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The Forest Mirror

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Explore the forest, taking advantage of its shifted underworld with reversed gravity, and restore the fairies to their home.

*UPDATE* I have optimized the game as much as I could, and I hope that it runs smoothly now, thank you for your patience, I wasn't expecting this much attention.

For a smoother experience, the downloadable version should run at a steady 60 frames per second:
https://joseph-ferrari.itch.io/the-forest-mirror

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Very nice game, I enjoyed it very much!

I must agree with some of the critic below, that some enemies where almost impossible to avoid. Though luckily you can take a couple hits and still make it, so it wasn't that big of a deal. I cursed at the game a few times, but that was just my own lack of skills and mistakes :P. The game was exactly the right amount of challenging, difficult but not impossible.

Completed the game in 35 minutes with 18 deaths. Here is what I think:

Positives:

- Cool concept with two worlds.
- Cool jumping mechanics which made me think hard how to reach places especially last two faeries.
- Open world, collect diamonds and faeries in any order you want although from left to right is obviously the most logical one.
- Nice retro graphics
- Nice music, I liked how it was different for each world.

Things to improve:
- Not being able to kill beasts that attacked you was very annoying.
- It would be better if there were a status bar with lives left, number of collected diamonds and faeries. Time spent and amount of deaths should not appear on status bar to maintain the peaceful non hurry atmosphere. If it is not so already then timer should stop when character is not moving, so that player can go and have a time off screen.
- Sound of bats flapping their wings was ok, but sounds wolves made were annoying and unrealistic.
- Sometimes when jumping the character made annoying screeching sounds, seemingly randomly or maybe it was when hitting a wall I don't remember exactly.
- Invisible platforms were not a good solution except that one time when they represented tops (bottoms) of roots.
- White dashed line rectangles looked ugly and out of place.

So game is good on major points but has minor issues that could be improved.

JosephMoonGolf responds:

Thank you for your review! I understand your comments about the wolves sound effects, the game was made for a game jam and I was running out of time for adding these sounds, so blips were all that I could think of. As for the screeching sound, I believe that what you are hearing is the bat's sound effect for being alerted of your presence, this sound will occur when you are within close enough range of a bat and that must be why it happens sometimes when you jump. I will take all your comments into my future projects and I hope to improve.

(I was writing my review while playing and I lost everything, here's what I remember I wrote)

It's overall a cool game, but I found two things to improve :
1) Enemies. At some point they can get really annoying. I suggest either you add some weapon, or you remove some of their abilities to make them easier to avoid (like slowing down bats and removing wolves' ability to jump), or at least don't put them in a place where it is impossible to avoid them, like a wolf right next to a bridge you have to pass from below.
2) The player goes waaaaaaay too fast when going to the left/right. This can get really annoying when jumping on narrow/invisible platforms, especially if the player keeps walking a little after the left/right key is released. I suggest you slow the player down and make sure to stop the player completely from horizontal movement when both left and right keys are not pressed.

Other than that, it's pretty fun to play! Challenging enough, ok music, nice graphics :)

Keep up the good work! ;)

JosephMoonGolf responds:

Thanks for your review! I really appreciate the praise, and will do my best to balance out enemies in future games.

Pretty good.

The art could definitely use some work, but it isn't a bad style. The music is way too repetitive and irritates after a while.

My main issue is the bats. I think it could have been telegraphed better that you can't attack them or fight them. It was kind of frustrating trying to figure that out.

Some of the platforms looked like you could jump to them when you couldn't. Making it more obvious when an area isn't accessible from where you currently are would go a long way to make this game feel better.

Overall, keep up the good work. Hope to see more from you in the future

JosephMoonGolf responds:

Thank you for your feedback! I will keep these suggestions in mind, as this was my first attempt at a game explaining its mechanics through gameplay, and I would love to learn how to do that better.

too bad my left cant enjoy...

Credits & Info

Views
16,142
Faves:
37
Votes
313
Score
3.31 / 5.00

Uploaded
Jun 24, 2017
7:53 PM EDT