In Development Pokemon: Polar Call - Demo

Muffyang · Jan 2, 2024

I'll put my review under spoiler tags, but overall I just found it disappointing and tapped out early.

Played for about 40minutes, found 4/5 of the Journal/Clues. The exploration is boring, the world lacks in fine details, the snowstorm overlay just makes everything look worse, and overall there's just nothing interesting to it. I'm not a big fan of ambient tracks, and these felt very "stock" and bland even for the genre.
Polar Call is lacking the detail, care, and intrigue you've had in your previous games.

Bugs:
Activating a beacon has the sprite become a black square until the area is reloaded.
You can activate the central beacon and teleport to the southern one, even if you hadn't repaired it.
Various minor tiling errors, the semi-central lake has no north-facing shores, westernmost wall had a few trees half-cut off.

A: You'll find out how in the opening tutorial.

Not only is there no tutorial, doing the MC's stated goal of fixing the beacon is an immediate softlock. Since you have sparkle effects for interactables it's easy to overlook the heaters as decorative.
Needing to go outside and check a house before the Crowbar(and Charger?) spawn is just random, discourages exploring "before you're supposed to" and makes dying just slightly more tedious.

Dynamic exploration that requires basic resource management.

The exploration is entirely static, you either have enough heat to actually explore or you don't. You don't gradually gain or lose heat and need to duck into shelters regularly and there's no penalty to just slowly shuffling through the empty white void.
Actually repairing the beacons is entirely useless since it eats up power you need to not die and there's no reason to teleport. It's not even QoL since the story is entirely linear looking.
The map is just terrible, it's not uncommon to be able to walk in a straight line for minutes without seeing anything at all, much less anything of interest. The minimap from the flags has no sort of landmarking, and the few spirits I found didn't have much notable to say.
The world itself is very bland and uninteresting even when you find one of the 5 or so landmarks. What I managed to piece together was "A shooting star landed, people's errant wishes came true in a way that left nothing around". The barkeep wished for no pokemon mucking up his pub, which is why the the pokemon fangame doesn't have any. Some idiot wished for an eternal snowy aftertoon.

I do hope for this to be the type of game where people take notes.

there is no menu for the game.

Even though there's no penalty to just tabbing out to take notes, most players would want to pause to do so. There's also no real puzzles I found in my playtime, and only a few vague directions that didn't require note taking over memorization. Player don't need to plan an efficient route, even if the directions are misremembered you can just meander around until you find it.
Most of the UI elements are just clutter, and having a menu pop up for them instead would be better. Given how fast the you can get all the items, you don't need a constant reminder of them. You don't have to manage someplace to keep your tools, and fret over backtracking vs heat, no worry about running into a situation you need to go back and grab a tool you thought you were done with to move on.
The UI just obscures the top part of the screen, which is made more annoying by how the only direct directions I got were to "head north". The UI is also inconsistent with the prompt images.

All that said, hoping for a full version.

Elle · Jan 2, 2024

Muffyang said:
I'll put my review under spoiler tags, but overall I just found it disappointing and tapped out early.

Played for about 40minutes, found 4/5 of the Journal/Clues. The exploration is boring, the world lacks in fine details, the snowstorm overlay just makes everything look worse, and overall there's just nothing interesting to it. I'm not a big fan of ambient tracks, and these felt very "stock" and bland even for the genre.
Polar Call is lacking the detail, care, and intrigue you've had in your previous games.

Bugs:
Activating a beacon has the sprite become a black square until the area is reloaded.
You can activate the central beacon and teleport to the southern one, even if you hadn't repaired it.
Various minor tiling errors, the semi-central lake has no north-facing shores, westernmost wall had a few trees half-cut off.

Not only is there no tutorial, doing the MC's stated goal of fixing the beacon is an immediate softlock. Since you have sparkle effects for interactables it's easy to overlook the heaters as decorative.
Needing to go outside and check a house before the Crowbar(and Charger?) spawn is just random, discourages exploring "before you're supposed to" and makes dying just slightly more tedious.

The exploration is entirely static, you either have enough heat to actually explore or you don't. You don't gradually gain or lose heat and need to duck into shelters regularly and there's no penalty to just slowly shuffling through the empty white void.
Actually repairing the beacons is entirely useless since it eats up power you need to not die and there's no reason to teleport. It's not even QoL since the story is entirely linear looking.
The map is just terrible, it's not uncommon to be able to walk in a straight line for minutes without seeing anything at all, much less anything of interest. The minimap from the flags has no sort of landmarking, and the few spirits I found didn't have much notable to say.
The world itself is very bland and uninteresting even when you find one of the 5 or so landmarks. What I managed to piece together was "A shooting star landed, people's errant wishes came true in a way that left nothing around". The barkeep wished for no pokemon mucking up his pub, which is why the the pokemon fangame doesn't have any. Some idiot wished for an eternal snowy aftertoon.

Even though there's no penalty to just tabbing out to take notes, most players would want to pause to do so. There's also no real puzzles I found in my playtime, and only a few vague directions that didn't require note taking over memorization. Player don't need to plan an efficient route, even if the directions are misremembered you can just meander around until you find it.
Most of the UI elements are just clutter, and having a menu pop up for them instead would be better. Given how fast the you can get all the items, you don't need a constant reminder of them. You don't have to manage someplace to keep your tools, and fret over backtracking vs heat, no worry about running into a situation you need to go back and grab a tool you thought you were done with to move on.
The UI just obscures the top part of the screen, which is made more annoying by how the only direct directions I got were to "head north". The UI is also inconsistent with the prompt images.

All that said, hoping for a full version.

Fair enough. Honestly, I've never done something like this before, so I knew there was a chance I could fail at it. Even though it seems like it needs a lot of work, I appreciate you playing it and sharing your helpful critique.

mucka33 · Jan 5, 2024

Finally got to sit down and give this demo a proper playthrough. Will post my thoughts below, there will be some spoilers for those who haven't tried it out yet:

First, I gotta say, the atmosphere is suuuper nice! The muted colour palette with yellow highlighting key features? Very, very effective. As I got farther in, I knew that if I found yellow objects, there was Lore I had to find. Like when I stumbled upon the crash site. Or the Sugar Mines.

The music was better than I expected, for being stock sounds. The Wilderness theme was on-point, and reminds me of the Pixelmon OST "The Frozen Lands" (amazing song, so having a theme that was reminiscent of that really enticed me to set out and explore!) Some of the sound effects (like bumping into things) were a tad loud, but not the worst.

Speaking of exploration, I think the Wilderness does exactly what it sets out to do. It's a large, open area with few landmarks. That's the point. If ever I felt really lost, I'd wander until I found a flag to orient myself on the grid-map, then carry on from there. And in wandering around, I did find the grave site, which was a nice little surprise. I think having more "easter egg" type locations would be neat for future versions. Things that don't necessarily have a progression purpose, but add to the world building and general atmosphere. Maybe some of these areas could have extra resources too, to encourage exploration beyond going from outpost to outpost. I ran low on power (I probably saved too much...) so I never did get to light any beacons, unfortunately.

I'm also a Big Dumb and didn't realize I had to use the heater first before using the crowbar on any of the other buildings...resetting 2-3 times and having to re-enter my name sucked lol. That's mostly on me, but maybe a save RIGHT as the playable game starts would be nice. Just so you can figure out how the mechanics work without having to sit through the intro and naming screen if you screw up like I did :')

The story is intriguing, and I'm curious to explore later versions to learn more! As Muffyang summarized, it seems like a meteor/shooting star crashed, and people started to get exactly what they wished for...albeit with unfortunate consequences. Monkey paw-type situation haha. With the beacons being Clefairy-shaped, I suspect there's something related going on there. Maybe. Maybe I'm overthinking it :P

Overall, I think there's a lot of promise to this project! With a bit more added to find in the Wilderness, and an expansion to the story/locations, I can see this being a very fulfilling little game! I hope you keep working on it and we can see a full release one day :)

(Also your tilesets are so nicely coloured and detailed, hhh)

Thank you for the demo!

RubyB.Rose · Feb 1, 2024

what about pokemon exigence?

In Development Pokemon: Polar Call - Demo

Attachments

Muffyang

Novice

Elle

Maker of Many and Finisher of Few

mucka33

Rookie

RubyB.Rose

Rookie