Ranked #1830
155 Points
You find yourself in an old decrepit hotel, knowing neither the how or why of your presence here. Forward is the only choice that appears to you, but will you go ? This game was made on Unity and meant to create an immersive and disturbing experience. I hope you'll enjoy it ! Let me know your thoughts! If you encountered any bug or errors i'd appreciate you tell me :). Any way, your feedbacks will help me improve ! If you liked the experience, feel free to check my other games!
Hey there ! That's a great start ! Keep it up !
So I played roughly half an hour and I didn't expect that much content, maybe a bit too much to be honest.
It's clear that you are passionate and wanted to create more and more, but i'd say, from now on try to focus on improving your core gameplay and experience, otherwise people won't discover the story you've created.
Let me break down my thoughts from the start :
- Overall : Interesting and has potential but lacks a bit of personality and UX needs a lot of polish
- Main menu: Try to avoid flashing UI and it's a good place to summup your game's ambiance and tone, you should think at ways to hook your players from there.
- Texts : You deliver a lot of content and it's a bit tedious to swallow. By that I mean it's several pages of plain white text on black background. As it seems to be one of the main feature of your game, you should focus on that, try adding sounds matching what's going on in the story, segment your texts more instead of a page by page system, try adding animations to your characters so they match the mood of what's going on, try to find a way to recognize what is what (dialogs in italic, souds / events in bold, etc).
- Tutorial: The first big mistake is those tutorial boxes, gosh avoid them like if they were the plague haha, it's ok to have prompts but please not 10 in a row and especially when it's not in a situation that requires it. The tutorial is one straight line with "every" element of the game put one after another, it doesn't help the player understand what's going on, does not give the rewarding feeling of discovering something new and overall it's overwhelming (after the 4 pages of text, the 25 infoboxes and 1 km long straight pass, I started to feel bored even the game started, but your narration kept me going after that). Having a tutorial is fine, as long as it doesn't feel like one, you clearly like to write so take advantage of that, make the player discover stuff through your character, for example, instead of putting a can on the narrow path, have an abandoned camp with teared backpack, find a letter in it, have your player hooked and then prompt your box to tell you've found 1 ration blablabla. Narration is the strength of your game so take full advantage of it !
- Signs and feedbacks: Well, some things are clear, some too much and some others not at all. At the very beguining of the game I took a lot of damages, even before I got the prompt telling me the zone was radioactive, it frustrated me, felt like you wanted me to lose. I don't know if it was a bug or something not clearly shown to the player. I even realized later on that the radiation level is written on the top right corner of the screen, if it's an important mechanic, show it more, have your world show what's going on instead of counting on UI. For example the enemies's fov was really clear and understandable and it felt good to run to avoid them. About running, please remove that "Blocked" text when you bump into something hahaha, we can clearly see that we're running into a wall.
- UI; You'll have to work a bit on that too, have your UI connect more with your game's world, right now it feels more like debugs than anything. Maybe have some more sprites to show what it is about, make it responsive (bars shaking, glowing, or any type of effect that fits the current state of the situation)
- Extra: I really loved the first time I saw goose fly through the screen, made me feel a bit more grounded in your universe. That's a very good path to follow if you want your players to connect with your world. Make it feel alive !!! The first secret hideout was easy enough to find and taught me more about your game than the tutorial. It was funnier to run and avoid the enemy encounters than to fight them, maybe focusing a bit on that aspect could create an even more interesting aspect for your game :).
I hope this will help ! Keep working on your game, you're getting somewhere !