10 hours in: Feedback from a Backer
Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2018 9:11 am
Wasn't sure if I should post this on the Steam forums that people are reporting feedback, or on the official forums, so I just posted it on both.
I had played the alpha and reported some bugs back then, but this game had fallen off my radar a bit after, I wish I had played the beta so I could have given this feedback earlier. I was going to wait to post this until I beat the game, but as my progress has slowed down, I figured it might be best to collect my thoughts for now and list my current feedback before I forget, so far I have played it for around 10 hours (not counting the alphas) with 8 hours on my main save, and have gotten through most of the Keep:
- First thing that stuck out to me was the same issue that many had with one of the Ur-Examples of this series: Symphony of the Night, and it’s an issue that most of the other Metroidvania-style Castlevania games didn't fix either. The way Game Over works. The biggest issue people had with getting a game over in SOTN was how slow it was to get back into the game. You had to wait for the screen to slowly do the melting effect, show you the Game Over image, have THAT go away, reload the title screen, reload your save, and let the game load again.... while needless to say a modern PC/Console loads much faster than a PS1 did, the issue is still the same: You need to watch the "Game Over" message (Which you can't seem to skip or speed up), let the game go back to the title screen, select your save, and then reload it. Chances are when most people die, they will want to do exactly that, reload their save. Why is there no quick "Reload last save?" option when you die? This really should have been an obvious one, which is why I listed it first.
- The fast-travel system seems to need some better prediction. There have been times where it would place all of the world's warp points close together, and then have a large swath of area with no warp points within it. I have attached a screenshot of this. Notice the entire top-half of the Gardens which has a small vertical "choke point" to access it has no warp points, all of them are clustered on the bottom half (It would also be nice if you could tell in advance where a fast-travel point would also take you on the map):
https://i.imgur.com/BQezKfO.jpg
- Speaking of fast travel, going between worlds is incredibly clunky. It would make a lot more sense to just choose the world the warp-gate sends you to instead of having to cycle across them.
- Far too much of the jumping/platforming is of the "just barely made it" type. This is nothing but frustrating to the player. The game was filled with rooms and ledges where you will just BARELY make the jump if you jump at the last possible moment at max jump height. This felt counter-intuitive to being able to actually move around and explore, and made repeating many of the rooms due to the backtracking nature of such games a chore. I groaned every time I had to re-do one of those vertical rooms where you basically slowly ascend by going back and forth and just barely making jumps.... essentially resetting the room if you make a mistake and fall. This is a NIGHTMARE when the jump is over any kind of pit with a damaging liquid that sucks you into it. This is also badly implemented when you need to jump up a vertical wall. There were areas where I assumed that I was supposed to cross them in some other way, due to the character sliding down the wall for about half a second then dropping off, but if I JUST barely manage to jump JUST right, he can grab the wall for a second longer allowing me to then keep jumping up. I hated crossing any of these areas, as they take multiple attempts to finally grab the wall in the right way to actually cross up.
- In addition to the above, it felt like far too many of the larger rooms were just that, a large rectangular area where you have to get from the bottom to the top... but the only way to do that is to cross it horizontally, then at the end manage to get slightly higher, cross it horizontally in the other direction, ascent slightly higher... etc etc until you reach the top. This got old FAST, especially due to the above.
- Weapons feel like they just barely have a millisecond too much delay than they should. None of them felt fluid to use, and while it goes without saying that smaller and lighter-damage weapons like daggers should be able to be used faster than slow and high-damage weapons like hammers, all of them felt like they had their delay set just barely too long in time with enemy attacks. Enemies kept getting hits in JUST before I could react/dodge because the weapon delay was just barely too long by a hair to let me, it just made all of combat feel off and the back-dash useless since I could rarely use it before the enemy could hit me.
- Some of the hitboxes felt like they extended slightly larger than they should, the biggest one that comes to mind is the fire the Titan boss spits out, they seemed to always hit me when I should have been between them.
- I was surprised at first when I was no longer able to buy any more of a certain item from one of the shops. There was no mention or indication what shops have limited inventory, and that their stock doesn't refresh ever either. Some kind of indicator somewhere of how much the shops have left of an item would have helped me not waste my money on trying to acquire more of an item I needed than the shops had stock of.
- Random money drops feel like the only real way to earn money in this game, while they are generally pocket change in most Metroidvanias. There didn't seem to be any real way to make money, unlike many others where selling drops is usually the primary source of income. Nearly every item has a use and many of them don't sell for much. I at first thought for sure the precious gemstones I was getting were going to be for this purpose... but nope, they are actually consumables for upgrading your magic, and they sell for next to nothing to the jeweler. Lucky duplicate drops of weapons were the only way I found to make some profit, but even that is a rare occurrence, especially of getting an item that sells for a decent amount.
- White treasure chests feel worthless. Their rewards are not only far too random, but also far too low quality for the effort nearly all of them need to reach in the first place. I have had some just spawn a few pieces of food... that immediately fell into a poison lake since most of these chests tend to be on a high ledge, or just two bags of gold that I could have farmed in about 5 minutes. The reward really doesn't fit the effort to get them, especially since many of them typically need you to come back much later when you have the item to reach them, and then tend to drop their rewards off the ledge they are on.
- The Bestiary is honestly a chore to use. There is only one way to scroll through it (left or right), no way to scroll through multiple pages at a time (such as pressing LB/RB or their keyboard equivalents to go 10 pages at a time or so), no way to search, you can't just display multiple pages on a grid so then you can select one, can't in any way sort it.... it's just plain annoying to try to find an entry for anything that's not at the very beginning or very end of the book.
- The Shovel item is counter-intuitive to use. You have to equip it like a weapon when it really should act like the way artifacts do and just be a button or direction/button combination to use. Having to equip it slows the game down considerably (especially later in the game when you have many weapons) because you have to go to the equip menu, find the shovel (this game could REALLY benefit with having more grid-like menus instead of just a single-column vertical list), equip it, dig for a few seconds, then when you are done since the shovel literally can't be used for anything else you then have to go back to the equip menu, find the weapon you were using, and re-equip that. All that, just so you can dig for about 5 seconds.
- Surfacing from the water is slow, very slow, and it seems to have issues if you are pressing any direction other than straight up, such as if you are pressing diagonally up and left or right.
- Input from one source is cut off if another is used. E.G. If any keyboard button is pressed input from a gamepad is cut off, such as while you are gliding, causing you to drop down immediately. It also won't switch back to the gamepad from analog stick input, it has to be a button or d-pad. This is annoying for those who take screenshots, especially if they use the analog sticks instead of a d-pad.
- The little red Imp enemies can essentially hover "inside" you, making them impossible to hit and make you keep taking damage if you are on a platform where you can't move enough to get them "out" of you. This was very apparent in the vertical room with the platforms full of rotating spike-balls that was full of these things. There is not enough room on the platforms without just giving up and jumping off to get them "out" of you.
- It’s a little annoying that familiars essentially “steal” your kills. You not only don’t get any EXP if they kill an enemy but it doesn’t even count as a kill in your pause-menu stats. This can be aggravating when you are fighting a tough enemy and the familiar that has been barely moving swoops down and gets the last hit in.
- The spider's web-attack is easily abused. When there are two of them they can essentially stun-luck you by keeping you webbed, tossing one so it hits you just as you break out of the previous one. And I don't know if this was intentional or just a mess-up of the RNG system, but there is one that is placed right in front of a (tar?) pit, if it webs you, which is very likely to happen if you aren't specifically watching out for this, it drops you in the tar, making you take an IMMENNSE amount of damage since you are constantly taking damage from the tar as you attempt to break out, and then still take a lot more damage as you attempt to jump out of the tar that you have now sunk to the bottom to. It's practically a one-hit kill if you are not at about 80% or higher health, especially since those hazards do damage based on your current HP, not a set amount. This thing could essentially kill you in one hit even at level 99 due to that if you are not close to full health.
- Possible Bug: The puppet enemy seems to remember aggro from across screens. If I aggro a puppet, then leave, when I re-enter the room it makes a mad-dash towards me even if it was at the other end of the room. Furthermore, this seems to be shared across all puppet enemies. If I aggro a puppet, and leave, then eventually reach another room with a puppet, THAT one will immediately go after me. Killing any puppet seems to reset this. Is this some kind of intended special behavior for the puppet, or a bug?
- Possible Bug: Enemy A.I. simply does not react at all, not even to getting hit, unless you are within visual aggro range, this happened even in the arena when I was able to stay far enough from enemies before they spawned, so they didn't attack or react to me using ranged/projectile attacks on them. Here is a video of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4fWSmQbxIQ
- The overall sense of progress feels very slow. It felt like forever until I got my first movement upgrade to grab ledges, it wasn't even until the second world where this happened, the entire mines had no movement upgrade. Likewise, by the time I got the slide move it felt like it was massively over-due by the time I finally got it. They didn't even feel like they were helping much (especially with how limited-use the slide was) so they barely felt like upgrades that helped me explore more, which is somewhat the point of a Metroidvania.
- In addition to the above, some of the upgrades felt like a hindrance to me. The notable ones (so far) are the wall-kick and swimming upgrades, and to a lesser extent the parachute as well. When I got the wall-jump move, it caused more damage/deaths due to it accidently going off than I can count. This is related to what I said earlier about the game being very picky about doing everything JUST right. If I was a millimeter too low to hang onto a ledge, it instead makes me grab and slide down the wall... and since with a ledge-grab you can jump straight up while a wall-kick sends you careening in the opposite direction, this led to many instances where I was expecting to jump over a ledge... but instead jumped straight OFF of it and into a hazard or straight back to the bottom of the room. I actually had a harder time getting past rooms I had gone through a dozen times before due to this thing now being picky about if I was grabbing the wall or ledge and making me jump off in the opposite direction instead of up. Swimming was now an annoyance too after I got the Diving Gear, since now I immediately sink like a stone, crossing water areas that I used to cross has become much more annoying, especially with the issue I mentioned previously about how surfacing is slow and annoying to input properly.
Basically.... I don't trust the game. I have played many Metroidvanias, and while there have been some that utterly frustrated me with their difficulty (Order of Eccelsia comes to mind) I have practically never felt like the game would just plain not do what I asked it to do. With those previous games, I never tried to jump up a wall thinking "Please let my character actually grab it the right way" or "Please don't just barely fail to hold onto that grip and fall into a hazard". Control and fluidity, being able to react and platform, those are key to many Metroidvania games, the controls need to be right and responsive, do exactly what you are telling them to do. Chasm... felt the opposite, it felt like I was always fighting with the game itself to make it do what I wanted it to do, and the more artifacts I got, the more I had to fight the game to actually make it do what I want due to how picky it is. When I fight, it always feels like the game is asleep when I am telling it to GET. OUT. OF. THE. WAY. OF. THAT. ATTACK. and wakes up a second too late. Everything is stiff and does not respond how it should respond. I just don't trust this game, I don't trust it's controls, I can not trust it to do what I tell it to do. The game can’t be trusted.
I had played the alpha and reported some bugs back then, but this game had fallen off my radar a bit after, I wish I had played the beta so I could have given this feedback earlier. I was going to wait to post this until I beat the game, but as my progress has slowed down, I figured it might be best to collect my thoughts for now and list my current feedback before I forget, so far I have played it for around 10 hours (not counting the alphas) with 8 hours on my main save, and have gotten through most of the Keep:
- First thing that stuck out to me was the same issue that many had with one of the Ur-Examples of this series: Symphony of the Night, and it’s an issue that most of the other Metroidvania-style Castlevania games didn't fix either. The way Game Over works. The biggest issue people had with getting a game over in SOTN was how slow it was to get back into the game. You had to wait for the screen to slowly do the melting effect, show you the Game Over image, have THAT go away, reload the title screen, reload your save, and let the game load again.... while needless to say a modern PC/Console loads much faster than a PS1 did, the issue is still the same: You need to watch the "Game Over" message (Which you can't seem to skip or speed up), let the game go back to the title screen, select your save, and then reload it. Chances are when most people die, they will want to do exactly that, reload their save. Why is there no quick "Reload last save?" option when you die? This really should have been an obvious one, which is why I listed it first.
- The fast-travel system seems to need some better prediction. There have been times where it would place all of the world's warp points close together, and then have a large swath of area with no warp points within it. I have attached a screenshot of this. Notice the entire top-half of the Gardens which has a small vertical "choke point" to access it has no warp points, all of them are clustered on the bottom half (It would also be nice if you could tell in advance where a fast-travel point would also take you on the map):
https://i.imgur.com/BQezKfO.jpg
- Speaking of fast travel, going between worlds is incredibly clunky. It would make a lot more sense to just choose the world the warp-gate sends you to instead of having to cycle across them.
- Far too much of the jumping/platforming is of the "just barely made it" type. This is nothing but frustrating to the player. The game was filled with rooms and ledges where you will just BARELY make the jump if you jump at the last possible moment at max jump height. This felt counter-intuitive to being able to actually move around and explore, and made repeating many of the rooms due to the backtracking nature of such games a chore. I groaned every time I had to re-do one of those vertical rooms where you basically slowly ascend by going back and forth and just barely making jumps.... essentially resetting the room if you make a mistake and fall. This is a NIGHTMARE when the jump is over any kind of pit with a damaging liquid that sucks you into it. This is also badly implemented when you need to jump up a vertical wall. There were areas where I assumed that I was supposed to cross them in some other way, due to the character sliding down the wall for about half a second then dropping off, but if I JUST barely manage to jump JUST right, he can grab the wall for a second longer allowing me to then keep jumping up. I hated crossing any of these areas, as they take multiple attempts to finally grab the wall in the right way to actually cross up.
- In addition to the above, it felt like far too many of the larger rooms were just that, a large rectangular area where you have to get from the bottom to the top... but the only way to do that is to cross it horizontally, then at the end manage to get slightly higher, cross it horizontally in the other direction, ascent slightly higher... etc etc until you reach the top. This got old FAST, especially due to the above.
- Weapons feel like they just barely have a millisecond too much delay than they should. None of them felt fluid to use, and while it goes without saying that smaller and lighter-damage weapons like daggers should be able to be used faster than slow and high-damage weapons like hammers, all of them felt like they had their delay set just barely too long in time with enemy attacks. Enemies kept getting hits in JUST before I could react/dodge because the weapon delay was just barely too long by a hair to let me, it just made all of combat feel off and the back-dash useless since I could rarely use it before the enemy could hit me.
- Some of the hitboxes felt like they extended slightly larger than they should, the biggest one that comes to mind is the fire the Titan boss spits out, they seemed to always hit me when I should have been between them.
- I was surprised at first when I was no longer able to buy any more of a certain item from one of the shops. There was no mention or indication what shops have limited inventory, and that their stock doesn't refresh ever either. Some kind of indicator somewhere of how much the shops have left of an item would have helped me not waste my money on trying to acquire more of an item I needed than the shops had stock of.
- Random money drops feel like the only real way to earn money in this game, while they are generally pocket change in most Metroidvanias. There didn't seem to be any real way to make money, unlike many others where selling drops is usually the primary source of income. Nearly every item has a use and many of them don't sell for much. I at first thought for sure the precious gemstones I was getting were going to be for this purpose... but nope, they are actually consumables for upgrading your magic, and they sell for next to nothing to the jeweler. Lucky duplicate drops of weapons were the only way I found to make some profit, but even that is a rare occurrence, especially of getting an item that sells for a decent amount.
- White treasure chests feel worthless. Their rewards are not only far too random, but also far too low quality for the effort nearly all of them need to reach in the first place. I have had some just spawn a few pieces of food... that immediately fell into a poison lake since most of these chests tend to be on a high ledge, or just two bags of gold that I could have farmed in about 5 minutes. The reward really doesn't fit the effort to get them, especially since many of them typically need you to come back much later when you have the item to reach them, and then tend to drop their rewards off the ledge they are on.
- The Bestiary is honestly a chore to use. There is only one way to scroll through it (left or right), no way to scroll through multiple pages at a time (such as pressing LB/RB or their keyboard equivalents to go 10 pages at a time or so), no way to search, you can't just display multiple pages on a grid so then you can select one, can't in any way sort it.... it's just plain annoying to try to find an entry for anything that's not at the very beginning or very end of the book.
- The Shovel item is counter-intuitive to use. You have to equip it like a weapon when it really should act like the way artifacts do and just be a button or direction/button combination to use. Having to equip it slows the game down considerably (especially later in the game when you have many weapons) because you have to go to the equip menu, find the shovel (this game could REALLY benefit with having more grid-like menus instead of just a single-column vertical list), equip it, dig for a few seconds, then when you are done since the shovel literally can't be used for anything else you then have to go back to the equip menu, find the weapon you were using, and re-equip that. All that, just so you can dig for about 5 seconds.
- Surfacing from the water is slow, very slow, and it seems to have issues if you are pressing any direction other than straight up, such as if you are pressing diagonally up and left or right.
- Input from one source is cut off if another is used. E.G. If any keyboard button is pressed input from a gamepad is cut off, such as while you are gliding, causing you to drop down immediately. It also won't switch back to the gamepad from analog stick input, it has to be a button or d-pad. This is annoying for those who take screenshots, especially if they use the analog sticks instead of a d-pad.
- The little red Imp enemies can essentially hover "inside" you, making them impossible to hit and make you keep taking damage if you are on a platform where you can't move enough to get them "out" of you. This was very apparent in the vertical room with the platforms full of rotating spike-balls that was full of these things. There is not enough room on the platforms without just giving up and jumping off to get them "out" of you.
- It’s a little annoying that familiars essentially “steal” your kills. You not only don’t get any EXP if they kill an enemy but it doesn’t even count as a kill in your pause-menu stats. This can be aggravating when you are fighting a tough enemy and the familiar that has been barely moving swoops down and gets the last hit in.
- The spider's web-attack is easily abused. When there are two of them they can essentially stun-luck you by keeping you webbed, tossing one so it hits you just as you break out of the previous one. And I don't know if this was intentional or just a mess-up of the RNG system, but there is one that is placed right in front of a (tar?) pit, if it webs you, which is very likely to happen if you aren't specifically watching out for this, it drops you in the tar, making you take an IMMENNSE amount of damage since you are constantly taking damage from the tar as you attempt to break out, and then still take a lot more damage as you attempt to jump out of the tar that you have now sunk to the bottom to. It's practically a one-hit kill if you are not at about 80% or higher health, especially since those hazards do damage based on your current HP, not a set amount. This thing could essentially kill you in one hit even at level 99 due to that if you are not close to full health.
- Possible Bug: The puppet enemy seems to remember aggro from across screens. If I aggro a puppet, then leave, when I re-enter the room it makes a mad-dash towards me even if it was at the other end of the room. Furthermore, this seems to be shared across all puppet enemies. If I aggro a puppet, and leave, then eventually reach another room with a puppet, THAT one will immediately go after me. Killing any puppet seems to reset this. Is this some kind of intended special behavior for the puppet, or a bug?
- Possible Bug: Enemy A.I. simply does not react at all, not even to getting hit, unless you are within visual aggro range, this happened even in the arena when I was able to stay far enough from enemies before they spawned, so they didn't attack or react to me using ranged/projectile attacks on them. Here is a video of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4fWSmQbxIQ
- The overall sense of progress feels very slow. It felt like forever until I got my first movement upgrade to grab ledges, it wasn't even until the second world where this happened, the entire mines had no movement upgrade. Likewise, by the time I got the slide move it felt like it was massively over-due by the time I finally got it. They didn't even feel like they were helping much (especially with how limited-use the slide was) so they barely felt like upgrades that helped me explore more, which is somewhat the point of a Metroidvania.
- In addition to the above, some of the upgrades felt like a hindrance to me. The notable ones (so far) are the wall-kick and swimming upgrades, and to a lesser extent the parachute as well. When I got the wall-jump move, it caused more damage/deaths due to it accidently going off than I can count. This is related to what I said earlier about the game being very picky about doing everything JUST right. If I was a millimeter too low to hang onto a ledge, it instead makes me grab and slide down the wall... and since with a ledge-grab you can jump straight up while a wall-kick sends you careening in the opposite direction, this led to many instances where I was expecting to jump over a ledge... but instead jumped straight OFF of it and into a hazard or straight back to the bottom of the room. I actually had a harder time getting past rooms I had gone through a dozen times before due to this thing now being picky about if I was grabbing the wall or ledge and making me jump off in the opposite direction instead of up. Swimming was now an annoyance too after I got the Diving Gear, since now I immediately sink like a stone, crossing water areas that I used to cross has become much more annoying, especially with the issue I mentioned previously about how surfacing is slow and annoying to input properly.
Basically.... I don't trust the game. I have played many Metroidvanias, and while there have been some that utterly frustrated me with their difficulty (Order of Eccelsia comes to mind) I have practically never felt like the game would just plain not do what I asked it to do. With those previous games, I never tried to jump up a wall thinking "Please let my character actually grab it the right way" or "Please don't just barely fail to hold onto that grip and fall into a hazard". Control and fluidity, being able to react and platform, those are key to many Metroidvania games, the controls need to be right and responsive, do exactly what you are telling them to do. Chasm... felt the opposite, it felt like I was always fighting with the game itself to make it do what I wanted it to do, and the more artifacts I got, the more I had to fight the game to actually make it do what I want due to how picky it is. When I fight, it always feels like the game is asleep when I am telling it to GET. OUT. OF. THE. WAY. OF. THAT. ATTACK. and wakes up a second too late. Everything is stiff and does not respond how it should respond. I just don't trust this game, I don't trust it's controls, I can not trust it to do what I tell it to do. The game can’t be trusted.
I am mostly happy with the game and fully trust it to do what I expect. While the controls are clunky in some ways I feel that they are fully predictable and not a single one of my many deaths felt like the game's fault. Maybe give it a bit more time? If you didn't already know those techniques I mentioned above, practice them and see if combat feels less annoying? Frankly classic metroidvanias, while awesome experiences, tend to be way too easy and don't punish you for making mistakes. I see them as exploration games with a thin "game" package around them, and I am very glad that Bit Kid decided to go a slightly different way.
