Alright, so I've played a couple of hours so far. The first thing I want to say is that I am extremely impressed. For a game just beginning its alpha, it shows a remarkable amount of quality work already in. This is going to be great, I can feel it! I haven't fully completed the demo yet, but I plan to do so soon. However, I have a list of impressions and feedback that I wrote out while playing, and I would like to share that here
Intro
The intro cutscene is clearly in its early stages, but it is functional. I found that the text scrolled by a little bit quicker, but it worked well enough. In terms of pure content, I found the base premise to be enough of a hook to keep me invested. It isn't anything magical or gripping (especially with no context of the world abroad), but I'm sure that is far from the current focus. As far as music goes, I really enjoyed it! It reminded me a lot of the wind waker music, which is a definite plus. More on music later.
Graphics
Right off the bat, the game looks pretty great. My computer is a piece of junk by modern standards, but I simply had to lower the AA, post-processing, and shadows to get to a playable fps. However, that stuff is pretty unimportant when compared to what really defines a game's graphics... the
art style. When first walking around the level, I was continuously reminded of the
Legend Of Grimrock games (especially the first one, due to the setting). This isn't exactly a surprise, given that
Grimrock was also made in the Unreal engine I don't know what I'm talking about. This is certainly not a negative in any way; given that
Grimrock did a somewhat similar type of game well, there's no negative correlation. The environments generally have enough variety in appearance to be distinct (that is also a function of level design, but more on that later). Enemies have a great vibe and atmosphere. I love the look of the slimes and wastelander-types. While not terrifying, they look extremely fantasy-esque and match the environmental style/graphics very well. The lightly-shimmering glow of magical objects just looks fantastic, really. Given that the game is really quite dark, it
clearly differentiates magic and non-magic items to the player in a consistent way. However, that brings me to another point and my personal biggest issue with the game (possibly a bug).
The game is just too
dark. Now, to preface this, it could 100% be an issue on my end. I have tried adjusting the brightness on my monitor, changing the settings, etc. No matter what I do, I just can't seem to make it bright enough. This is what I'm referring to:
https://imgur.com/a/V8vOXLv
Without a torch, certain areas are unplayable. This is by
no means a bad thing - it gives a lot of power and weight to both the torches and divine light spells. Because torches and magic are a scarce resource, it gives them even more weight. So often in games, these types of items are simply rendered useless due to a game being too lenient with its light. However, I found that the torches still didn't illuminate enough, and when they did, it was too centered on the player. In the center of a room, I would expect the sides to be further illuminated than they were. An easy (or maybe not so easy, because I do not understand coding at all) way to fix this would be to add a gamma slider. If that would break balance too much, perhaps making torches/divine light stronger would do. Just my 2 cents! This was my biggest annoyance, and it was
extremely minor compared to many alphas I have played, so hats off to you!
Segueing from that, I love the atmosphere generated so far. One benefit of the game being so dark is that the light sources give everything this super-realistic and dramatic lighting. It looks and feels like delving into an abandoned ruined fortress, which is what I assume to be the intention. The random enemies patrolling in the dark add to this tense nature as well. On top of that, there's the music to talk about.
Music and Sound
Normally it wouldn't make sense to group these together, but seeing as there isn't really a ton of music in the game, I feel that it's appropriate. The ambient atmospheric drones, as I mentioned earlier, compliment the atmosphere. It's that thin, whistling noise, or the sounds of your own/enemy footsteps that add to this. Often times, developers feel pressured to add music to the game because they might feel that silence is boring. Here, I would argue that it augments the game greatly. If I had some epic strings playing as soon as an enemy gets my attention, it would almost cheapen the experience for me and break my immersion. More variety might not hurt, but there wasn't really any points where I thought about it beyond the context of the atmosphere, so it looks good to me!
In terms of sound effects, I generally like these as well. Breaking pots feel really powerful due to the high presence of low-end frequencies in the sound effect (I don't know if that was intentional, but it works really well). Enemies groan, and they don't sound out of place, which is really all they need to due.
Voice acting in the few parts I heard it seemed well done (I can only recall the adventurer's spirit, but I could be wrong). No complaints there. Obviously, having the dwarf NPC be fully voice-acted would be cool, but that's entirely superfluous in the grand scheme of things. This is a game after all, and the gameplay here is king!
Gameplay
Ah yes, the meat and potatoes of this genre. Overall, I enjoyed the gameplay. It's hard, but not impossible. As
DJOGamer PT said, there are a few things I would change. You may be missing out on an opportunity by not making small objects interactable. I wrote on my sheet that I was a little sad I couldn't throw the fish, or pick up some of the hammers in the workshop. This is far from a big deal, and I have no idea how resource-intensive it would be to change that, but it was just something I noticed. Speaking of the fish, I was not enamored with how closely the items drop from your character. I would personally prefer it if the item just dropped a little further away from the player, or even better, allowing the player to place it. I recall the instance of cooking the fish; I felt like I had to almost stand directly on the fire in order to place it correctly. I could just be really awful at placing things, but that's just me.
As far as movement, I love leaning! It feels great in the game, especially with the bow. I'm extremely grateful that you added it in. Walking is a little slow at first, but investing in athletics, as mentioned above, can alleviate the problem pretty quickly. Echoing what zwanzig_zwoelf said, it just makes stats feel a little more important. Casual players will get used to it, especially because it gets easily remedied. It also leads to a more cautious playstyle more appropriate to the genre (in my opinion of course). Jumping feels a little bit janky due to lack of control while in the air, but that's really not that much of an issue, providing there's no real platforming to be had. If there is, I would just suggest making ledge grabbing a little more generous to account for it.
Combat is fun! Each encounter has (I feel like I'm repeating myself here) weight. Each attack from an enemy matters, because they hit pretty damn hard. Fortunately for us, the AI is not exactly a genius. Enemies can be fairly easily distracted, and archers won't try to hit you if you hide behind a pillar or wall. This might make for a balance issue in the future, but that's all fine-tuning. The bases are definitely there. I feel like investing your stats in swords or whatever weapon would help a lot with this, so it will likely get better as the game progresses. I'm going to once again echo DJO and say that the shield might need a bit of a rebalance. The stagger felt too long for me and became a bit of a turn-off. It felt like the enemy shield was a lot better than mine, so I just opted to not use one instead. It could just be me, of course. Every encounter I had was fun though. None of them felt like a slog, which I suppose is easier early on. If enemy variety keeps on changing, however, it will certainly be great.
In terms of stealth, it seems pretty good! I didn't play with it as much as I would have liked, but it seemed to work decently well. Shadows factor into hiding, which is always a major plus for me. Enemies can be distracted (although as I mentioned earlier, maybe a bit too much?). I managed to sneak around two of the guys pretty nicely, and it was satisfying. I wanted the chest they were guarding, so I threw a crate across the room. They went to investigate, looted the chest, and dipped. Felt good man. Not insanely unique or anything, but it worked as intuitively as it could, so it looks good to me.
Magic seems nice, but I didn't exactly experience a ton of it. I found the divine light spell and promptly used it once my torches had run out. Work intuitively, so no complaints here. I believe that each stat ties into one of the three types of magic available, as well as one for mana. I could be wrong, but more on that next.
Character Progression
Finally, a game where the levels mean something! As I said earlier, athletics is pretty much necessary early on. You move too slow without investing a point or two into it. Most of the points work exactly how you might expect, so no complaints there. Throughout the stats, it's clear that build variety will be common. It's pretty modular, so you can likely specialize pretty hard the further you progress in-game. Experience points come from enemies and from spirits (from what I can tell). Early on the exp-to-enemy ratio felt fair, so hopefully, that balance remains. I wish I could have experienced more of it, but it's shaping up pretty nicely. You lose some experience points on death, which I feel is a fair trade-off; similar to
Dark Souls in that regard. A lot of the progression reminds me of
Dark Souls actually... I guess that shouldn't be surprising, given that both
Dark Souls and
Monomyth originate from
King's Field.
Level Design
It's a tutorial level, so I was not expecting anything fancy. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find a large amount of interconnecting areas. You can see rooms that you might reach in the future, find a way to get there, loop back around and open a locked door you couldn't open before, etc. It's a small slice, but this would be great (but very, very hard) if applied on a macro scale. Most rooms have something of value. The ones that don't have much are kind of boring though. I usually at least like to find
something of note in each room, but I guess that's not really realistic, is it? Still, I'm not a huge fan of walking along a long corridor just to find some raw fish. This is insanely nitpicky, but I just figured I mentioned it (I only felt this maybe once or twice the whole time). From what I saw, you can reach every area that you can see, which is really satisfying when the player spots a weird ledge and wonders "I wonder what's up there?".
There's not really any illogical areas that I can think of. Claustrophobia inducing small corridors make combat intense, and the large rooms add good variety. I'm not much of an expert in level design (or any of this for that matter), but I liked what I saw. Branching looping pathways are pretty much always a plus in my books.
Some more torches along the levels would be nice too!
NPCs
I only encountered two, but I enjoyed what I had to see. They aren't particularly complicated, but have enough personality to keep the player engaged. They don't have a ton to say, but generally what they do say is of note. I'm sure that there will be a lot more NPC interaction as the game goes on, given that speech is an entire skill to invest in. So, good job here. Some voice acting would be nice, but it might be a little much to expect.
Conclusion
This alpha is really great. Barring some issues with the lighting, I really enjoyed this experience. I'm eager to continue on to the end and play through it again multiple times. Guys, get hyped. I think this is going to be very, very incline.
For such a small indie effort, this is really shaping up to be quite the achievement. I like what I see. Much love and respect to you Rat Tower!
to those who will support it in proper testing, but fuck me I'm jealous.
