A Night Underground

There's a lot to this game!

I love the art and scale of the game. A lot of content is in this game, which is pretty impressive. The ant enemies are super unique (at least from my experience) and I love how they work. The controls are a bit delayed, but I guess that's the point of a metroidvania. 

The control controls bothered me a bit. The fact that you can only navigate the main menu with the keyboard when it  recommends to use the gamepad confused me for about 30 seconds. I also wish that you could use the joystick, but that's honestly just a nitpick.

The music was pretty alright! As I was closing out of the game, it annoyed me, but for the entirety of me actually playing the game it was fine. I guess that the music's not bad as long as you're in a flow state.

I love how the save points are actual objects that you have to interact with! I feels kind of satisfying to save using the start button, for some reason.

I will say that I didn't like how the start button resets the game. While I was playing, someone came into the room and I habitually paused to talk to them, losing all of my progress. I feel like if it was a different button, I'd press the start button, go "Oh yeah, this game doesn't pause," and be able to continue playing.

There was one part that struck me as pretty unfair

The fact that you have to make a leap of faith upwards, with snakes punishing you if you fall, strikes me as punishing, not difficult. I also had to reset here when I got stuck in a wall.

These two pictures remind me, I like the spikes! They look very, very painful. I also appreciate how they don't instantly kill you!

I like the buttons that add and remove blocks, it's pretty satisfying to walk over them.

While the ant enemies are super cool, they are also very buggy. One common bug was that they'd get stuck in the wall if they descended into it. Here's what I think could fix this:

(event that causes ant to go down)

startY = y;

go_down();

(step event)

if y = startY

{

          collide_horizontally_with_walls()

}

I feel like something roughly around these lines would be able to keep the ant from being stuck. Would it be flawless? No. Would it keep the ant from freezing? Yes...I think.

While I understand that it is a metroidvania, I found the map unnecessary. This may just be because I didn't get too far into the game, but I never really needed a map. While the map doesn't make the game worse, I still feel like it may not have been a good investment of developer time considering how tricky it probably was. However, I wouldn't be surprised if a map was a requirement for the game jam.

From the screenshots, I see that there's a lot of content that I never got to. It's incredible that there's so much stuff in this game! Even more so that you made multiple backgrounds from what I can tell. I'm very sorry that I didn't play all of it. I'm not a big fan of being lost, which I'm pretty sure is a core part of metroidvanias. 

At some point, I realized that instead of remembering every detail that I liked are disliked,I could just record some footage for you! If it keeps freezing, don't worry. That's just the player. Your game isn't super unstable.

This was a wonderful game with a few very fixable problems. Good job man!