Demo is interesting but also very unpolished

[Mark10293]

Tried the demo for a bit. Breaking the fourth wall right off the bat was a gutsy move, but the protagonist has the personality to make it work in a somewhat funny manner. Evil conqueror who wants to break free from the dev restrictions and conquer the outside world.

The protagonist's attack moveset and block ability look flashy, but the animations are very rough and choppy. It led to awkward visuals when I had him do the attack combo while in the air, and there was a point where I would hold block, but the shield shell visual didn't even appear. It doesn't have the same kind of polish as Hollow Knight, with a carefully hand-drawn aesthetic and simple but elegant attack animations. A trite comparison to make, sure. But if a game has action combat like Hollow Knight and emulates some of the qualities of that well-loved title, I'm going to factor that in how I approach the newer game.

I know it's a trend to say that a game is ideally meant for console controllers, but let's be honest... this is Steam. You're going to have a lot of gamers from Steam Next Fest who expect to play new indie games with illustrated, fully mapped PC controls and the ability to view and remap keys if they wish. I'm not too keen on the game's future prospects partly because of this alone.

Also, I couldn't find a way to get past the warden that triggers an un-skippable dialouge conversation whenever you walk to the right. I walked left at first and found the cave (like how Hollow Knight rewards you for walking opposite of the obvious direction at the start), but it didn't lead anywhere other than the tiny sign. Perhaps there's something I missed, but the level geometry didn't nudge my attention towards a direction where the developers presumably wanted me to look towards. I say this as a gamer who once disliked the puzzles of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 and then recently went back to appreciate how the Valve developers cleverly put subtle cues in their level design to nudge the player's attention to where they wanted them to look.

In addition, the in-game menu UI needs work. A lot of work and polishing. Exiting from the game to the title menu results in text that is too large for the menu buttons, which was disappointing to see. A demo is a demo, but... really, guys? You could have put a little more effort into making an exit button that looks professional...

But despite this, I intend to follow the game to see if it improves in the future.

[disastergamesstudio]

Hello!

First of all we wanted to thank you for playing the demo and giving us feedback, it helps us a lot.

Regarding the PC controls it will be fixed in the final version of the game and for future Steam events we will take it into account.

The Warden thing is a bug that we have already fixed and the left path is just a wink or a joke, there is nothing, just keep going right.

We will take into account the rest of the issues to try to leave the best possible version we can do.

Thanks again and best regards from the developers and Morkull!