No Place for Bravery Demo Criticisms

The tutorial does a really bad job of pointing out how the devs want the game to be played. Simple text on the screen is usually quickly skimmed and then forgotten. Having a more lengthy tutorial where the game asks you to perform each action like blocking, parrying and using skills an X number of times to see their effects will really help solidify how to play the game in the way you desire.

The camera is too far out for such small animations that require fine timing that further requires seeing the fine details of the animation. I recommend having a dynamic camera that zooms in the closer you and the enemy gets. As a result of this, less use of distant archers because they would just make the camera zoom out needlessly and archers shooting at you from off camera is annoying.

I don't really understand the point of executing an enemy. What mechanic purpose does it have that can't be accomplished from just having them die when they reach 0 life? All it does is make the game needlessly gruesome in my eyes, and becomes a tedious task for a small chance to get a drop. Its basically "kill this guy a second time by holding down the button." I find myself just never bothering with it.

An extension of the above, the quick execution is heavily flawed. Enemies get knockbacked out of range easily so you can't execute them by pressing F leaving you vulnerable as you wait a split moment for an animation that doesn't play. The camera zooms in way too much, heavily disorienting the player, and the lack of agency during this long animation just makes you more vulnerable as you get pelted with arrows.

I'm not really too sure why the hammer does less damage to regular enemies than the same amount of time spent swinging the sword. Also the charge swing and the regular swing have about the same animation time so there's no reason to not do a charge swing. The only enemy that I've found the hammer to be useful against is the shield guy due to his defined time window of attacks.

Holding down the F button to interact is just irritating. If it was also the attack button it would make sense, as it would not accidentally trigger those actions. However, it is its own button and you are not likely to accidentally press it while around one of those actions.

The 2.5D nature of the game makes it quite hard to figure out where on the ground their feet lie for the hit boxes. Many times we want to be able to hit anywhere on the sprite that is present on the screen, not just what their feet covers on the ground, as we can't see how far behind them their hitbox is since the sprites themselves are 2D. Being able to go through the sprites themselves since they have no collision doesn't help things. It makes me wonder if this just wants to be a true 2D game or a 3D game instead of a 2.5D game.

Skills not really seemingly useful since the combat is all about parrying and defense management. The skills don't accomplish those goals and just regular attacking is more reliable and faster and doesn't displace the user when the enemy is stunned.

Having the parry button and the block button be the same button kind of makes both feel clunky and unresponsive. The animation for the block is also real slow, not too mention the parry window forces you to stay still for a short period before you can move again. The initial frame of the parry also doesn't look like a parry, it looks like the character is winding up a block so its not clear when the parry is supposed to happen.

The dash is more disrupting than it is of help, as it has a really long animation to come out of the dash itself to be able to swing or block. It's also not really long enough of a dash.

As I've mentioned before in a post a few days ago, the call and response part of a Souls game is very important ... but I found that most enemies don't do this. They walk up to you and swing at you regardless of what you are doing. They don't strafe around or try to block your attacks or swing when you've missed or had your attack blocked. They have a set defined AI and the only way you really influence that AI is by moving away from them, staggering them, stunning them or killing them. Moving away from them just makes them path in a straight line towards them, you can only stagger an enemy with the first strike of your attack, stunning and killing both completely render the AI actionless.

It's at this point that I ask if this game really wants to be a Souls game, or if it just wants to be a good fluid fast paced action game. I may be just reading into the souls part too much because I saw others mention it, but regardless I don't think this game fits too well in either category.

The enemy attack patterns and slow deliberate animations along with the stamina and defense bars and the prevalence on timing your attacks/blocks and parrying are all good for a Souls game. However, your fast attack speed, rapid attack combos, needing to be in very close melee range, presence of numerous enemies in an open field environment, not being able to approach them how you want to through maneuverability in the level design, having a lot of flashy and blurred animation that occlude your vision, requiring keyframes on the animation as 60+ frames of animation is a lot of work, and having no animation going from the windup animation to the swing are all part of a decent fluid fast paced action game. A lot of the things here just clash.

But the one thing that doesn't fit with either a Souls game or an action game, is the defense bar parrying focused combat. A Souls game prizes expert timing and reading of your enemy and punishes you for a single mistake but rewards you for a single good parry. This rapid constant parry use doesn't fit that. It's just not very rewarding to do. An action game prizes fluidity in attack, mobility and defense and the capacity to solve a fight with all free with equal measures and be able to go from one to another with near perfect freedom. The parrying isn't that. You are required to sit still, you can't move while parrying is happening, rendering all other actions useless, and you can't execute it fully off of a dash or even an attack, and there's no animation canceling for either dashing or blocking or attacking. Further ontop of these is the fact that to recharge your defense bar you basically just have to run away helplessly for a while. Note dash isn't actually useful to run away with here since you are rendered immobile for a second while the dash animation ends.

A suggestion I have to keep the defense bar and stunning concepts but give the combat a much better fluid action feel is if you attacked at the same time as your opponent to "parry blows" (better term necessary) to lower their defense. You would be required to attack the enemy with the same power of attack (the white, yellow and red) in order to do a successful parry. This would replenish your defense bar. If you swing with something of higher tier than the opponent, your parry blow will instead greatly reduce their defense and stagger them, (not stun them). You could potentially also give the same Souls "slow mo" feel whenever you do a successful parry blow to give the player some time to think of what to do next. I feel like this encourages the fast paced flashy combat while at the same time rewarding successful parries per time they happen and making you more fluid and mobile in the process. A player would still be able to block and dash in and out of attacking freely, with blocking draining defense and dashing draining stamina.

Whether or not that solves the "souls or action game" problem I notice I don't know, but I feel like it would be more interesting.

As for the artwork and soundtrack, these are honestly the best parts of the game. I'm not as good at praise as I am with criticism though so these are short. The artwork could use shadows a lot more, in particular, for the ramps and stairs to show that they are indeed ramps and stairs with varying heights. The soundtrack is solid and evocative, with only some soundeffects being problems. The block soundeffect being too long/"slow" that makes it feel a bit clunky ontop of the slow animation, and the parry sound effect not being unique enough to indicate that it was successful amongst the chaos of combat.

The animation is the final part, my biggest suggestion to this is to learn sub pixel rendering. This is a complex advanced animation technique to show movement without actually adding or subtracting lots of pixels to the sprite. A jumping off point for that would be here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqd6epIWo6E> it would do wonders for things like flashing of hit markers or parry success markers that are just white pixels that are easily missable.

Further, a lot of the animation and effects work to occlude your vision, as this screenshot indicates <https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/754392623602466937/754496907606491194/unknown.png>. The enemies flash white, there's a splash of white hit marker covering the sprites, and the sword is a large curved blurred line instead of just a straight sword with small blurred trails. It doesn't help that there's no enemy sprite collision so you inevitably end up in their face a lot unable to see them from you.

I feel like I got everything here, hope this was useful.