Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD58 → Feedback comment stats → Mathstr0fficial
Feedback comments for LD58
Mathstr0fficial's games and stats for all events →
| Timestamp | Since previous | Game | Mathstr0fficial's comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 7 16:21:50 | Trivia Hart in "The Case of the Porcelain Tricorn" | ♥ 2 | This was an impossibly impressive game from the amount of high-quality, polished art and sound you managed to include. I do think that the gameplay and overall scope suffered a touch from it, but given the amount of time it's still a quite impressive amount of content and didn't feel at all "cut short" in the way I worried it might. Great job :) https://youtu.be/juytfbK6gT0 | |
| Oct 7 20:25:14 | 4h 03m | Invasive Spectral Projectiles | ♥ 1 | This game is simultaneously brilliant and frustrating. Everything is polished super well, and the whole thing feels great to play, but it is so aggressively unapproachable at times that it makes it a little difficult to feel happy about beating. It sort of felt like I lucked into my final victory more than earning it. I have many more thoughts in my full playthrough linked below, but overall it was a fun time, just one that was maybe a little too much for me. https://youtu.be/cpJUvEtdSm0 |
| Oct 7 20:58:59 | 33m 45s | Hop, Skip, Jump | ♥ 2 | This is really impressive for the little time you had! The puzzles were definitely decently tricky, but never felt too frustrating or confusing. I'm frankly a little glad there were as few levels as there were just so I didn't get too stuck on something harder, but I also would have loved to play more. My full playthrough is linked below with more thoughts! https://youtu.be/cLx72o4DsAU |
| Oct 7 21:06:03 | 7m 04s | Gems of Kaine | ♥ 2 | So, I did record a video, but that one is not going to be posted for a variety of reasons I'm going to talk about here. I'll just do a proper written comment instead, because I do still have a lot of feelings about it. I do think the concept is interesting, and now understanding the rule I do think it's a cool rule to build a puzzle game around. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really play puzzle games because I'm bad at them, and as such never really got better at understanding their language. Even if I understood the rule from the start, I probably would not have finished the game, just because of the kinds of games I play. None of this is your fault at all, I am just not the target audience of something like this. That being said, the primary mechanic of this game is not the actual puzzles. It seems to be the meta-puzzle of figuring out the rule governing these puzzles. This is a really cool concept in theory, it sort of stems from something like The Witness where the rules are an additional layer of puzzles in and of themselves. I don't think anyone would argue that a game like that is necessarily unfair, and neither would I, but that's also a game I bounced off of extremely hard despite its objective good design. However, I feel like the language of the puzzles makes it very difficult to determine what the rules are. The constantly running timer, the intense music, and everything else aesthetically about this game is great, but it makes it feel very tense which made me try to rush through guessing at puzzles instead of actually trying to figure it out. By the time I slowed down and tried to solve the meta-puzzle, I was already decently frustrated and could no longer actually reason through the information with the logic required. If I had stuck with it for a little longer, I think I maybe could have gotten it, but then we get back to the root issue of me probably not being able to solve the actual puzzles even after this realization. I honestly don't know how you solve something like this, obviously there are people that this worked for, and making it easier would probably ruin their "aha" moments, or at least dull them. But then there's always the risk of it being overly frustrating for those who can't figure it out and by proxy can't experience the whole game. I wonder if some sort of hint system would help, like once per level it could show you a correct next step and then you could reason through why that's the correct option. It's not an easy solution, it's the kind of game that I think inherently risks alienating people, and maybe that's what the game needs to be to reach its target audience. All this being said, I'd just like to reiterate that this is pretty much exclusively a me problem. I'm impatient and bad at parsing the language of puzzle games, and this was going to require that from me no matter what. I do think the mechanics are very clever, and the whole aesthetic and narrative design is delightful. It's objectively a very interesting and intricately created game, it just didn't work for my abilities in its current state, and maybe that's okay. |