Alyx Ascended

Hi,
I streamed your game last night. Overall, I enjoyed the style and uniqueness of the game, but found it's lack of clarity in both the story and game play to be frustrating.

The biggest problem with this game that I feel holds it back the most is it's decision to not explain anything. While I understand some more popular games have done successful "hidden tutorials" (catering the game's design to subtly coax the player into learn the mechanics instead of explicitly stating the mechanics) that design is not present in the game, making the initial start confusing and frustrating. If more care was given to teach players, either through an optional tutorial at the start, or even just a basic text dump at the start (not recommended, though) it would go a long, long way in improving user experience.

On more personal matters, there were other gripes I had with the game's design. The first of which is the overly sensitive keyboard controls. Turning the character would sometimes fling me 180 or even 270 degrees around when I only wanted to turn 90 degrees. Due to the design of the hallways looking exactly the same every direction, this overly sensitive turning made it very easy to get lost. 

Second, I didn't enjoy how combat often boiled down to babysitting your barrier. This slows down combat a lot, but additionally, due to how hard bosses hit, it punishes the player for not having "enough luck" to draw enough barrier cards. I don't know the best way to balance this, as the chat and I debated about this even after I had finished streaming your game, however, in my personal opinion on this matter, the requirement of keeping barrier up to win or otherwise take so much damage that you will die feels punishing and not very fun.

Anyways, during the stream, I most certainly get quite ranty and sounds like I am being overly harsh on the game during the stream (which is why I feel it is important I provide a written review in addition to my live stream so that we can just ignore the rantiness of my review and hone in on the core issues I have), but my overall feelings of the game is that it's a nice game with a lot of potential.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.

Pretty fun little game and definitely gave me some good ideas on the power of the CGC plugin!

If I had to nitpick I think the fact that the description of the cards would not update to show their lowered EP cost or Damage was a bit annoying however. I'm not sure if that is possible with the CGC plugin though so I can give it a pass.