Haven't played the game all the way, but, so far, I'm loving it. It's got a nice story, and the gameplay kind of reminds me of a traditional flash RPG. Also, I translated the binary on that first terminal on Aeryl using a translator I found online, and oh my god I couldn't stop laughing. "aeo4ever" Made my day.
Reviews for "Zos"
This game was fun. Not very difficult but that didn't matter because I found myself immersed in the simple story and reminded a bit of both classic NES games and old adventures games on PC.
Only issue I had was on The planet Lyelei or whatever inside the thing.... When I lit the orb there was an error/bug and I ended up locked in a platform and had to reset to my last save point.
All around though great work.
This game was okay. Mixing potions was an interesting idea and the controls felt good to me. No problems with the platforming so all is good there.
The story was a bit odd to me (There's an evil creature that's eating the entire universe... and only alchemy and the distilled life force of seven dead people from seven unrelated planets are able to stop it? What's so special about them?)
But I do have a lot of complaints that keep this from being perfect:
1) Gathering ingredients when you run out of them is a major pain and really breaks up the gameplay when your progression is suddenly halted by having to backtrack just for some random ingredient. Here I am wanting to repair a ship and I'm missing the little blue gem things ("blazestones")... Since I'm out of them, I can't look them up in my inventory anymore and while it doesn't actually matter, I can't remember what they're called. The real question is where do I get those again? So I ran through all of Elaris to go find some. A reminder of where each ingredient can be found in abundance would be nice. Or perhaps make all potions be infinite, but with cooldowns for some of them (i.e. health potions)
2) A lot of the potions seemed to be very limited in use and come up rarely (and unexpectedly). The infinite potions were fine, but the potions you drink tended to be "Oh, darn, this one ledge is just too high. Let me make a potion that lasts for a minute and waste it on just one jump." or "This computer is just too tough for me. Better drink a potion just to read its one message." I.e. There wasn't a time when I needed lots of high jumps in a row, just sections where I needed a single high jump. And of course that's if you even have that potion. Good luck if you need to go find the ingredients. This makes any of these obstacles into intentional wastes of my time / ingredients.
3) If you die, all of the potions you used since your last save are not refunded. So if you were in a boss fight and used up all of your healing potions and still died, then you won't have any healing potions for the second round so you need to either hope you've magically gotten better at fighting the boss, or need to backtrack to find more ingredients.
4) Navigating the potions mid-fight with only Q and E is pretty annoying and at least for me was prone to error. More than once was I trying to switch back to the fire potion only to have switched to my health potion instead and wasted it at full health. Shortcuts to the different potions might have been helpful.
5) The invisibility potion says it makes you invincible. That's not true (or at least not on the final boss... haven't tried elsewhere)
6) I felt somewhat disappointed at how few potions I could make. Only twelve potions out of twelve ingredients seems low when there are a total of 220 possible combinations.
7) You should disable the combinations of the infinite potions after you've made one of them, or at least make it more obvious that it is infinite from the potion mixing page. I was annoyed when I wasted all of my ingredients just making the freeze potions only to find out they were infinite already.
8) I noticed a few times there were areas that would need a high jump to get to, and have an ingredient or two up there... Why would I want to spend three ingredients to get less than three ingredients? Are you trying to trick me?
Great game with good alchemy mechanics that reminds me of Secret of Evermore.
But I ran into a little problem at the end of the game. When going through X'o'thchu's teeth, there's a point where you must cross a lava/poison pit with Zero Gravity (or maybe Invisibility potion.) But once inside, there are no more ingredients to get back out if you run out! Please fix, and maybe I'll come back to get the last few medals I'm missing.
Btw, pretty good ending for such a short game. Poor dog.
Asvegren responds:
You took the hard way over the lava. There is a way you can cross it with a potion that is infinite... (hint hint)
like old commodore games good