Ebenezer and the Invisible World demo playthrough (Next Fest June 2023)
2A metroidvania with hand-drawn/animated artwork that's based around the lore of A Christmas Carol? You have my attention.
There's a lot to like here. Clearly a ton of effort was put into the artwork, music, and lore, and the demo hints at several mechanisms for progression (and gives us access to one of them).
Unfortunately, there's also a lot of room for improvement in terms of gameplay and accessibility. First, on the accessibility front: some text is ridiculously hard to read, either due to being extremely tiny, or written in cursive, or both. In some cases this issue is compounded by messages also being timed rather than dismissed via button press, so players are extremely unlikely to have a chance to read it.
The other accessibility issues I'd note relate to dealing and receiving damage. This game really likes to add screen-shake to make your hits feel crunchy. Many modern games allow disabling screen-shake since many folks find it unpleasant or downright nausea-inducing, but that doesn't appear to be an option in this demo. On the other end of things, the game seems to apply a brief moment of slowdown every time you receive damage - which seems likely to throw off some players' timing, which could easily lead to receiving even more damage. It'd be nice to have an option to disable that as well.
The subject of receiving damage brings us to another gameplay aspect: the damage balance on standard enemies seems rather unforgiving in this demo, with a single hit often subtracting a substantial portion of your HP. You don't start out with any healing items, and while there _is_ a shop, it takes a while to find, so you start out wondering if you're ever going to have any survivability whatsoever. When you do finally find the shop, you realize you're going to have to be somewhat frugal with healing items, as they generally cost $1 per HP. This had me worrying that this is actually aiming to be a soulsvania, but surprisingly, the only boss enemy in the demo felt largely _more_ forgiving than standard enemies in terms of damage dealt per hit.
On the other side of enemy balance, however, a lot of enemies seem rather slow and/or static and some areas seem sparsely populated, which might be intentional to make them trivial to dodge; unfortunately, this also makes them honestly seem somewhat boring. Why not reduce the damage enemies inflict and/or increase the supply / reduce the cost of healing items instead?
There are a few aspects in which, despite appearances, the demo comes across as unpolished. There were a couple of points - especially one after exiting a door - where I took immediate unavoidable damage from an enemy I couldn't see coming. For that matter, triggers for some doors and NPCs seem extremely picky about where you need to stand to activate them. On the subject of input prompts, at various points the game seems to forget I've been using a gamepad all along, and reverts to showing keyboard inputs until I press a button; this seems to happen even upon room transitions. The lore could use a copyediting pass, as I noticed a few typos throughout. Given how _much_ lore there is even in the demo though, this is somewhat understandable, especially combined with the strict timeline of Next Fest.
Also on the subject of lore: I admittedly haven't read the full text of A Christmas Carol, having only seen various adaptations, but it seems like the vast majority of characters introduced are entirely new and completely unrelated to the original story. I can't help but think this game could have easily featured a completely original cast and plot in that case, and I worry that the choice of Ebenezer might just be a blatant attention-grab (I mean, it worked in my case). As I said though, the lore clearly shows a considerable amount of effort either way.
I found this demo somewhat intriguing, but I think I'll wait and see how the full release pans out. No specific release window has been indicated, so hopefully that leaves ample opportunity for improvement.
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