Reviews for Demon Runner

[Primalmoon]

Artsy and Smooth, but generic and badly instructed

I like the art. I'm always impressed by the art that some people can come up with in a short amount of time.

As far as controlling the character, I'm glad that this game is very forgiving. I've played games like this where my timing had to be within a frame or two and those are hard, so I appreciate that I'm golden as long as I'm in the ballpark. I also like that even if I mess up I'm still alive, which I cannot say in some of these games in this genre (such as Hippolyta).

That said, other reflex games like this usually have some sort of rhyme and reason to why I need a different button to get over a different obstacle (each one is a different action), while here I press up, down, left, or right for no reason other than being penalized for pushing the wrong one. Since all the buttons seem to make me "jump", I see no reason why I should need a different button to get over the different obstacles. Other games make it be something like "left" is "roll", which is used to get over obstacles where rolling is helpful, and up is jump, and right is charge, down is burrow under the wall, etc., so that's a direction you could look into.

Besides not differentiating between the buttons well, it was also not very clear which button I was supposed to press for a given obstacle. Granted this derives a lot from the buttons not being differentiated in their own right, so that I can't intuit which button I should press ("this is a low hanging obstacle, so I should duck"). Without that, I'm forced to resort to the in game instructions. I read them before I played, but they made no sense to me without the context of actually seeing the game. I believe this is because they're just little lines that don't actually look like obstacles. Pictures of an actual obstacle might serve better. In the end I still had to die twice before I realized I had been pressing the wrong buttons (since I had apparently never pressed the correct button, all of my attempts looked the same).

And as I am already comparing to other games, I'd like to mention that this game seems rather uninspired, where it could have been a lot more. There could be more story (why is there a demon there? is he running to anywhere in particular or just running away? What's with these No Demons Allowed signs that end the level?)

General suggestions:
Currently I see no indication of how long the level is. Adding some kind of progress bar would be nice just as a user convenience.

There is also no way to get back to the instructions without refreshing the page, should I have desired to see them again. A link to the menu would be nice.

[padaloof]

alright

The art is fantastic and the beginning scene made me chuckle, but the game simply isn't all that entertaining and gets boring after quite awhile. Also, it makes me kinda dizzy.

[skala]

its a rhythm game?!

its actually not to bad. although you really do need to put some sort of barrier around the obstacles like a black line so you can actually see what's coming. other than that, that was a creative twist on rhythm games. good job

[WFWGAMER]

Interesting

The one that looks like a house push UP.
The one that looks like a ditch push DOWN.
The one that looks like a bumpy patch push LEFT.
The one that looks like a flat stump push RIGHT.
I agree with the lack of animation thus it gets a 7. Good idea though.

[Adept-Omega]

Counterintuitive controls; Good artwork

I can see from some of the other comments on this submission that the controls were confusing for many of the players. The big problem is that it's not explained at any point that the different types of block you need to jump over require you to press different directions. I believe many players are assuming (and I was as well), that up would be 'jump', down would be 'duck', and left right would be slow down / speed up, duck left / duck right, etc. Because all of the obstacles look like objects to be jumped over, this leads to players being unable to clear stage one. It doesn't help that the flashing arrow shows the button you /have/ pressed, rather than the one you /need to/.

Even factoring that in, the hit detection and jumping's a bit sloppy. The character seems more to jump into the house-shaped blocks than over them. When you understand how the controls work, the fatigue system's pretty forgiving, but it would probably be better to have a cleaner control / timing system with a slightly less forgiving fatigue system.

As others have pointed out, though, the animation's solid. The cutscenes, characters, and backgrounds look great. If this were an animation, I'd have scored it significantly higher.

I see that this submission was made for the Game Jam, and it's hard to expect perfection from a 72 hour project. The number one improvement I would suggest would simply be a clearer explanation of the controls, in particular becuase the player is asked to do counterintuitive things such as pressing down to jump over an obstacle without a prompt; it would change the game from confusing to playable for a lot of the viewers.