Love it - but dislike the problems
Hi,
I found this a nice, refreshing concept (though not exactly unique ;) ) and I've quite enjoyed the game. I also find the story to be above avarage for most game submissions here.
Unfortunately, the game is teeming with annoying little problems; some have mentioned the slowdowns, which I merely find to be inconvenient (until it forces you to save the game more often than you'd want to just so you can exit to the menu and return to the game without losing your progress).
It also happens rather often that the loading screen claims the game is loaded (sometimes I don't doubt it, because I've let it load for the last half hour while doing something else), but when I press A, nothing happens until I've pressed A a number of times - sometimes this results in a bug that causes the game to speedily load your latest saved game (if you picked the uppermost slot that is) as a new, albeit bugged game that rushes through the starting sequence and then gets stuck.
I've lost my progress more than once this way and I don't feel like pestering the games creator to get my progress back - I merely shrug and call it an excuse to play the game from the beginning anyway. Nonetheless, I would far prefer not to experience this problem.
Ok, I didn't want to whine about being stuck in the game, but that's precisely what I am: The last dungeon sees me running out of keys when I try to rescue the last of the four pub guys. I checked the video walkthrough of the last dungeon and for some reason, a lot of the open doors in the video appear locked when I face them, preventing me from taking the same steps as the guy in the video.
I see this as having three potential causes:
1. there's a hidden time limit that I've been too late to meet (if yes, I consider it a lame and annoying way to make the game challenging, but that's just because I hate time limits as it hampers my exploration of the world and overall sense of relaxation).
2. You've put up a later version of the game than the walkthrough vid and put more locked doors in this one (makes sense - a lot of the cages in the video weren't even locked), and I've not been able to find the right combination of people to enter.
3. It's a bug that makes me look stupid and incompetent ;)
That last issue is by far the most off-putting, because even if the final Boss is just three recycled bosses, I still want to get up to him and kick his ugly behind, and I've been playing through the game up to the point where I have to enter people's dreams twice now with the exact same result and I'm reaching the point where I don't feel like playing the game anymore, which is a shame.
So, you get 9 for concept (I reserve 10 for originality or cases where cool twists are put on an existing concept) - 10 for graphics (feeling generous) - 7 for gameplay (could do with some more balancing and something to make it less repetitive, but it's easy enough to say...) and 4 for playability (those damned slowdowns and bugs force me to give you a lower score than I'd want to give you :( ... )
Overall, I think it's a 7 which looks depressingly low, but truthfully, I'm hoping you'll do another game in this series, especially considering how much better this one is compared to the first one.