Mines of Grimvale - Released

Anyone care to share a review? Is the game playable?

Fluent said:

Anyone care to share a review? Is the game playable?

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Its not really playable, the display window is far too small, unless you set resolution to 800x600, its really not good looking on a modern screen with those resolutions.

As for the dungeon layout, it starts like dungeon master with characters to pick from an hall, then it pits you against very hard enemies right from the beginning, without even some scrolls to remember the basic runic combinations for spells, and almost no equipment too.
Now on Level 2 , more of the same , hp bloated monsters decimating party in a few hits , very tedious to kill.
Every encounters are sprites from dungeon master java, eye of the beholder etc...So far everything seems ripped from those game.The art direction is completely incoherent done, without care . A serious lack of care thats really how i would sum up the game .They are throwing everything they could get their hands on mixing 3D , 2d sprites, portraits are a mismatch of their old games.

I have not explored further for all of those reasons making the game a pain to play.Maybe it gets better i dont know.

Not playable for me currently, or for others in this thread by the looks of things. The game comes up in a very small screen that can't be expanded. The text is too small to read (and black on a blue background, which doesn't help). The character creation screen looks interesting enough but it is illegible as it stands. I had a cursory look around the first map and encountered some blob monsters. It seemed to run ok (except for the screen issue), but I didn't play for long and others are saying that it actually freezes up after a while.

I PM'd the devs about the screen issue and they said they are working to fix it. I'm generally ok with these things taking time for hobbyist devs to resolve, but the devs also said earlier in this very thread that the problems had actually already been fixed in an earlier update. Which they clearly hadn't.

When playing hobbyist dev games I like to have the feeling that I'm playing a labour of love. I'll generally forgive any manner of rough edges in such situations. I'm not getting that vibe here. A few more updates and better dialogue with purchasers etc would go a long way to putting that right. Clearly the posts in the other thread haven't painted them in a positive light either though.

I noticed the screen issue as well. I hope they fix it.

As for difficulty, there are several difficulty options, right? -2 to 2, I think I saw in one of the edit files.

Here is the program I was talking about in the Cave of Sorrows thread. You can use this to auto-change your desktop resolution when starting a game, thus you can at least workaround the screen issue until they fix it.

http://12noon.com/?page_id=641

So, at 800x600 it's playable. If you maximize the screen it appears in the middle. I had to turn the brightness wayyy up on my monitor to be able to read the character creation screen. Black on dark blue definitely doesn't help. The wall graphics look nice, actually. The items and other art is low-res and the portraits are from their other games.

I just played it for 5 minutes to see if it would function. I don't know how to even attack with a weapon, though. I killed a slime by kicking it and punching it. WASD doesn't seem to work, but maybe there's an option for that. There are a few settings menus but I forgot to look through them. Sound is...quiet. Play your own music, I guess. Sounds effects are there. I dunno, it seems like a basic old-school dungeon crawler to me. Reminds me of another dungeon-crawler, Verlies.

Verlies - https://tyler-kitano.itch.io/verlies