VERY NICE! I'm pleasantly surprised. For version 0.2, this is really, really good.
The porn in the game's early state is lacking (not much of it, not repeatable, pretty tame since it's a beginning of a corruption journey, and you can easily miss like 75% of it), but everything else is put together very well. It has a very solid retro quest game feel, nostalgia 10/10, plus some modern memes. Good pixel art, both tile sets and bigger character sprites, good animations faithful to the style (not a huge amount of frames, but pixel art animation isn't supposed to be cinematically smooth).
Writing is pretty funny, pretty expressive, and can turn dark on a dime. The big plot is delivered quite well, without boring infodumps (it's unravel a conspiracy type of story).
Good level design. One of the minor pet peeves of mine is when a background NPC unloads a mini info-dump in one line over and over and nothing else, becoming basically a walking sign post. So, here, a lot of NPCs don't do that, and will instead engage in a mini-conversation with you if you pester them repeatedly. Neat! Also, elves are casually called knife-ears, neat! (even though on the balance I kinda like those jerks)
The downsides, so far.
Characters' facial expressions (and body language) could use more variations. Come on, devs, it's one of the most repeatedly used assets of the game, it's a good investment.
Writing is full of banter, but there isn't going to be a lot of half tones, it seems. If someone is a scumbag, he is a sleazy scumbag through and through, and if some goblin hits them with a golf club in the face, he fully deserves it, if you know what I mean. But again, this lack of shades of gray fits the visual style. Very limited, high contrast palette both visually and narratively.
Levels aren't fully polished: some tiles that should be traversable aren't, and some that shouldn't are, and some map boundaries could be walled off better. It's not gamebreaking or anything, but there never can be too much polish. We'll see if it gets tidied up later on.
Very rough quest log. It's not going to be as much of a problem on final release if the game won't branch heavily, but before that... May god have mercy on your soul if you return to an old save after a couple of updates. I would be totally stuck trying to remember where I left off, and quest log as it stands would be of absolutely no help.
But overall, it was already a surprisingly enjoyable experience.
The porn in the game's early state is lacking (not much of it, not repeatable, pretty tame since it's a beginning of a corruption journey, and you can easily miss like 75% of it), but everything else is put together very well. It has a very solid retro quest game feel, nostalgia 10/10, plus some modern memes. Good pixel art, both tile sets and bigger character sprites, good animations faithful to the style (not a huge amount of frames, but pixel art animation isn't supposed to be cinematically smooth).
Writing is pretty funny, pretty expressive, and can turn dark on a dime. The big plot is delivered quite well, without boring infodumps (it's unravel a conspiracy type of story).
Good level design. One of the minor pet peeves of mine is when a background NPC unloads a mini info-dump in one line over and over and nothing else, becoming basically a walking sign post. So, here, a lot of NPCs don't do that, and will instead engage in a mini-conversation with you if you pester them repeatedly. Neat! Also, elves are casually called knife-ears, neat! (even though on the balance I kinda like those jerks)
The downsides, so far.
Characters' facial expressions (and body language) could use more variations. Come on, devs, it's one of the most repeatedly used assets of the game, it's a good investment.
Writing is full of banter, but there isn't going to be a lot of half tones, it seems. If someone is a scumbag, he is a sleazy scumbag through and through, and if some goblin hits them with a golf club in the face, he fully deserves it, if you know what I mean. But again, this lack of shades of gray fits the visual style. Very limited, high contrast palette both visually and narratively.
Levels aren't fully polished: some tiles that should be traversable aren't, and some that shouldn't are, and some map boundaries could be walled off better. It's not gamebreaking or anything, but there never can be too much polish. We'll see if it gets tidied up later on.
Very rough quest log. It's not going to be as much of a problem on final release if the game won't branch heavily, but before that... May god have mercy on your soul if you return to an old save after a couple of updates. I would be totally stuck trying to remember where I left off, and quest log as it stands would be of absolutely no help.
But overall, it was already a surprisingly enjoyable experience.