Feedback from 97% completion (warning: very long. like +3000 words long)

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title. i wanted to hold off on writing this whole thing until i hit 100% on the save file, but i uh, need a break and wanted to get started while the ideas were still warm. linking imgurs of "proof" i'm a massive loser: https://i.imgur.com/OoaTZeq.png https://i.imgur.com/OXqFtRn.png for any curious minds, the only things i have left to finish are buying out the remnants of the various shops

this is going to be somewhat unorganized, quite stream-of-consciousness style of things i thought of while playing quite a bit in a short amount of time. spoilers ahead, feel that worth bringing up. also this is going to be cut up in parts because +3100 words is too much for a single post apparently

first up is stuff about the meta-story-and-adjacent. it's fantastic, i think the way the team handled the presentation of a lot of the concepts were well done from a variety of different angles, considering the different personalities our leading lass meets. felt like "real" people - people who were strangely supportive, but we'll chalk that up to personal deflection. but one thing that did strike me as weird were the idle dialogue boxes after gifting and exhausting an NPC for the day; Fernando commenting "I'll see you in the office" or something to that effect but.. both Fernando and Cass have acknowledged she got fired. this happens to a few NPCs, but Fernando's was especially jarring to see considering his position. not a big deal in the grand scheme, but it does "ruin muh immurshun" when characters selectively forget about the progression of time/relationship milestones

related to see previous section, i think the meta-progression of Cass, oddly enough, treads on the story's toes a little bit. or maybe its just a personal choice of the player (me) that messed it up for myself. let me explain: i felt myself experiencing a sort of narrative whiplash because i initially rushed Bruce's friendship because im a filthy minmaxer and thought a generic damage boost would help me "farm" the rest of the bonds. but i think the intention from the team might've been to take turns or work on bonds more or less equally; imagine my surprise when my Cass's personal development goes from new girl to sad girl to doing-better-girl with Bruce only to go straight back to new/sad girl with, say, Tamal. also, where is my "pause conversation" button? its a relatively minor thing, but yeah, it'd be nice.

now with that doomsaying i do have a bit of a potential remedy, albeit kind of jank: i would increase the rate at which random event conversations pop up with NPCs and the value of "friend points" they provide during the lower levels of friendship and to balance it out, reduce the the "FP" provided for conversations at the higher end. this is for a few reasons: one of the biggest determining factors, from a player-mechanical perspective i think, to choosing your first few people to "focus" is whose interests you uncover the fastest. i latched onto Bruce because he just decided to reveal his interests to me faster than other universally "good" bonds like Eve or Alison. in addition, making it easier for the player to "passively" get a mostly-even spread of friendship levels so that the individual relationship narratives aren't so varied. making the initial climb(s) a bit quicker and approaching the climax(es) a little slower. i mean, this is under the assumption we're to believe all of Cass's relationships arent in a bubble and they all progress in some form of universal timeline anyway. point being: trying to avoid narrative whiplash from talking to Bruce's Lv8 milestone and then speaking to Rose at Lv4 in the same "day" when one is "Yeah I'm getting better" versus "Dark days are upon us and there is no escape"

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next section on the chopping block: progression. bear with me boys and girls, we'll get through this together. ive already spoken thoughts about it, so i'll keep it short: i echo the sentiment of a lot of other players, it feels painstakingly slow. i also have seen a Dev response that the "Hades-style of drip-progression" (along those lines) was very positively received - which i agree with, though maybe not for the same reasons. Hades' meta worked, i think, better in its own game because of the amount of player agency you had. did you pursue a Darkness room over a boon or intentionally push Heat to nab more Diamonds and such? we don't really have that sense of control in Dreamscaper i feel; perhaps you've noticed my runs are at 70 and runs won at about 10; at some point i intentionally began to toss runs out the window because it simply took too long to navigate high Intensity levels versus the rate at which i got the sweet sweet meta currency

which i think, again, is pointing towards the HOW we get meta-currency: random drops. no player agency outside of investing sand (random upon random) or bombs (more random on random. hope you get rocks and hope they're nice). again, im only being this nitpicky-scroogy because i want to work along the lines of what a Dev said; it works in Hades because there are no surprises of how and when you get that meta currency, and furthermore there's usually some guaranteed expectation of some amount of it. player agency! Dreamscaper you're subjected to rng upon rng, which while you could argue "thats just a roguelite game though lol" to which i would say, "but that feels like an excuse to retain an element of unfun". to offer a paltry remedy: increase the baseline drops for killing bosses, consider adjusting elsewhere to compensate. that's it. it doesnt feel very good when, in my 70-and-counting runs, that it FEELS (emphasis on feels, not necessarily reality) like too much of my meta came from random bomb drops than actually progressing far in my runs and killing bosses. also, as a fringe nitpick, it felt like especially at high-Intensity runs, i was getting much more Inspiration than the others. maybe I only noticed it because I was nearing the end of all my relationship levels and simply didnt need it as much, but worth mentioning i suppose

last stretch friends: balance. hot takes inbound. before that though i'd just like to say one of the absolute greatest things about Dreamscaper is the fact that the team listened to EA feedback and allowed for toggleable unlocks. holy moly is this feature an absolute godsend. that being said...

overall, id say balance is actually quite excellent, and though i realize this might come across as a backhanded compliment, i think that's due to just how simple and relatively non-complex the game is. figure out the element combos and that's about as deep the pool goes. once again, this isnt a bad thing. i wouldnt call Hades a particularly nuanced and complex game mechanically speaking either, but that didnt stop you, me, and all our collective mothers raving about how good that game is.

but there are flaws. im sure the team is at least somewhat aware of this, but the toggleable unlocks means that all the stuff the player deems "bad" and is not part of the toggleable menu feel that much worse; i personally as a filthy, biased minmaxer tryhard have far more unlocks toggled off than on (i have 22 toggled on of the 56 available, for reference). i fully understand that it's a necessity to always have "undesirable drops" in any rng-centric game to make the better stuff feel BETTER, but in respect to Dreamscaper that gets a little flipped on its head with the toggle menu. from my uneducated, non-developer, non-stats-having perspective, it might do to brainstorm what more the team could do with the feature. go even more nuts and allow to block even more items? adding biases to certain drops? who knows; i think there's room to experiment once the player has gotten through the bulk of the (phenomenal) story and is just playing to play - i think having a nice legendary-tier starting loadout item but being unable to take it through more than the 3rd level is a bit of a lost opportunity due to lack of, say, reforge rooms or what-have-you.

to avoid getting even longer, i'll rapid-fire what i deemed to be the most "bad" or "too-niche-to-be-ever-realistically-considered-outside-of-fun-for-fun's-sake" items:
melee: masher. melee weapons are really good across the board and what i'd consider to be generally "viable". ups for that
ranged: boostie fuego, snowball. suffers from the too-niche thing
shoes: lightspeed, acrobatic shoes, feather-foot flip. common theme: they're really slow with long recovery times. the latter two just feel like rather inferior versions of roll or weave, the former feels like the edgier yet impotent version(s) of shadowstep, astral hop, or burning step
shield: they either have parry window or don't. not a big deal
lucid attacks: coldsnap, terracade**, release, upheaval, ground surge, rain of blades, breaking, spirit board, cyclone, maelstrom.
**special mark of shame: it breaks enemy AI sometimes in not a fun way, resulting in occasional "indie-jankness" like an enemy's attack getting through the wall or completely shutting down their AI altogether. rare, but it did happen sometimes. i apologize deeply for whatever dev decides to investigate this on a whim and finds it frustrating to replicate, because i sure got frustrated too.

enemies: big heavy sword-dragging, literally nightmare-fuel (because they're in Cass's - nevermind). the tracking on some of their attacks feels outright unfair, doing near or literal 180s. to a similar but not nearly as extreme what i would call the Johnny Bravo enemies. all shoulders no legs, advanced GPS systems in their knuckles. some map layouts with an absolute deluge of ranged enemies... it reminds me of how in the age of "soulslike" games getting quite popular, many games are hard for the sake of being hard, not challenging. fine line there, and i think some map layouts, regardless of Intensity, reflect that. i saw another feedback post of how a certain enemy layout has 4, uh, demonic casters? in a rectangular room and how their "tractor beam" enemy could stunlock you to death. that's not challenging, that's unfair pretending masquerading as being hard. and a few layouts in the Nightmare Hometown briefly turning Dreamscaper into a bullet hell game is amusing for the wrong reasons occasionally

let me clarify a few things from the above: i think the big scary greatsword men are fantastic additions to the Nightmare Intensity setting, they're new and unique encounters that set them apart from the rest of the monster roster (and outside of the nutty attack tracking feel very fair, except for perhaps 2 that decide to spin-to-win simultaneously and spamming Weave isnt fast enough to get out of literal dodge). but stacking a bunch of sphere turrets or spear throwers across red pits is less engaging and more annoying, feels as though its alienating a melee-centric playstyle because, again, it FEELS like the game is telling you to kick rocks if you haven't got the right ranged weapon or lucids to deal with them at that time. which, fair enough, if the game is trying to push you to having a more "rounded" set of stuff, just at the cost of player agency

oh and Loss's "Ranged" phase is extremely unfun and might i say unfair when he's hanging at the literal bottom of the screen where you cannot actually see him, but only track where he is based on where the attacks are coming from. an unnecessary layer of RNG hoping he doesn't decide to set up camp at the bottom of the screen outside of the camera's vision

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which brings me to Cass and the bonds; i think these are actually the weakest part of the game overall. and a damn shame too, i think this weakness bleeds into the rest of the game in albeit somewhat unexpected ways. to sum it up before going in depth; Bruce, Allison, and Eve are either too strong for their own good, or the rest are too weak. this is under the basis that they are all maxed out, for the record. i feel like there's so much potential damage to address here, in terms of meta-balance that cascades into how the player approaches the story.

let me preface the deep dive with the following: im not going to pretend to know if the Influences are supposed to be the difference between "build defining" or "neat little passive perks", but the following section is from the lenses of you want to allow the player to specialize in a niche or two; e.g. a "Mage" playstyle with Allison, and judging from my own experience this expectation seems to match with practicality

Allison&Eve: lucid/ranged attacks are extremely powerful, anything to give them the extra uptime or oomph even more so. the opportunity cost of not using Allison/Eve in a late-game run or whatever compared to niche conditionals like Tamal or Carl when the modifiers are the exact same if not worse (16% damage for [category] versus sometimes 16% across between ranged, melee, and lucid in a game built around RNG, need i say more?) not to say i think they deserve nerfs, because nerfs in a narrative PvE game are kind of lame, it just feels like the choice between Allison/Eve and the rest of them are pretty illusory. going into a run and thinking "I'm gonna build for a sick Tamal run!" is hard when you can't normally take your starting loadout items very far and you're banking on finding a matching synergy to carry you to justify swapping influences mid-run

even then, the numbers don't really justify their place i think. Tamal and Carl suffer so much from this because of their conditional effects; i think bumping up their baseline numbers would help or to add more enticing bonuses like, i don't know, extra Extinguish damage to really "oomph" up their elemental-centric themes. because boy oh boy would you rarely feel an extra 20% burn duration or +2 shock chains. mark of shame to shock chains, they may as well not even exist outside of eating up an Extinguish proc im trying to set up. which is a long-winded way of saying Tamal and Carl feel extremely lackluster compared to the standout "damage" influences of Eve and Allison who just work all the time and give you a fat Lucid bonus on top of it all because they simply don't excel anywhere. again, consider perhaps Extinguish bonuses or adding more element-specific stuff. Burn duration? why not oil too? off-balanced for Carl or longer Slow effect? stuff like that to set them apart.

as for the Defensive end, i don't know why Rose exists. straight up, i don't. one of my favorite characters from a narrative standpoint is arguably the least useful. run speed doesn't mean much because the differences between all the various levels of shoes with her whopping 16% run speed really dont mean much and red pits imply you're messing up to take advantage of its effect. it's one thing like, say, the Crystal Barrier to nullify a single mistake every ~15 seconds, its another to have a passive which sole purpose is to blunt the blow of a specific mistake that realistically won't hurt you for more than a tick or two at a time. shame really, there's a lot thematically you could do with "Rose's Wit" and the description "Improves Speed". dodge invuln frames (callback to the meditation shop here), even more attack speed, projectile speed, (steps on Eve's toes i know, but speed is speed and if someone says no, you guys literally made the game), trap resistance, DoT durations, there's a bunch of ideas just waiting to be nicked from the meditation shop that work thematically.

Fernando is in a weird place. he's either absolutely busted or absolutely useless. the way Armor scales is odd, you can go from suddenly getting chipped to becoming an immortal warlord from picking up a shield one tier higher than the zone, slap on Fernando, and facetank everything barring burns and poisons. but a paltry 5% health when a very common affix for items is %HP? feels kind of bad, and the parry window isnt much to write home about either. as far a suggestions go, I feel like Fernando's Influence could go a long way with just giving him more stuff that help with the whole Defenses bit; 1% native leech or lower Lucid consumption on (cough failed parries) blocks, i refer again to Rose's section and urge inspiration seeking from the meditation shop. 16% for a lategame shield that gives 100 armor is huge, 16% for a midgame shield that gives 46 armor is... not. "silly user, that's why you switch influences during your run" to which i have to say, i think artificially pigeonholing your own design into "just use this when you get a decent shield 4, 5, 6 levels into a run and nary elsewhere" is lost opportunity. sorry if that comes off as particularly harsh, i promise i mean well

to tie it back to what i mentioned earlier: i think it hurts the meta-narrative because from a monke-brain perspective, players might want to focus on Influences that best help the actual gameplay. like i did; focused Bruce because he was generic-good-buff-man-yes and his (excellent) story came as a bonus. i think of all the characters, Bruce, Tamal, Allison, and Eve in no particular order were my absolute favorite people, but two of the aforementioned were "late to the party" simply because their Influence stats sucked. i hope that makes sense; the idea that a gameplay mechanic ended up negatively influencing the meta-narrative

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i don't know where else to shoehorn this in, so here it is: minesweeper feels like a weird addition; the reward is sitting there taunting you while you meticulously (or don't) try and solve the puzzle while time has slowed to a crawl compared to the rest of the pacing of the level. which is my way of trying to be cute to say: minesweeper puzzles come out of left freakin' field and dont feel like they integrate into the game well because its so DIFFERENT from how the rest of it plays. the line puzzles are rather quick and easy to solve and the combat itself is also quick, moving room to room is smooth until you're slapped with the 'ol minesweeper - but im also willing to accept this is just my subjective experience and being dumb with minesweeper. as an aside, i somehow found the high-difficulty minesweeper puzzles to be much easier than the low-difficulty ones, so uh, take what you will from this bit

final critique section, thank god for that. parrying. very short and sweet: i don't think parrying feels rewarding enough for the risk taken. and for the long version: i understand the risk:reward isn't necessarily the point when parrying's primary appeal to many people, including myself, is to swag out on some dumdum AI bots, but it just kind of sucks when the reward as offered by the game's system is a window of opportunity that is shorter or equivalent to dodging an attack on the majority of enemies and bosses. say dodging an attack to trigger a "near dodge" is enough to get a full normal perfect-attack combo with a Katana even after having to compensate the distance from dodging with, say, Burning Step. versus getting a parry on the same enemy, say, a Johnny Bravo, and only having enough time to do the same normal perfect-attack combo with much more risk involved. now apply that to bosses and it's not particularly encouraging to 'parry all the things' when the reward is relatively moot. solution pulled from the depths: additional damage dealt during that window of opportunity. easy enough and specific to parrying enough to encourage it as a viable option

not going to pretend i have any amount of anyone's attention this far down, but for any Dev eyes that stuck it out: thanks. i adore this game and it really struck a chord for reasons im sure you could imagine considering the game's narrative beats. i tried to reign in how critical i came across, but i hope my belief in the team and the game wasnt missed either. the game's story is stellar and is enough to stand alone to push the player to completion, and the gamePLAY is just oh so close to hitting that sweet spot of "im going to keep playing this after the story is done". thoroughly enjoyed it all and i strongly believe the ceiling of potential hasn't been cracked quite yet. i hope at least a bit of my feedback will be of use to the dev team, if only to spark some brain juice. alternatively, "shut up, nerd, its our game" and that's acceptable too

[Nicodemous52]

Oh, well, I rewarded you for the first novel, I'll read the rest later.