The Curse of Illmoore Bay. Back this!

[F34R]

Looks really nice!! Love the animations and the story.

 

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seconddimension/the-curse-of-illmoore-bay

Edited May 17, 2019 by F34R

[+Starwander]

Just backed project, thanks for sharing.

[+Yurkie]

Bumping to see what people think of the game.

 

[+jgkspsx]

It looks cool. I’d like to try it.

[+jgkspsx]

So this is available on Antstream. Unfortunately my input lag is horrible and it really hurts the game. But initial impressions:

 

Music is fantastic. Like, top 1% of the library good. It uses all of the voices of the synth cleverly and to amazing effect.

 

Graphics are stunning. Fluid and fast animation, very well chosen color palettes, just terrific.

 

Unfortunately, gameplay does not live up to the rest of the package.
 

You can shoot, but you have limited ammo that is hard to replenish and the range is quite short. You can use melee attacks, but the range is tiny. There are many enemies you cannot attack at all because you cannot attack while jumping.

 

There are three characters, but one of them seems to have a weird slide to his movement that made him unplayable to me. The other two seem to play similarly, but the girl has the best jump and the best melee range and there is no reason to play as anyone else.

 

Enemies would be tolerable, but it is in the actual platforming that the game becomes unplayable to me. Antstream lag makes it worse, but the programming of the game is way too harsh. There is little momentum at play and the physics seem off, and jumps need to be pixel perfect or you will fall into the many bottomless pits. It feels like they were trying for an Apogee feel - Crystal Caverns or Commander Keen or Duke Nukem - but they did not get the physics right.

 

The characters can jump and nothing else. No slide, no double jump, no nothing. It means you have no way to move around gracefully, and no way to recover from mistakes.

 

To make matters worse, there are no checkpoints, so you start back from the beginning of the level every time you die.

 

It’s possible that without the lag it would play better, but I am not willing to make a $60 bet that it will. It is truly tragic as the audiovisual presentation is one of the very best on the system. Sigh.

 

I will say that the Antstream emulation is pretty janky, with sprites frequently just disappearing. So it’s possible that it is running too fast and that the real game would be better. But it’s an expensive bet to make ?