Some demo feedback

[Cahalith]

First of all: I REALLY enjoyed the demo. I like the combination of Zeno Clash style melee fighting and slightly open-world level design with Dark Souls vibes and I'm loving the relationship between Pseudo and the boy in particular. Not to mention my delight at returning to Zenozoik again after all these years. The Eternal Cylinder was one of my favourite games last year and it looks like this one might become one of my favourites next year.

That said, here are a some very minor bugs or areas for improvement (?) I've noticed in my playthrough:

- When upgrading my attributes or using figurines to upgrade my fighting styles, I wish there was an "undo" button (or an "apply" button) to prevent the player from accidentally assigning points to the wrong attribute/style. I'm not saying we should be able to re-distribute all points at any time, I'm just saying I misclicked on a fighting style once, and these figurines are a limited ressource that I'd rather not waste.

- In my time with the demo, I've explored everywhere and fought every enemy, but I haven't been able to beat a single opponent in the ritual. Maybe I'm just terrible at it, but I feel like the enemies in the demo all have way more dice than me as well as very powerful items for destroying my dice. So I ended up with the impression that I'm always gonna be better off not even bothering with doing the ritual. I guess this will take a lot of balancing for the full game and I hope you take your time with this. Also, if the player will eventually be able to improve their ritual ability (given that there's a dice counter, I'm guessing that's a planned feature), maybe it would make sense to have an indicator of how difficult the ritual will be before you engage enemies? That way, you could hold off on fighting certain enemies, trying to find ways to increase your odds against them.

- I've found 4 pieces of clothing for Pseudo's night form and I bought some clothes for the boy, but I haven't found out how to equip them yet. So either I'm completely failing to understand how to use the clothing menu or this system hasn't been fully implemented yet?

- The same goes for feeding the boy.

- On some (admittedly rare) occasions, I've fallen down an instant death drop while exploring because I didn't understand that the ground I wanted to reach wasn't supposed to be reachable. For example, there's a point in the castle where there's a pagoda-like bit of roof to your right, at the same height as the stone floor you've been walking on. So I assumed I could walk on that bit of roof, but I slid off and died. Perhaps you could turn the instant death drops into "you take damage but you'll be put back without dying" drops?

- After leaving the game and starting it up again, the "Animate Lines" rendering style option in my game seems to reset. Or rather, it still shows that it's set to "yes", but the lines aren't moving. Turning it off and on again makes it work, though.

[[ACE] abordeu]

Hi there! Thanks for the feedback. Really impressed you managed to acquire so many items in your playthrough. I'll briefly touch on some of your comments, but this is all valuable feedback that we can iterate on:

-Ritual being too hard: Wow, seems like you had a lot of bad luck with the rolls, but maybe it is too difficult and we should start off with a setup that is less punishing. I think we definitely have a difficulty spike where enemies that have more dice are nearly impossible (like when you try to challenge the guy with the giant animal at the end of the demo (we call him 'Beastmaster' internally, can't remember the real name haha ))

-Garments: Did you enter the clothing tab in the menu and press on the garments for Pseudo? If that's not working we have a bug. The boy outfits are supposed to automatically equip when the boy encounters environmental hazards (which are not present in the demo), but that's not very easy to understand. We have to improve this system.

-Feeding the boy serves no purpose in the demo. We decided to scrap this feature just before releasing the demo because it was obnoxoius, and the interface remained, oops. We're looking to redesign it.

-Animated lines: That's a bug. Thanks for catching that. I'll report to my UI guy.

[Cahalith]

Like I said, I really enjoyed the demo, so I hope it doesn't come across as nagging, especially since none of these things are major problems or anything.

Regarding the ritual: Maybe I'm in the minority here, so probably best to wait for additional input from other players to figure out if it's indeed too hard or if I was just particularly unlucky.

Some more context for the clothes thing: I found 4 pieces of clothing while exploring at night. When I picked them up, they would show up on the character model, but they would disappear again from the model once I switched to daytime and back to nighttime. They're still in my inventory, but I can't interact with them via clicking/double clicking or pressing "Enter" (dragging them with the mouse or using 'z' to move them does work, though). Interestingly, the prompt at the bottom of the screen says "(Enter) Equipped". Maybe the game thinks I still have these pieces of clothing equipped, so I can't equip them 'again'? When I find the time, I'm gonna go grind ressources and buy some daytime clothes for Pseudo to check if I can equip those.

[Cahalith]

Ok, I bought some daytime clothes and I can equip those normally. So it seems it's just the nighttime clothes I can't interact with.

[[ACE] abordeu]

Yikes! So you've basically found a bunch of bugs in our clothing/armor system. More stuff to fix. Hooray :'-)

Thanks for the valuable feedback!

[SonkitA]

[An "undo" button (or an "apply" button) to prevent the player from accidentally assigning points to the wrong attribute/style.]
True!
Garments... I saw it on the night Pseudo when I picked it up. But the other night it didn't show up. In the clothing tab, when clicked, the "wear" icon on the item disappeared and then did'nt appear when clicked again, the clothes are not put on.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

I was pretty good at the ritual. The thing is it could be always just bad luck or you're still not 100% accustomed how to utilize the tchaks in the most optimal way.
I think it could be helpful if there would be some kind of sparring partner where you can practice the ritual with (but it doesn't consume artifacts) i'm just not sure if it would "clash" (badum-ts) with the lore, the ritual being something special that isn't just used for fun.

But I would refrain from making the ritual against enemies too easy since losing alone doesn't mean it's the end, while being lucky means that you can utilize huge advantages it would be boring if it's always almost guaranteed that you can win and steadily gain the advantage in combat.

[Kastoris]

I really liked the demo and would reiterate what OP was saying, as I fell off in Gemini's Castle at the same location - https://imgur.com/4JNLMJw
Overall falling off of cliffs and the sometimes confusing level design were my major gripes with the game. Other than that, you guys are doing something really ambitious and quite complex, and I commend you for it. Stay strong!