ninebears 2015-08-24 21:47
Impressive game for a weekend jam, it may be a bit too dark as it was often difficult to tell what I could interact with. Overall a solid entry.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD33 → Unwelcome Presence
By hemuuuli
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mood | 24 | 4.29 | ||
| Coolness | 3 | 63 | ||
| Graphics | 66 | 4.42 | ||
| Audio | 106 | 3.75 | ||
| Overall | 165 | 3.69 | ||
| Fun | 402 | 3.23 | ||
| Innovation | 632 | 2.87 | ||
| Humor | 817 | 2.21 | ||
| Theme | 830 | 3.00 |
Impressive game for a weekend jam, it may be a bit too dark as it was often difficult to tell what I could interact with. Overall a solid entry.
Wow this looks amazing, Reminds me of dark souls, hard like dark souls as well XD
Really nice game! I love graphism :)
Great work. Definitely has a Dark Souls vibes, and maybe a bit of Ico as well. And those a pretty impressive comparisons.
Only complaint is the combat is a bit clunky, to the extent that I often couldn't tell if I was hitting or not. Other than that, fantastic.
For a game made in such a small period of time this entry is just breathtaking. The amount of detail in the presentation that was achieved is incredible. The graphics are very well done and the black and white work so well to create a beautiful game. The ambiant music and sounds really add to the creepy atmosphere this game has. The gameplay is also fun with controls and mechanics you'd expect from a AAA title, not a LD entry. They are obviously not as polished as everything feels a little clunky but they're still impressive. Overall, an impressive and good entry!
Looks good and atmospheric. Could really use some footsteps and the player character felt a bit floaty. Also difficult to grasp when you landed a hit on an enemy.
Reminded me a ton of the Dark Souls Limbo mod. Pretty fun but a little repetitive.
It looks amazing. The only negative would be the slightly jagged animation while running up the stairs, and the attacking was a bit hard to master. The graphics are breathtaking, I would love to see this fleshed out! :)
Really good work! Played through it all and enjoyed the exploration and puzzle elements. Nice mood in it, I got startled a number of times from enemies bumping in to me around a corner while dodging my way forward to keep going faster.
The combat felt a bit rough and I ended up just ignoring all enemies instead of trying to fight them since that proved more useful. Not sure if it was intended.
And finally: Controls/graphics will be one paragraph. Because I think I nailed down the reason to why people feel hard to navigate and relate their character. The fog becomes like a static layer of blockiness which is always fixed to the player. I realize this is because of the limited number of colors combined with how the fog is calculated. I think it can be solved by some combination of:
A. making the gradient not totally greyscale but slightly towards a color, perhaps rgb(200,210,220) or so to make the blockiness more unevenly distributed.
B. Make the fog start a bit further away from the player to at least give a small zone of reference to the environment.
C. Try enabling HDR in your graphics settings if you haven't which will double the number of bits per color in the internal shaders. It might help, assuming that the fog shader actually makes use of it.
Overall, really well done for this short time, and I hope to see more from you in the future jams. Good scores for you, and greetings from Sweden!
Awesome entry! Reminds me of that Dark Souls "Limbo Mod", hehe.
the colours are quite dark, sometimes the nice details are impossible to see because of it. But it does add to the mood of the game.
Very impressive, combat was a bit unforgiving though, i felt like
It is badly ballanced. Cant hit the damn thing from half a meter and it can hit faster than I can dodge. Upon death it still stays at your spawn...
Although the graphics and atmosphere are good, I didnt enjoy it much because of frustration.
Cool moody graphic style, can't really tell if YOU are the MONSTER though. Plays great, love the monster designs.
I can see where you took you inspiration :)
The game was excellent, super well designed and with a superb visual style. Only thing that I found really annoying is that the stamina bar could be anything but back. i didn't even notice I had the bar cause it blended with the background.
But aside from this, I loved it. It is impressive to think you did this in a weekend.
Impressive for a jam! Still, more limited scope with better polish would have made a better game, in my opinion.
Ok... That's impressive. Great game, truly impressed. IMO it lacks some feedbacks when hitting the monster. Not necessary specific animation, but some blood or sound should have been enough... Well done guys. Darks souls mood !
Cool level, I loved the character animations! I'm getting destroyed by the dogs so maybe decrease their damage a bit.
Great atmosphere
A little too dark, but I loved everything else. :)
I particularly liked the level design, you seem to have embraced the Souls thinking of see where you can get to later, and open shortcuts etc, atleast it felt that way.
Nice soulslike game! Very similar to playing dark souls with the black and white mod. The level kinda reminds me of the tower part in demons souls though!
Well done I love those kind of games! I will try it later with my rift!
Dark Souls! I'm sorry, I'm going to make a lot of souls comparisons. It reminds me of why I like the souls series. It's not necessarily because it's hard, that's a part of it, but they're really atmospheric... and encounters can be tense. This definitely has that, though it's fairly rough in some aspects.
The visuals were definitely interesting, and I'm sure the grayscale aspect helped to keep the artist(s) sane. I do think it could be tweaked a bit so that certain areas are less muddled and give the feeling that you can't quite see what you're doing. It's not terribly common, and through most of the game it works well, but visual confusion can happen especially in tight spaces. Animations were also very nicely done for the most part.
One aspect of the controls that I didn't like was the sprinting. If you started sprinting and tried to go at an angle you start sidestepping and it's very clunky feeling. It works better if you run and use the camera to point your character in the direction you want to go, but it's awkward since sprinting is the 'a' button with a pad. Aside from that the controls work fairly well.
Combat is nice, it's not perfect and has rough edges for sure, but it does also capture the souls feel, at least in the strategy and mental aspect. Study enemy patterns, figure out holes in their defenses, and exploit them. I like that process and you've got it. I loved it when you introduced the first two-on one fight, and I was inclined to slowly back up down the hallway and lead them into the open area. Then I proceeded to divide and conquer. Some interesting level design and enemy placement there.
The combat did kind of feel... disconnected though. It was sometimes difficult to judge the attack range and actually hitting the enemies felt a bit hollow. There's very little feedback there aside from the audio cues you get.
I tried a bit of everything, I actually ended up using the crossbow a lot even though it was a tad awkward. I found out it was three shots to kill so that kind of ended up being my go to method for dispatching enemies since I could get a better idea of the health they had left.
Oh, the audio work was nice too. Specifically the rattling sounds the monsters make... gah, reminded me so much of a souls game.
Umm... the only other thing that comes to mind for me was that it took me a while to figure out that I could consume enemies in order to gain health. I think maybe that could have been hinted at better. Perhaps some sort of glowing "loot drop" effect to indicate there's something to collect.
Overall, fantastic job. It's not perfect and there are a lot of aspects that could be improved but for the scope and the timeline it's seriously ambitious and impressive.
Phenomenally atmospheric—loved the art, especially the strange silhouettes. Couldn’t really tell when I was hitting anything, though, which made timing attacks pretty frustrating. Wish I had a Rift to try it out with, this seems like it’d be wonderfully creepy in VR.
Infinite thanks to everyone! I'm glad to see so much constructive criticism. Its joy to read these comments.
I will be updating the game a little bit after jam and release it for Oculus Share (no worries, you can still play it without vr). Combat clarity and darkness of the environment have been the biggest issues so those will be smoothed out at least. Special thanks to Robinerd for pointing out gamma/linear color space issues with the fog and hoqjed for MASSIVE post! <3
Really fun and looked great especially for a jam entry!
Fantastic game! I love love love the darkness. adds to the mystery and mood. Great controls, excellent combat, decent AI, great atmosphere and levels... this is truly exceptional.
Not the most original game in this jam, but environment, graphic style, sfx, leveldesign and gameplay are very very good ^^
You made a good playable game in few time. good job!
The movement was pretty clunky, the character doesn't stop when I let go of the button and so it was very hard to move around.
With combat, I can see where you were getting your inspiration from, but killing even one creature required far too much effort so I just sprinted past all of them after the second one.
Other than that, very intriguing, certainly. Especially I loved the audio.
Wow, that was just breathtakingly atmospheric! The amazing visuals and soundscape create an unparalleled mood. When an enemy I hadn't noticed before suddenly ran towards me it really sent shivers down my spine. The gameplay itself is also very solid, but it sometimes felt like I should've hit an enemy but didn't. That's just a minor complaint though, overall this is really great and impressive.
"Graphics quality: dark," you weren't kidding. Nice Souls-like, though the controls are a bit clunky right now. I feel like left-right movement should be simply the character moving in that direction at their normal pace rather than the slower side-stepping it's doing now. Also, in my case the camera kept annoyingly drifting to the left. That may be my controller's fault, but it doesn't do that in other games. The link to the theme seems a bit unclear as well... I mean, the character *could* be a monster, sure, but we don't really know what he or she is either way.
That said, very ambitious idea, and impressively realized in such a short time.
Psst - You are featured in today's Ludum Dare to Believe! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL_22puDtCQ
Really interesting game, though I sort of sucked at it. I included it in part 21 of my Ludum Dare 33 Compilation video series, if you would like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/sSjPmVXpfX4