1 Hour Demo Thoughts

[AesAthena]

I am a big typing game fan (TToTD, Epistory: Typing Chronicles, The Textorcist) and I like the horror genre, so I was THRILLED to discover this via the preview over on PCGamer.com.

I played at the hardest level (I type around 123WPM) and single player. I am not likely to ever play multiplayer. Oh! I'm on a Linux machine (running Mint Cinnamon) and after freezing a few worrying seconds after exiting the elevator, it ran fine. Even let me alt-tab out to look up what Safe Mode was.

Overall, I found it really engaging and wishlisted.

I thought typing words to move around was really fun! And the scenery and SOUND EFFECTS were appropriately moody.

I agree; an instant CLEAR WORD button (maybe semicolon?) is needed for the heat of battle.

I also agree: at the computers, having REAL SENTENCES makes sense, instead of this rando generated stuff. (The odd words navigating don't bother me as much, maybe because they help me remember where I've been.)

(The computers were super creepy when activated, though!)

I agree with whoever said they didn't see the point of barricades. At first I thought the planks were, like, a big wooden plank for melee--but why would I choose that over my faithful Lead Pipe (as seen in the SILENT HILL series)?

I thought the tape-inserter thing was interesting: I wanted to know more (only got to feed it one tape, though). Good intrigue there.

My character, a woman (the one with the firearms bonus) stomped around like a gorilla. Not my favorite animation. (Actually, I think all the player models are goofy looking, not in a good way, a little incongruent with the freaky nightmares I'm fighting.)

Using the shift keys was nice for turning, but I could see longterm it maybe leading to motion sickness? Some sort of auto-center camera behind character...either option or button could be nice. (I preferred the shift key turns over Epistory's weird switch-to-movement trick, but probably not as much as TEXTORCIST's switch-to-movement method)

I was very GROMPY at the limited amount of inventory space but that's also kind of the trope? But at one point I had ammo for weapons I'd never seen (bolts) and never found the weapon.

What is the NecroLexicon thing and why am I carrying it around??? What is it counting?

Sometimes I'd be at those goopy red towers and typing off their 5-6 spelling words while it was spewing those floaty mouth things at me, and there wasn't an easy way to switch targets that I could see. That didn't feel fair.

The floaty mouth things are freaky and I like them.

It'd be helpful in the Help section to note that, in combat mode, pressing Enter will make you go up to the baddie and attack.

Kinda sad it's proc-genned level layout--an authored campaign I think would make the environments feel truly memorable (think of the mansion in RE. It's iconic. But it doesn't become iconic if it's always just random rooms thrown together) and give y'all the opportunity to create some amazing setpieces.
That said, I generally don't like Roguelikes/Roguelites in platformers (I'm okay with SLAY THE SPIRE and BALATRO though). Maybe I just want an authored single-player campaign.

I'm torn on the / for commands. It's cool, but clunky. You don't have to do this in the Linux terminal, or even in Interactive Fiction (IF) (one of my other typing game loves). There are some IF commands I wanted to use but didn't ("get bullets" or "take bullets" feels more natural to me instead of "grab bullets". And x for "examine" is another common command abbreviation).

I liked the Jumping quicktime event though.

I enjoyed my time in the game and look forward to full release! I hope my comments are helpful, devs, I'm rooting for you!