I am playing the newest version posted this morning and I have some bugs to report, and some thoughts. I am very big on deckbuilder roguelikes, so I would love to see this game succeed. That means I am going to write a lot.
Let me start with the bugs. There are just two, but one is very big (to me):
- I play on a laptop with a smaller screen, and I believe you have set a minimum width for the sidebar with the player portrait and stats on the left; as a result, it cuts off the text, and the newest version of the game does not allow me to collapse this sidebar, which meant my game was more or less softlocked once I hit the cultist enemy in the first act that had a text prompt that I could not click, since it was completely obscured behind the sidebar. Here’s a limited snapshot of what I had to deal with every time text came up:
What is behind the picture of the heroine? I have no idea, and I will never know in this current version of the game. Like I said, I think this is due to the sidebar not dynamically scaling its width in response to the window size, since resizing my window did not change the width of the sidebar. Even just adding an option to change the resolution to half would probably make my game playable. As it is, I cannot read most of the flavor text in the game, which is devastating for a fetish game where a lot of the kink is in the writing!
- Flavor text for the heroine at the second stage is missing, and causes an error to be displayed. This error was reported in the previous version of the game for just the first weight stage, and I suspect it is the same error, carried over.
Bugs aside, I am interested in what the game can become, but it does feel a little bare right now. I place a lot of weight on flavor text and narration in a kink game, and most of it that I can see is perhaps a bit stiff from translation. It takes a bit of effort to get to that text, and it is a big form of the reward in playing a kink game, so I would like it to be more impactful. Your team seems to be going for a darker fantasy bent with this game, with a lot of violence being narrated to the player even mid-battle, so I would like to see more of the thoughts of the heroine as well, since she does not quite feel like a character as much as a flesh-puppet I am moving through the depths, when we could have a heroine who reacts to both enemies and her own changing weight, while showing us her own mental state changing from the things happening to her and her body. I didn’t realize I wanted more characterization for her coming into the game, but I did as soon as I played for a bit and noticed it was not there!
That aside, I also feel like I would like to see more card variety. It seems like my entire build is decided by asking if I want to have high fullness or low fullness. I tried a few runs, and found that usually low fullness is not as viable, so there is really just a question of if I would like to play the strong build or not. I could also often get the cards for my preferred build pretty quickly, so really I just forced what I saw as the optimal playstyle each run. Contrast with Slay the Spire, where with most characters, I take what I can get at first, and then structure around the first solid synergy that shows up to stay alive, imposing run diversity upon me. Even on A20, I do not know what build will be effective until I hit floor 5 and get a lucky limit break. I find that I am not as incentivized to experiment in this game, because I know a build that will work, and I can assemble the cards for it without issue.
If the bugs I mentioned are fixed, the flavor text was more lively, and the build variety was a bit wider, I feel like this game could shine. What you have here is an interesting base, and I just want to see more on the scaffolding. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it, at the very least.
