Hello, I've been a fan of your works for a while now and I've been hyped about this game as soon as I've seen some teasers on twitter. I've gave the demo a shot and attempted at achieving a S+ rank on all levels, and I have to say this game rocks. I love the gorgeous environment art and the fluidity of the combat system. The moment to moment gameplay is spot on with satisfyingly tense combat. But I think the combat system demo still has some rough edges to iron out. When the combat works, it's a really awesome feeling of rapidly combo moves to dispatch enemies as fast as you can. However there are time where the combat does not work as well and it can easily ended up as a frustrating experience. Here some points I would like to point out that really killed my mood for the game.
1. Lack of Parry Indicators
Parrying is the core mechanic of this game and I think it is very important to communicate essential information to the player regarding that move, especially when its direction matter a lot. Currently it isn't clear how long does the parry last, how large it's its hitbox and how long does it last. This has contributed to a lot of frustrating "WTF I've right clicked on that!!!" moments in my play sessions. Sometimes I might miss a parry because my aim direction wasn't aligned with the attack but how much angle of deviation is considered misaligned? I really think this game could benefit from having a visual that indicates the hitbox of the parry. I don't know if the actual hitbox needs to be tweaked or not becase I can't judge it accurately, but communicating the hitbox to the player can at least let players to be able to judge clearly if a missed parry was their fault and how much they've missed it.
2. Multihits
This point is more of a problem when it comes to bosses. There are a good number of attacks where you can just get hit multiple times in a rapid succession with barely any way to evade them. This feels more frustrating than fair because you feel like you have no control over the consecutive hits. What this means is that you effective have next to no mistakes you can make during boss battles otherwise you can get pummelled in an instant. I've seen this is contributed by 2 things. One being that bosses attack too rapidly, some attacks are prone to this multihit issues (especially the stage 3 crab miniboss 3 hit combo and the boss's 3 bullets attack) and also the main boss needs to chill after each attack. And another is that any time you get hit you are stunned locked and only have a fraction of a second of iframes given after that which gives you very little room to evade an attack that is already coming when you are stunned lock. If I were to fix this issue, I would look into these first. I am personally not a huge fan of difficulty by limiting the amount of mistakes you can make.
3. Damage numbers
So you have 5 hearts and almost every attack hits for 2. That just means you have 3 hits before you are gone in most cases. I would not point out damage numbers as an issue on video games unless it's a problem, but in this case it is a problem when paired with the multihit issue earlier. While solving the multihit issue can alleviate the problem of taking too much damage and dying too quickly. I am not sure if you want the base enemies to deal 1.5 - 2 damage on average, especially on the base difficulty. Perhaps I can suggest that most damage sources would deal 1 damage as a base but make hearts only heal half a heart and maybe put the current damage values under hard mode. I am not entirely sure if the damage numbers is really a problem but I think it may be a good idea to have the average player experience to be challenging but manageable for most players, but leave the harder challenge for those who seek it.
Those are my main issues, some other issues I've encountered are:
- player's sword throw ability glicthes when the player's path is blocked
- game does not tell the player whether the dodge roll has iframe or not
- player, hearts and enemies can get lost in the foilage in certain foilage dense combat rooms
- I think it's beneficial to have a perfect run mode where the player has to restart the entire level when they die, this is mainly for players going for the S+ rank
These are all I have to say. I do apologies that this comment can sound negative. Aside from what I've mentioned here, what's the in the game is already perfect as they are and your works are still as fun and beautiful as they come. While I have my frustrations I did enjoy my playthrough for the game and I still hope to see through the development of this game. I've been wanting to play something like Hyper Light Drifter for a while now and perhaps this game can finally scratch that itch of mine.
(also just a fyi for fun, I've completed Tarn, twwwr, rusted moss, Ecila, Eli. and was the creator of Ballet and Steel)