Cuttledile's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hexpress]

A good start, but the text is hard to read and while the dual tone looked nice, it was difficult to figure out what was walkable vs. not sometimes. The camera movement also felt like it worked against ease of movement. And of course, it's vampire survival. The delivery aspect is cute but I'm not sure it's enough to distinguish it from the hoard of VS clones.

RunicPixels responds:

Thanks for your feedback!

[5 Dice Ver. 1.0 (Old)]

The difficulty of the game isn't the problem, but the lack of design and tutorialization / onboarding is. I don't mean telling the player how to play, but the gameplay itself should introduce new mechanics slowly to teach the player through gameplay. If you love Celeste, I'd suggest you look into some of the talks the devs have done on how they made their game feel challenging but also fun and fair.

Two suggestions you could make without looking into that;
1. get the player back into the level faster. You shouldn't be toggling through beginning of level speech every time you die.
2. Make your controls feel snappier. The floating jump makes gameplay longer and more difficult without feeling good.

And as a reminder- you will always be the best player of your game. If you think it's just hard enough, it's probably too difficult.
And if you find yourself thinking, 'the people who are playing this game aren't my intended audience', you're ignoring valuable free playtesting feedback.

J4cko16 responds:

Thank you for your advice. I didn’t add much tutorials since I thought the player wouldn’t want to go through “tutorial hell” and figured it would be more fun to make the player learn how to play with basic instructions. I am aware of the dialogue problem and have actually patched it I just haven’t released the patch yet. I know how challenging the game is and have watched many people play. Most players seem fine with the difficulty but from your advice I might try to ease the player into the game s little slower.