03 — Dreamless: The Madness from the Sea | #Metroidvania First Impressions (Steam Nextfest June '22)
7As a writer, the creepy alien horror of H.P. Lovecraft's work has always fascinated, entertained, and made me jealous in roughly equal measures. I've played several videogames with an eldritch horror bent: Bloodborne being the most notable, but also games like The Secret World and Moons of Madness which have Lovecraftian overtones.
This isn't the first metroidvania game that has tried Lovecraftian horror, but it's the first that does it so directly, and I enjoyed my time with it — though I am not without critique.
Sleepy Cat Games, the developers, are a two-person team, so with that considered they're doing a great job of evoking the necessary atmosphere for this kind of genre.
***********************************************************************************************
Written Feedback for Devs:
Contact Damage: Loathe it, especially with so little visual feedback of hits and how tiny our weapon range is. Combat should not be about trading damage.
Running Animation: It isn't physically possible to run as the main protagonist runs. I'm afraid -- and I know it's time-consuming! -- that the running sprites need redrawing to have the character tilt forwards when he runs. At the moment, his legs angle forward and his body stays straight up and a human would fall over doing that.
Sound FX: almost certainly temp fx at the moment, but just a note that they need sprucing up.
Opening Crawl: Too much text in one chunk, scrolls too fast to read, especially for people like me who tend to narrate for an audience.
Respawn Points: See towards the end of the video for issues I had there.
Stats: It's possible that you're going for the "stats and what they do are obscure" motif, but I'd like to know how the sanity SP system works BEFORE our first level up where we get to choose our points focus.
Tone and theme: love them. Great integration of the more commonly-known Lovecraftian lore. While any attempt to actually draw out Lovecraft's creatures ultimately takes away from the psychological experience, the ones I've seen are creepy enough given the pixel art style.
***********************************************************************************************
Game Description from Steam:
Dreamless: The Madness from the Sea is a metroidvania game based on the works of the American writer H.P. Lovecraft, the master of horror. Play as Ambrose Blackwood, a British archeologist whose fate is irrevocably bound to the mysterious city of R’lyeh and to its monstrous inhabitants.
***********************************************************************************************
If you found this video entertaining (or my metroidvania maps useful) please consider a small donation to my ko-fi ►►► @ https://ko-fi.com/demajen and subscribe on youtube to help me out! You can also check my absolute ramblings out on twitter @ twitter.com/demajen
***********************************************************************************************
#Dreamless #metroidvania #demo