A great looking game! The idea of how rather than losing life, you gain skulls and that makes the fog appear quicker, fitting the theme quite nicely. The art is amazing even though their was 48 hrs. The sword swing felt a little unresponsive but everything else was awesome!

Sounds and art are amazing. the gameplay is interesting but i had difficulties with the attack and the hit feedback. I wasn't really sure when I hit an enemy. good job!

Great art and good audio. The animations and enemy designs are really solid especially for a gamejam.

The game not starting in fullscreen and locking the mouse inside was a bit annoying coupled with it's tendency to crash, when alt-tabbing and after dieing once and restarting I couldn't open the inital door again (?).

However I liked the classic gameplay and the mood of the title is really it's trong suit.

You're a beast! great game! <3

Twitter follower here, I would have expected nothing less. Great work, great execution, the graphics are superb, audio design is solid. Gameplay and idea work like a charm as well.

Wonderful game with great graphics, sound and execution.
The only critique I have is that in later levels, some tight corridors get completely blocked off by projectiles, and I also killed an enemy who's corpse ended up inside a wall and I couldn't replenish my health at it.

Definitely one of the best games I've played so far in LD40! Great work!

Definitely the best game I have played so far. The atmosphere is just fantastic, the sound and graphics go together very nicely and the gameplay is simple, but fun. Respect :D

The game ran a bit slow on my computer — but I assume that is because I was running it on macOS through Wine.

Fun game, great atmosphere and mood.

Great mood, game-feel, and all around atheistic. Good work!

Great mood! I have no idea why I died most of the time. I had 2 skulls and was fine on the bars on the sides but I would just drop dead late in the game. Also, using mouse to attack feels really bad, as does the long time out between when you attack and can move. Especially considering most of the combat seems to be attack then run and then go back and attack again. If your mouse was not in the right position and your attack misses you will get hit. This makes the game feel sluggish instead of tight. Very nice art and music! Also, the doors would open when attacked by enemies. This was weird. Also, being constantly on the clock for more blood after clearing a room didn't feel good. In binding of issac or zelda like games that this is derived from, you get a break after clearing a room to just pick up loot and this is an important emotional beat. Constantly being pushed forward doesn't feel great, especially when the doors are slow to open.

The music and the fog on the screen as soon as the thirst starts to kick in, it felt great! It shows very well the urge to consume more blood, to keep going. To open the door you had to attack it, at first it was not obvious

The mood is great and the gameplay is really fun, if difficult. One issue: the skulls disappear when you drink, but it seems like you're not any further from dying. I'm definitely going to keep playing, though!

AWESOME!! The enemies were all very interesting and the game was really fun to play. The "thirst" mechanic is Thrilling. Congrats!

Nice and simple game mechanics with great artwork. Very well done! I had a lot of fun playing this.

It's fun and well polished. Good job.

Amazing game and amazingly well-polished. Excellent work!

A great use of the theme, with a great aesthetic! I did get a bit lost but it was a nice challenge to figure out what was happening while playing. Overall a very well polished game!

The amount of polish is impressive for a compo game! The mood in the game is thick thanks to a great soundtrack and graphics, they really sell you the idea of the depths.

A thing that I would improve is the thirst and death mechanics. They aren't really intuitive, and I had to read your explaination on the page and go back to the game to actually get them. The skulls on the upper left look a lot like lifes, so I was very confused when I didn't die after getting hit multiple times. I also thought that the bars were indicators of how much time I had left to kill all monsters before opening the door. I can't help on how to make this more intuitive here, unfortunately.

Anyway, this was just a nitpick on my part, and the game was amazing, so great job!

Amazing graphics as always, but the combat was a bit too sticky for my tastes. The death mechanic was really confusing, as was the doors (I thought you had to kill all the enemies, but I think you just have to hit it?)

The art and ambient sound makes the mood so great. I like the idea too but I didn't notice it till I read the game page. Overall, great game.

This game is beautyfull. Good job. I really like the art style, and all is so consistent.

It's a little hard to find a failing, but because I always like to find one, I should recommand this one :
Maybe a little more effect on the blood drink.
I really love the Idea that the more you drink, the more you need.
The thirst effect is good, but it should have a little more effect on the game.
Maybe losing progressively the controls of movement to be forced to go toward an enemy depending on the thirst level.

So, thank you so much for this experience.
I loved it.

this game looks super good! There's so much polish in the visuals and I love it.
The visual effect of the thirst is super cool and so subtle, I like how it takes me a second to realize what is happening.
As for suggestions I think that maybe you should make it obvious if you have already drunk an enemy's blood. Maybe get rid of the green blood whenever you're done drinking.

Nice game Saint! Impressive what you made in short time. Congrats!

Belo jojinho Santo! Impressionante o que você fez em tão pouco tempo. Parabéns.

The blood of my enemies isn't as refreshing as an ice cold Pepsi MAX® but pretty close! 5 stars.

Amazing game! I almost lost it when you open the first gate and the music starts, amazing way to set up the mood!

Here's something that maybe could be improved: when attacking, it felt a little weird to attack facing the mouse position and not the character's direction.

perfect pixel, macabre ambient music (I liked it), very good gameplay, I'll try to go from level 13 (I got it the most)

Fun! The style was great, and the gameplay was pretty smooth!

Superb.

Amazing graphics and wonderful mechanics, the soundtrack combines with the game environment, congratulations you're wonderful.

Awesome art as always ^^. Impressive that you made it all by yourself.

Whaou. The art is great. And the game looks deep for compo submission. Very good job, and thank you for the experience.

Idea is great, awesome graphics and audio, fits the theme pretty well and is extremely moody as well. Great game!

This is really, really impressive! I follow you on Twitter and I love to see your work in action - this definitely lives up to the high bar your other work and tutorials have set. Awesome job on this.

Cool game, the graphics and audio were really great!

Hi Pedro, I enjoyed your game. Frankly speaking, I enjoyed your game a bit too much I guess. After having played 10 hours plus I even decided to make a video in speedrunning fashion.

Lets talk about your game:

First of all I want to address that you nailed the theme, in my opinion, of this Ludum Dare. Having a stunmechanic that becomes worse the more often you got hit is very fitting. The second theme based mechanic is losing time faster after you drank from the eldritch blood. You could also go so far and tie your time mechanic to a H.P. Lovecraft theme. For instance, every time you drink from the blood you become a little bit more nervous and your insanity meter depletes therfore a bit faster or some sort of H.P. Lovecraft horror theme (because you know everyone in a H.P. Lovecraft story becomes mad a certain point in that story).

Secondly I want to talk about your enemy design. What was outstanding is the fact that the enemies are designed orthogonaly, meaning that they have different attributes. You have the EyeOrbs that avoid you and try to snipe you (trust me they will snipe you) and on the other hand you have the DeepOnes. The DeepOnes are incontrast to the EyeOrbs very slow, but pursue you and in contrast to that you have the fast moving fast attacking Cultists. There also enemies that are almost completly immobile but can take a lot of hits and shoot with a spreed shot pattern to compensate for their immobility.

The next topic is the level design. A bit simple. However the Levels you created did their job very good. At a certain point in my WR run you can see that used a corner to slow down two Cultists. Otherwise killing two agroed Cultists would have been a difficult task. I realy appreciated the H.P. Lovecraft inspired atmosphere of To The Depths. Being a Lovecraft fan I realy enjoid the crawl through the ruins.

The last point is the gameplay. Overall the feel was very good and it almost felt if the game was in a refined state. If you time your attacks on the DeepOnes correctly you can stunlock them. I were also able to stunlock the Boss (not sure if it was intended). It was almost like I was dancing with the Yogs. The Yogs were especially hard after I managed to reach them for the first couple of times. Until I noticed that a Yog will immediatly do a slash attack after you attacked it and you only had to repeat that until it was dead (repeating that hit and evade tactic is what I mean when saying "it almost felt like dancing"). I also used the Shoggoth to my advantage, because the shots of the Shoggoths can also open the doors. Those Shoggoth shots could also open doors that are not on screen which is especially nice in a speedrunning context.

Overall the experience with To The Depths was great. I had a blast playing your game and it also inspired me to make my own To The Depths (and I am definitely waiting for updates on this game^^).


Bug: not sure with this one, but it seems that the reaction time of the cultists becomes longer the longer the game is running. Could be a problem with the engine?


BTW I am the WR holder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRKRoScYKlw

@cptn-b Wow, thanks a lot for such a detailed review! This inspires me to maybe work some more on this in the future!