Found a bug.
When the dragon appears, if you die from the boulder, restart from the checkpoint, then run over the elevated platform, you fall through the platform, but survive with no way to get back up and continue the game.
Reviews for "Thoreau"
Nice looking game in slow motion.
Nice looking limbo art, lovely smooth animations, cool fild grain. I wish I could move faster. I really like your "sight" concept. Like echo-location. Awesome!
I got an actionscript error:
Parameter hitTestObject must be non-null.
at flash.display::DisplayObject/_hitTest ()
at flash.display::DisplayObject/hitTestO bject()
at Game/update()
Aside from some polish and playtesting issues, this is a great-looking start for a game that could evolve into something really cool. Keep up the great work.
"I must slay the illusions!" Thoreau shouted.
"No, Thoreau... you are the illusions"
Then Thoreau was an illusion.
I don't think I've ever intentionally spoiled a game before, but I want to save people the time of wondering what the "mysterious" story might be. Long story short, it's all a hallucination. Now you don't have to waste twenty minutes playing this thing at the snail's pace it makes your character move.
I'm scoring this higher than I normally would because it's got REALLY impressive graphics and a haunting soundtrack for a game made in four days, but don't make any mistake here, folks: gameplay-wise, it's sluggish, buggy, and oversimplified, with a cliche storyline and giving absolutely no distinction between what is and isn't safe to touch. I walked right up to a boulder that had already fallen and touched it and it killed me on the spot- several separate times.
It gets even worse when there becomes a spot necessary to jump on TOP of a boulder to progress, but the kicker is that unless the boulder is completely settled, you kill yourself again when it shifts a centimeter to the right as you land on it. -_-
5/10 for bug issues, and that's being generous.
Trying too hard
I understand wanting to make a game that doesn't hold hands, but that isn't what you did. You abused 'fake difficulty' (nostalgiacritic and several others have done videos on this) to the point that, with only some exception the game is about memorizing the level. It's not always that there is no way to know a trap is coming ahead of time. . . falling block you can hear, ditto the arrows -- but the spike trap above-all irks me, there is no way other than using your sight ability to check.
It was a nice try, and certainly not bad, I can throw these same complaints at jsut about every NES era game, and most anything at all reminiscent of LIMBO. Why is it okay that LIMBO killed you on purpose without really being fair about it and that was okay? Because you were a powerless little child, and the deaths were brutal and wrong and innately disturbing. . . .in this game you're a moderately creep man(?) with an advantageous power, and the deaths are boring, in addition to a too-long respawn animation.
It's not bad. . . .but it just isn't as FUN as it could be -- and the "warning" opener in the comments just feels so . . . ascendant. It implies to the reader that the author is saying "Yeah, I know how to play this game and you don't, so I'm going to kill you, over and over and over until you learn." I hope that wasn't what the author meant or was thinking when they wrote it (though the elitist response to 'hand-holding' in games in general is still a tad irksome, it is far more forgivable) but feel that it serves pointing that out anyway.
BUT, by flash standards mate -- good game, nice work, and so and so forth. I'm actually holding Team Thoreau here to a higher standard than 'just' flash games, especially given the remarkably short time frame this emerged in -- so also keep all that in mind.
Bravo guys, keep it up.
Nothing very enjoyable about this game
It just isn't fun. It's a trail and error game, where you're the guinea pig to die over and over again, realizing that you cannot touch blocks after they've fallen, and cannot move any faster than snail's pace.
Meh.