itch.io

I've tested it multiple times in the training area and the survival mode. Can't get the second combo hit to land on an opponent who's vulnerable. It doesn't help that the first hit being the one to break an enemy's guard will interrupt your combo to knock them back, but even so, following up by whiffing the first swing means the second attack can pass all the way through the opponent's body without registering as a hit. With the right positioning, a parry into a combo has the same result. Opponent is knocked back by the parry, out of reach for the first swing of the combo, but the second attack passes through them without killing, and it's always the third hit which kills.

And when I say "passing through" it can be anything from the tip slicing through the front of the body where it should be catching the front few pixels of the torso, to the blade being visible sticking out behind the opponent, and nothing works.

Might be a hit detection problem in the current build? It registers for enemies blocking it, though.

Fun trick.
Press 1.
Press esc.
Opening the menu while paused unpauses.

The first attack of your basic combo and the jumping slash share a death animation.
The third combo attack shares its death animation with the non-focus sword draw attack.
The the focus+block attack and the sprinting slash share a death animation.
The sheathed and unsheathed focus+slash attacks each have unique death animations.
The basic flame attack, and the first and second level focus+flame attacks, all have unique death animations.
Focus+up and focus+down both have unique death animations, and focus+down has a second version of the death animation if you follow it up with a kick.

If there are more than those 10, I haven't found them yet.

Other than the focus+down>kick animation, kicks don't have any death animations, which makes sense because they're clearly non-lethal attacks. Weirdly, though, the second combo attack isn't capable of landing a killing blow either (but does damage enemy block). Taunts obviously also don't kill. Especially not the one with your weapon sheathed, but it's nice to do this anyway. You can't attack while ducking, and jumping onto enemies doesn't kill unless you do the jumping slash attack (but jump+kick has surprisingly good knockback).

Not yet! I commented on it in one of the update posts (12/23/24) and the dev confirmed it's coming "soon".
EDIT: Not sure why the site didn't show my the devpost until after I replied but... yay! O_o

Being 90% makes a lot of sense for what I've been seeing, it did seem higher than 50 xD thanks for confirming that.

And more importantly, thanks for a really fun game!

Getting the hang of things...

Best result so far on the new update. I'm liking the new changes, takes a lot more effort to stay in the fight!

-quickdraw is unblockable but only affects one enemy

*USUALLY* only hits one, but... sometimes you get lucky...

Also... that was my first time since trying the new build that an enemy *didn't* spawn a firefly... so it's definitely not 100% spawn rate. Might have just had the coinflip go my way about 300 times in a row? xD

I have changed my opinion slightly on the above. Blocking or parrying a kick doesn't look right. Blocking and parrying sword attacks does though.

Also, I think you bumped the spawn rate for fireflies to 100% somewhere along the way, but the cap is only 3 now.

After some experimentation...

Sheathed blocks and parries don't have their own unique animations, but they look smooth coming out - it's just the teleport back into the sheathe that looks wrong. Could be fixed by triggering the weapon drawn state when successfully blocking or parrying an attack.

Also, getting kicked with your weapon sheathed still uses the animation where the weapon is out.

Basically, they have 2 ranges. First is the blast radius, and inside that, is the radius where you trigger the self-destruct timer. If you're inside the blast radius, but outside the self destruct range, killing them deals damage to you, without any prior warning.

I agree that it's harsh, but there is a mechanical reason why they sometimes kill you without lighting up.

That said, with the new block mechanics, it feels like the sheathed focus attack might be impossible to get kills with at the moment.

It's starting to feel like I can choose a kill count at which I'm happy dying... I may be playing this too much xD

"When it's ready" - don't feel like this is rushing you. You're doing great!

Disappointed to hear about this game and look it up to find "moved to steam" instead of expanding the availability. There are a variety of reasons for people to avoid Steam in recent years (not the least of which being the fact that Valve has been knowingly harming their customers for over 5 years now...)

I hope you bring the game back to a storefront that's not a pile of trash. There's a lot of advantages to using Steam, but there's good reasons for some of us to avoid it (like, for example, the storefront not actually providing any safe way to access the games you buy there... kind of a big one).

Another thing to note: If you do slice an enemy then kick them from behind, the skeleton still comes out their back, flying through you and landing behind you instead of flying in the direction you kicked it.

Current feedback:

Shift+down feels a bit too strong. Decapitation can be ducked by enemies, thrust can be blocked, but the down slash is a guaranteed kill if you're in range, and you can follow up with a kick to stun an enemy behind the one (or sometimes 2 or 3) you killed.

Bath is broken. No haiku timeout. Can't get past the door. It opens, but doesn't let me through.

Bowing is cool. Phoenix and dragon attacks are cool. All the animations are cool. Enemy block animations are cool. Kicking skeletons out of enemies is cool. Game is just cool. xD

Really looking forward to the addition of music/sounds, cleanup of the spawn mechanics, and hopefully further improvements to the combat system in the game.

This looks painful...

Can confirm First Cut is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I can only play the itch.io demo version, not the "finished" game, since the dev hasn't made that available on here yet, and Steam exclusivity means it's not an option for some of us -_-

Good luck with the Steam launch, but please *don't* move the game exclusively onto Steam. It's been having growing numbers of problems for some people in recent years (including being a literal health risk in some cases, locking some people out of our existing game libraries and making it functionally a non-option for any future purchasing).

Definitely having fun with the new updates... xD

By spreading the word about this the way I have been, I continue to occasionally find people who are being harmed by this problem, but aren't yet aware of the cause. I continue to see evidence that my voice is being heard and paid attention to, and that it's actively helping others. And I continue to see developers (not all those I speak to) who are willing to take appropriate steps to ensure their games are more widely available than Steam exclusivity will allow. Telling me, even if somewhat less rudely than you could be doing, to shut up, isn't productive for you OR me, so if anyone needs to take your advice at this stage, it's probably you.

I have  multiple reasons not to be sharing the documentation I have in public spaces. You've addressed only one of them, and not very well. In some cases, redacting the details which are needed to avoid publicly sharing someone's personal information leads to redacting information relevant to the topic being discussed, and/or information which would be needed to giv the documents any validity as proof of the claim in the first place. The people for whom the documentation is actually needed, have access to it.

There are plenty of reasons unrelated to my own for why some people are avoiding Steam (DRM, occasional blurring of the lines on fraudulent conduct, the removal of useful features with the excuse that being more popular than steamdeck means nobody's using them and somehow that justifies extra work to remove things they could just leave intact without harming anything), just like there are plenty of reasons why other people still use Steam and will continue to do so (convenience, easier communication with devs than a lot of other options, btter support for early access projects in particular). Regardless of how large each group is, and regardless of their reasons for the decision, there are growing numbers of non-Steam-using PC gamers, and having *SOMETHING* available as an alternative is always going to be an advantage over being exclusively locked to a single storefront.

As one of the 2 people I can say for sure it happened to, I have good reason to be confident in what I'm saying. I also have good reason to not just post the records publicly, though. I've got sufficient evidence to support everything I'm saying, and have provided it to relevant authorities. Sharing the kind of personal information in a public space is... less appealing to me.

As for your claim that I should keep my grievances personal, well...

I've literally had one of the *VERY* few people who seemed remotely competent in Steam support tell me to "make my voice heard", and I've posted every one of these claims in spaces where they're clearly visible to Valve, directed at them publicly, and *WOULD* be grounds for a defamation claim if they had any basis to make one. The fact that it's true is part of the reason they're being investigated for their conduct, and I'm not being taken to court over my own *FACTUAL* claims. Because telling the truth is an absolute defense against defamation.

Did better... or worse?

So... I did a thing. It took a lot of fireflies to get to that point xD

Just gonna put this here...

Yay remapping! I recommend changing the name of the "move left" button from "move up" to "move left" though xD

Also... I noticed another animation which is missing a sheathed option: taunt.

Additional feedback after a bit more playtime. The jump in challenge from one difficulty mode to the next feels like a huge spike (and it specifically says that from the lowest to second difficulty is literal doubling of enemy power). This is also reflected in the endless high score mode, which also feels like it ramps the challenge up a bit faster than I'd like. Toning the gaps down in difficulty, at least on the lower levels, would be nice to see in future.

VERY cool game though, even if it feels like it could do with some less extreme jumps on the lower end of the difficulty scale.

Level 3 animation looks cool. Shame it doesn't have an attack connected to it yet!

The most central problem for me personally is that the Steam client has been a literal health hazard since 2019. If I buy a game there, I don't get access to the game. The over $3000 worth of games I bought there before 2019 have been effectively stolen from me by Valve because of the problem, and their refusal (not failure) to fix it.

They've directly acknowledged that they're not just aware of the problem, but were made aware of it within a few days of the update which caused it. Their response started out with a direct promise not to bother taking appropriate steps to fix it, and has only escalate to more abusive behaviour since. That includes violating privacy rights of affected (former) customers, trying to gaslight people, and in at least 2 instances I'm aware of, trying to coerce people into self-harm.

There's a bunch of reasons other people dislike them as well, with a number of features which had been beneficial to power users being removed in the past few years for dumb reasons, but the "they've functionally stolen $3000 worth of games from me" thing is a slightly higher priority on my personal assessment of things.

Happy I could help! xD it's not like it's a deal breaker but it'll be nice to see!

That's awesome to hear! Keep being amazing!

Also worth considering... when you have your sword sheathed, there aren't proper animations for dodging or for taking hits. Both animations teleport the sword into your hand, then have it teleport back into its sheathe after.

The most notable absences in this game are audio and fullscreen. You say it's an early prototype but it feels really good even in its current state. Art style is beautiful, some neat easter eggs in the background, and the core mechanics just feel solid. Depending how well focused I am, I'm generally going somewhere from 11 to just over 50 kills (my record is 55 so far). Definitely feels like there's room for improvement on my part.

Also, I'd very much like to see control remapping options. Being able to move the buttons around (and view them in-game, not just on this page) would be much appreciated.

For people without a middle mouse button (you can sometimes still find mice like this, but more likely, people on laptops like me), it would be nice to have an alternative mapping for the "move view" option in the coding screen.

Other than that, thanks for a really fun game! I do hope the demo being on Steam isn't an indication that you plan to abandon itch.io with the full game though. I've seen that happen too often, and when a game ends up Steam exclusive, it locks some of us out of supporting you. So please don't do that?

Awesome, thanks! (and yeah, long story but Steam has been a *BIG* problem for some of us for a few years now)