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Misery

3
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A member registered Nov 25, 2017

Recent community posts

Hey, so, first of all:  Excellent game.  This held my attention for quite awhile, I really only stopped after my arm started to hurt too much (tendon problems, cant use mouse for long, gonna have to rig up a controller scheme, will try that later).

The different "biomes" are really well done, and the exploration never stopped being tense and exciting, even though I tended not to move very fast.

Seriously I think you're onto a real winning formula here.  This is a game I'll probably be coming back to a lot... exactly my sort of thing.  I'm a huge fan of the Backrooms concept (particularly after Kane's excellent new series) and this captures it well.  I'm really hoping that you'll keep expanding it, there's so many cool concepts that could appear here.

There are a couple of frustrations that I ran into though:

The biggest one is the flashlight... I quickly developed a loathing for that thing.  I also learned to never touch the A or D keys, because that made the wobbly thing go all over the place.  

But also, the dark areas:  There's just too much of that.  I dont know how many would agree with me, but I find that the freaky/uncanny factor drops quite a bit when in dark areas, because I cant see the stuff that normally would be generating that atmosphere.  When in that type of area, it often just felt like exploring a mundane hallway... definitely something lost there.

That, I guess, would be my biggest suggestion:  Way more lit up areas, way less dark areas.  The dark zones would probably be that much more freaky if they were only encountered every now and then.  Particularly if the player had been in a lit up area for a good while, and then POP, the lights flicker and go out.

Also the glass walls:  I got stuck on those OFTEN.  Dont get me wrong, they absolutely work in terms of atmosphere and such, but combined with too many dark areas and... yeah, I spent A LOT of time smacking into things on floor 3.

There seemed to be a couple of bugs, typically textures acting odd or doors that seemed to get eaten by the walls after a moment, but nothing that actually interfered with the gameplay or experience.  

Oh, and the fuzzy video effect is really well done.  Seriously, that's impressive.  Excellent job on that.  The sound design is also excellent.

The one thing I couldnt quite grasp though was the rising water event that would happen every now and then... did I do something to trigger that?  Is there a way to stop it?  

As it is, I got to about floor 9 before I had to stop for the day.  It was great the whole way through.  Oh, and is there a proper way to exit the game?  I couldnt find one, had to alt-tab and close it that way.

One last thing, I know the idea of having some hostile things in the game has probably been brought up, and I do think it could certainly be done well, though if it were up to me, the player would only encounter said creatures every now and then... too many encounters and the game loses that empty aspect.  Besides, monsters are going to be so much more effective when you just arent expecting them at all because you havent been seeing any for awhile.  Not that the game NEEDS monsters, of course.  But I bet you could do it quite well if you should decide to.

Anyway, so that's everything I wanted to say!  Very much enjoying it so far!  Cant wait to see what else you might do with it.

To be fair though, even if the language thing was changed, it's still just very difficult to get games noticed these days. Even devs with alot of know-how and resources have trouble getting anyone to see that their game even exists.  And then getting people interested in trying them is the other half of the problem.  Particularly with games this unique.  I mean, I point out stuff like 868-HACK to friends all the time, particularly since that hit Steam, but it's hard to get anyone to try it because they think it looks "weird" or confusing since it's just so different from everything else.  There's no language barrier there but still the game seems to intimidate people somehow.  And finding these games on your own is tough.  The only reason I even know about any of them is from stumbling on HACK a couple years back on TouchArcade... some article or something mentioned it, and I gave it a try and loved it.

Hey there!  I'm actually one of those indie friends mentioned above.  Originally the language thing turned me off as well, but with some convincing I decided to dive into the game after all.  Not like I havent played confusing-to-learn games in this genre before, really.

And honestly.... after quite a number of hours with the game, I gotta say... the language bit stopped mattering almost immediately.  Partly due to how well you did with making the ability icons descriptive, I find that honestly very impressive.  I went into this expecting to have alot of trouble remembering what each one does (my memory is bloody horrible... with something like Isaac for instance I constantly have to check the freaking wiki because even after 400 hours I still cant remember what half the items do) without the ability to get a tooltip description, but... no, the icons honestly do the trick.  

Anyway, I mostly just wanted to say:  This game is absolutely fantastic.  You've done an incredible job here.  I've really enjoyed your previous games and they're all things that I constantly come back to, but I honestly think this might be the best one you've made.  I'm very impressed with the depth and creativity on offer here.  The more I play it, the deeper and more challenging it seems to get.   I'm currently on an 11-streak run (score of about 280... alot of room for improvement, yep), have some artifacts and even reached the secret room, and am loving every moment of it.

I cant wait to see whatever you might make next!