Howling Irons - DEMO

Not sure if it's just me but it says I cannot open the application and it does not show up in my Mac's privacy settings. Usually I can find the app in my settings and allow it to open anyway but now there's no such option. I'm on M2 Pro Ventura 13.5.2 if it helps.

Hi! after playing this game for a little bit, I have some praises and some criticisms. Here is my feedback:

- the aiming aspect is a little bit janky, the fact that you have to move towards an enemy to aim at it is a little weird. A way that this could be improved was to make the character always face towards the direction your mouse is. Another option is to implement free aim all the time, that way free aim could be used more and feel more fluid. 

- I can see the jump is similar to hollow knight or other games like that, but if feels a little slow and unresponsive. I would make the speed at which the character jumps faster. In general, I think the game might do good with a "speed up?"

- the art style is amazing, and the cutscenes look clean and high-quality. 

- Enemy hitboxes are kinda scuffed, I don't know if it's a game mechanic but sometimes my bullets go through enemies.

- Button mappings: as a trackpad player and a mac player, there is no middle click so melee attacks just don't work lol

Overall good game

Hello! I've been playing the game on my Steam Deck and I'm enjoying it very much. I just beat the second boss, and I'm very interested in what's next! I'm a huge metroidvania fan, and Howling Irons has definitely peaked my interest. I love the idea of the gunfights, as well as the rings to modify each gun on its own  I have  done feedback about the game and the overall experience:

- When respawning after death, players should get fully charged guns and 100/100 ammo. Otherwise, what every player will do immediately after dying will always be empty their guns, reload, and then rest to get full ammo. It's worth streamlining that.

- The dash feels a bit sluggish and hard to be relied upon. Since you lose some height when dashing, and unless you're perfectly over a platform you won't land on it, there's been times when I haven't been able to judge properly my jumps and I've ended up falling into a pit.

- The player's character should face the direction he's walking, even if the aim cursor is pointing the other way, and then he could turn if you start shooting. Especially when playing with a gamepad, it feels like you have to be using both sticks to walk properly in the right direction.

- The combat still feels a little bit stiff, the enemies don't have many moves (which is not a bad thing in itself), and having the guns mostly trivializes every enemy that does not have a ranged attack.

- The second boss (the lizard warrior) was hard to fight because the columns in the arena hide a lot of the telegraphed start of an attack, so it's very difficult to react (also the main character being hidden behind the columns doesn't help figuring out where are you and how to beat react). I did manage to beat the boss on my second attempt because of some sort of bug where he stopped moving at all, and I could unload all of my ammo without a care in the world.

I don't want to sound too critical with the game, I'm having good fun playing it and I'm excited about the final product because I think it has a lot of potential.

I'll be keeping a close eye on this project, because it's really cool!!

Hello! First off, I love the aethetic and the gameplay feels great! Definitely will be playing future versions and I'd be glad to pay money in the future! (Unfortunately i can't use my paypal right now cause my number is temp deactivated as I am travelling)

Unfortunately I was unable to finish this demo due to a bug. I cannot use my mouse to click on the in-game menu's. I'm not sure why, it works on the opening menu but none of the in-game ones, I was able to avoid it up until the blacksmith, by either killing myself during dialogs or just not using them, but now I am soft locked because I cannot do the blacksmith dialog.

Another minor bug I noticed is that when you enter and area jumping the game can fling you into the air.

Also some of my bullets and melee's don't seem to hurt enemies,  which I'm not sure is intentional iframes or a bug.

Overall really lovely game! It's too bad I can't finish it right now!

Absolutely blown away by this demo!  Fantastic story, great level design, and an absolutely beautiful game!

Absolutely nailed on art atmosphere and sound design!

Level design is also good.

What I've seen from the story seems pretty interesting so far and the dialogues were fun to read and the characters have cool designs.

The menus are also charming and original and I loved the ring idea, I always thought of something like that where you could put rings in each finger.

I liked a lot and I see there is a lot of potential so I'd like to give some constructive feedback if you might wanna take that into consideration

Gameplay:

In other games of the genre you usually have a really good sense of control of the character and it feels very responsive, in Howling Irons I'm afraid this is not the case as I feel the character is heavy to control, not because it's slow but because of the acceleration and deceleration being overwhelming in my opinion, not sure if this was the design choice.

The aiming (looking up and down to shoot) also takes a considerable time to change directions and that can be a bit frustrating since it has no reason to take that long, which makes it harder to take quick decisions when going for aerial enemies.

The original mapping of the keys are very weird, (I know you can remap but even so). Specially F to dash because usually people use the three middle fingers to control the movement and have to pull it off the D key to press F makes it very odd. I suggest go with the normal "left shift or ctrl shift".

I'm okay with being one shotted by falling of a cliff, but usually in the oneshotting sections of a game the checkpoint is near so it doesn't become annoying, also the platforming doesn't feel very great for me as it seems you have to always jump at the max value of your jump and it almost doesn't make it every single jump. More air control and a lighter character would be better in my opinion.

Bugs:

In one of the tutorial dialogues there are some words that are highlighted with blue, but as soons as the text starts appearing in the textbox, some code (that I assume is to make the letters blue) appears before it actually does it job.

If you stand in the very edge, the tip of any platform, and hold down to crouch, the character instead of crouching, he crouches and stands up very fast repeatedly and the sound effect gets very loud as it's repeating a thousand times per second.

I'm not sure if was intended but I had no HUD throughout the whole game but from the screenshots I could tell that there was suppose to have one (?).

All that said it's just my humble opinion on how this game can be improved. I really wish it succeeds and I hope the best for the team, otherwise wouldn't have written this essay! Good luck and keep up the good work!