Released pre;COGNITION [Jam Version]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaa I feel so bad saying this, so let me just preface that I think you've made something super amazing. I gave went on a long speech giving some thoughts at the end of my last stream and while I've tried to put all those thoughts in here, it is probably worth watching the end of that stream as well.

So I haven't actually beaten the game, I got to the final boss with a Level 5 eric, and well of course I lost against the level 21 beast because I hadn't done any party building or training. And I just don't think I'm going to be able to beat this game. The path to get to the boss feels long, and then on top of that each attempt I take would require me to train up a brand new team and manage hp and pp sustainably while grinding. And then all that effort would be lost if I fail that attempt. I really became invested in the story and the game, and so I REALLY REALLY REALLY do want to see the ending. I just think it is probably not something possible for me without putting a lot of pain and time and trial and error into it.

Just to start off with what I LOVED about this game. This game is a pure time loop game, normally timeloop games cheat a little bit and make it so each loop isn't actually identical. Sometimes they make it so that you literally can't do a certain action until you discover something else in a previous loop first. Sometimes they let you keep items. But this game is a pure time loop game. Loop 1 is the exact same as loop 100. You can beat the game in 1 loop if you want. But because of how the game is built, you are going to explore and discover things through multiple loops before you actually beat it. So I think the game is really well built in that sense.

I also really liked the story of this game and how it was presented. The scope of the story expanding from a small mining group to a evil research team and their quest for an all-knowing pokemon that results in the death of many. Learning everything through little notes really feels satisfying, because it feels like you're a detective and you're piecing together everything. So really well done there too.

And then the aesthetics and music, just super super super super nice. The UI, amazing, the sprites, amazing, the fakemon, amazing, THE WAY THAT THE FINAL BOSS PRESENTS DIAGLOGUE, AMAZING!!!!! presentation was just spectacular.

With all that said, I did have some issues with how mechanics were put together and how certain parts of the game felt to play:

-Most of this comes from the Loensdale town, it is a massive expansive town, with lots of areas to explore and lore secrets to find, however, it is all cave encounters. The massive map and the fact that there are so many things to find, and places to get lost in, do not mesh well with this. And I found that this section of the game was just me spamming run away as I slowly inched my way to new places of the map. And depending on what order you visit places in the city, you will be expected to backtrack, which the cave encounters just make painful.

-And somewhat tying in with the encounter problem, I felt that the pokemon battling aspect of this game was not well balanced. in two ways:
- Building a party felt pretty hard, because of time=difficulty, you would have to constantly fight wild encounters to keep up, at a rate that seems pretty rough especially when you have to consider that there is no xp. share, and each pokemon has to be leveled up individually. Meanwhile, healing can only be done through items, and the only way to replenish items when you've explored your area is to fight pokemon, but you can't guarantee that you'll get an item, or that it will even be the kind of item you need. And so you really shouldn't be grinding because most of the time it will be at a loss of HP and PP. But if you don't grind then you will quickly be incredibly underleveled.
- I don't know if pokemon battling adds to the enjoyment of this game all that much. It is a game all about exploring and discovering a mystery, but every time you reset you need to train a whole new team. Of course you then have the problem that the battling is required for this game, you need a lose condition to validate a reset, and losing a pokemon battle is your lose condition. And making it so that your party persists between time loops would make the time loops redundant. So yeah, I can't really offer a solution for this, it just feels that the mechanics don't mix well as they are. (that being said, this could just be personal bias since I am someone who is quite tired of plain pokemon battling as it is)

Some more minor critiques that are more a result of not having enough time I imagine.
-Controls feel like a weird choice in battles. I really appreciated that nearly everything has button prompts, but attacking being x and then confirming an attack being c feels odd to press.
-I think having a "demon core" which can end your run just because you interacted with an item on the table is a bit of a mood ruiner. The game is about interacting with everything and gathering clues. It feels unfair that looking at a shiny object on a table can end your run and the whole team that you've built.
-Sometimes it feels like the lore clue snippet things are a bit too dense or go on for longer than needed. The lab in the cave just felt like a lot of reading and mumbo jumbo for what info needed to get across to the player. That being said, most of it was super fun to discover, for the most part it was well paced and good.
-I said this in stream, but with a game like this with such a reliance on reading handwritten pixelated letters, it feels like a transcription option is really needed. Some letters felt worse than reading unown font.
-I don't believe the difficulty system is explained in game, I only knew about it because I read the thread which I feel shouldn't be required.

I really liked this game, and I think you've made something really cool and really unique. But I do feel that it could have benefited from more playtesting perhaps from a 3rd party to smoothen out how the game plays. Please do not be disheartened by what I've said. I really like what you've done, and it is one of the coolest games I've seen in a jam. So please please please keep up the good work in making amazing and unique games.

Additions:

• Accessibility - Added transcripts to a few of the particularly unreadable notes
• Accessibility - "Friendlier" error handling
• Accessibility - The game now comes with an installer
• Balancing - Added a cooldown on cave encounters
• Controller support (may not work entirely)
• Graphics - Added kane's missing portrait and overworld

Changes:

• Input - the return key can now do almost everything the C key does
• Internal - upgrade engine from mkxp-z 2.4 to mkxp-zr 3.0-alpha
• Gameplay - you can now ask tess about the rising aggression in the local wild pokémon
• Gameplay - moved the "demon core" to an area earlier in the game
• Gameplay - entering the password for the shortcut down to the meteorite in loesdale hollow now lowers the bridge
• Gameplay - passcode entry screens no longer start with "0000"

Bugfixes:

• Bosses now correctly scale in level alongside random encounters
• Eric drops his pokéball again
• Fixed a bug where the time loop still occurred in the final area of the game
• Fixed crash on timeout loop
• Fixed crash on beating penultimate boss
• Fixed player always being on top after entering the Wretchenfell Meteorite
• Loesdale is no longer full of major graphical errors on GPUs with texture cache limits below 16384
• Pokecenter actually works now

Removals:

• Internal - Removed DiscordXP (discord support integrated into mkxp-zr)
• Gameplay - Removed lore note a1_rt_taillow (it was a red herring anyway)

v1.1.2 Fixes:

• The game no longer crashes immediately if Discord is not installed.
• Fixed title theme not changing in volume when adjusting BGM volume in options

v1.1.1 Additions:

• Accessibility: Added a few more transcripts.
• Accessibility: Added (or rather, finished adding) the ability to disable certain fogs that may impair your ability to see in certain areas of the game.
• Accessibility: You can now force the game to always display keyboard button prompts.

v1.1.1 Changes:

• Compatibility: The game can now run on GPUs with a cache max (texture size limit) as low as 2048. It is highly unlikely it will ever get lower than this. Correction: Due to a number of particularly large lightmap textures, pre;COGNTION does not currently run on GPUs with a cache max of 2048.

v1.1.1 Fixes:

• Fixed a crash when attempting to read a transcript of a lore note that does not have a transcript.
• Fixed a misaligned event transfer upon entering the ██████████.
• Fixed a misaligned event transfer that prevents the player from accessing the helipad.
• Fixed a tile collision issue that prevents the player from accessing the helipad.
• Fixed a bug where the first phase of the final boss would be skipped.
• Fixed a bug where the final battle would loop forever.
• Fixed a bug where the credits would not display on the bad ending.
• Fixed a misaligned event transfer that prevents the player from accessing the helipad.
• Fixed some "jammed doors"

In many ways this game is a masterpiece and definitely my fav in concept for this Winter Jam. I've never seen a Pokemon game outside of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series use this kind of 'reset' mechanic before and the way it integrates with the already griping story is really, really cool... But unfortunately pretty much all of the 'memorization/learning will get you through the game' stuff that hooked me onto the idea of this game is strictly limited to passwords giving shortcuts that only slightly cut down on travel time and the location of the same three item types you get almost everywhere (aka the super repels, super/hyper potions and various flavors of pokeball) which is... Less than ideal given how easy it is to get mons KOed trying to catch certain species of Pokemon while in the later parts of the cave and in the city, and then have no way to heal without far too much backtracking.
Like sure, risk assessment is clearly part of the gameplay and all that, but it makes making a mistake in this otherwise great game a LOT more punishing and time consuming than it has any right to be, and also feels like something that could be averted/lessened with faster/bigger short cuts (like IDK there could've been a house in the city that mentioned an Abra in the forest liking jokes, and should you reset past that you can befriend that Abra in the forest and get it to teleport you from where it's hanging out to the house its human friends lived in) and more 'high risk, high reward' things like Rare Candies, TMs, Revival items, the Exp Share/All, an Escape Rope that can take the player back to the starting area, rare pokemon to catch, etc to reward players willing to explore or try optimizing their gameplay with something beyond the 'only interesting on the first discovery' tidbits of lore hidden everywhere. Additionally powerful fixed encounters in places, like say, near rare items, bits of lore or a one off heal spot could've really amped up the Pokemon battling aspect and encouraged players to try building a team despite the risks of losing it.
...Also part of me really wishes the starter if nothing else could keep any earned level ups or learned moves just so its worth actually putting effort into trying to make it stronger as opposed to catching other things but I can fully understand that going against the game's vibe and why it's not a thing even if I really really wish it at least had Confusion already when you first get it XDD

That's just my 'consistently overextending and getting mons KOed while I'm in the city' take though and overall I'm still really impressed with this game - Also looking over the other comments it looks like you raised up the Starter mon's levels quite a lot? If so I'm very glad for that because I wasn't able to grind for exp beyond the stuff you get for catching Pokemon at all due to a bug/glitch where it would just skip over giving any reward for KOing a mon (could 'grind' by catching but not worth it, even with the cool dropped goodies the caught mons would give me) and judging from the error reports I think it's connected to the game crashing glitch that happened when my adorable Nickit tried to evolve had literally just beaten Zeta and gotten exp that for once wasn't skipped like all the other times so... Yeah. ^^; Very, very glad the starter and other mons are all around the same levels as everything else or else I wouldn't have much hope of ever beating it.

Anyway 7/10 star game, hope my rambling thoughts on ways games like this could be improved were at least somewhat interesting if not directly helpful for what you might be going for/willing to add to the game and may all your future projects shine just as brightly~ <3