 minutes leading to the boss did I ever reach the edge of the arena. This can then make finding upgrades on the field a matter of pure luck as it they spawn far away, you'll likely never find them. I don't know how big the arena is (again, I never reached the edge), but I would say it should be at least 50% smaller. If you're worried about it being too easy for players to find multiple upgrades, just reduce the range where they're shown that an upgrade is nearby.

So I know that the way the game works is you have 5 minutes to get as many levels as you can before fighting the boss, but I personally found that the game scales too hard early on. This goes back to what I was saying about the Fork weapon, but I constantly found that I just did not have enough weapons early enough to deal with the enemies that appear in the first minute. Instead, once the one minute mark hit I often found I would only get one more level during the next entire minute because the enemies suddenly became so beefy that I couldn't kill them while the weaker enemies just stopped coming. An improved starting fork can help this, but I think the real thing that needs to happen is that the scaling for enemies should be changed, with the first new enemies having less health. Otherwise, all the player can do is spend over a minute just slowly bleeding off lots of enemies, then sweep around and get so many items that they get multiple levels at once and suddenly go from being too weak to being too strong not just for the current enemies, but for the next set of enemies too.

And this brings me to my last point... WHY AM I FINDING MORE THAN ONE BABY CORN?! WHY ARE BABY CORNS SPAWNING IN AREAS I ONCE KNEW DIDN'T HAVE ONE?! I DON'T WANNA KILL THE BABY CORN, YET IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO THIS! STOP MAKING ME A MONSTER!

That's all from me! I can't wait to see more! :D

https://youtu.be/PxcoIl3ur9E Skip to 32:00 for your game

The aesthetic is cute, and the mean/A N G E R Y veggies are hilarious. Music is fine, controls are fine, though if you can implement controller support, that'd be even better! Also, if you can add some additional health recovery items, that could make runs last a little longer. Still, a fun concept!

Very cool and nice game, feels really smooth, I really had fun playing it! The SFX were fun and accurate. I really liked how well the theme of the game was used, the fact that the ‘experience bar’ is a soup was very original. The final boss was really something I didn’t expect, haha, very nice design and I found it to be well balanced, not too easy nor too hard but still challenging.

I only found two problems:

1. On one run I managed to kill the boss, yet some of its projectiles were still flying and I believe it hit me right after the boss was kill so the ‘you lose’ screen showed instead.
2. I tested the game on Firefox on a low-end pc (8gb ram and 2 core) and the game goes black every few seconds. I believe it’s something related to Firefox as I’ve had problems with other games in the past. The Linux version on the same machine works really nice. I didn’t face this problem using Brave Browser.

Despite problem 1, I managed to kill the boss on the next run. I think I got lucky, as I could get all the treasures. Vitamin C was truly essential.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wddLUatdB0l9dx7NLlUNwAVNEXrUnv7i6e8sbNYL7Yc/...

I'm jumping the gun a little and testing some of the early entries! The link above is a Google Doc with my real-time thoughts.

This was a lot of fun! I was pretty compelled to keep playing after I died. While it doesn’t do anything crazy groundbreaking, the different choices are compelling and there’s a decent bit of weighing options.

In terms of assets, it’s all passable. The pixel art is a little scrappy bit in a charming way that feels at home in something casual like this. As the veggies get stronger their art becomes less appealing as the sprites get bigger and have more empty space on them, but the art style gives the vibe of a game that doesn’t need to be taken seriously and for that I can’t complain much.

Musically, it’s forgettable but serviceable, nothing in here stuck out as egregiously bad but a custom soundtrack that loops properly would be preferred. If it were left as is I don’t think anyone would complain, but it would be great if there were some more tailor made tracks.

In terms of balance, I feel like the Chef Hat might be a bit too strong. While choosing any one weapon upgrade does seem to power up that weapon alongside the additional shots, the Hat multiplying all of your shots at once almost always feels like it outweighs that. By the time I had around six knives floating around me, I turned into an untouchable killing machine that basically just got to sit there and wait for the enemies to kill themselves. Knives were especially strong too, but basically useless on the final boss except for grinding for HP.

The movement speed was annoying but I understand its value now, especially since it gives the running shoes a lot of use. If you moved at a comfortable pace from the start, the shoes wouldn’t be useful.

The boss is great, its design is very goofy in a way I adore, and it has a variety of attacks that keeps the fight really fresh (pun intended). My one complaint is that the attack where it shoots a vine and drags you into its mouth seems hard to react to, and once I get sucked in I have no idea how to escape. It basically feels like an instant death sentence, which is almost welcome since the game otherwise feels a little too easy, but a single attack’s ability to kill me in effectively one hit does feel frustrating. If there is a way to escape, I’d love some more information on how to do that.

In terms of UI and controls, it’s all functional but there were a couple points of irritation. It’s weird the game has any interaction with the mouse at all since core gameplay only uses the arrow keys or touch screen, although there isn’t much reason to disable that. On PC, my only real problem was the pause screen, it would be nice to unpause with E. Mobile had a couple more issues I went into greater detail with the touch controls. It also confused me a bit that the dedicated pause button pauses the game, is still visible while the game is paused, but doesn’t work when you press it while paused to unpause the game. I’d make that disappear or just work as an unpause button.

I’m also unsure about the pot at the bottom right of the screen. Veggies appear to enter the  pot, and its placement below the D pad conveys that it’s important in some way, but if it is conveying information I have no idea what, as it doesn’t appear to be a progress bar for soup at a glance. If it is, I would make that more readable.

Anyway, this was a fun little game! It’s not breaking any new boundaries but that’s okay, it’s a casual and addictive roguelike shooter and I think it plays that role very well.

Once ratings open, I'll return to give this a proper score!