Duo Quest

Here is the elevator pitch as to why I think this is a good game, but I cannot recommend it right now. The game lacks polish on basic aspects. It straight up recommends you play with a controller while actively having aspects of the game that do not support a controller. Text in this game is blurry for some reason, even while I’m playing in 1440p. The game has soft locked and hard locked on me multiple times, especially during the “reconnect controller” screen. Certain elements of the UI and mechanics are unclear and displayed in a way that is unpolished. There is a fun little coop game here, but I do not recommend until these issues are resolved and until this game is steam deck verified. If you want more specifics on some of the points I brought up and some I didn’t, continue reading. I want to support smaller devs which is why I hate to be so harsh on this game, but I cannot recommend this game is good conscience until this game is in a better shape. So now that the short part is over, here's the more detailed and slightly nit-picky part of the review. -Controller Issues: Game recommends that you use a controller but certain aspects like the custom question do not work with a controller. It says keyboard and mouse only, but this doesn’t make sense when plenty of games can plug into the steam keyboard API and have a keyboard pop up for people to use with a controller. Its how games on console work and I don’t know why it can’t be implemented here. Second reason I don’t understand this restriction is that the game already has a built in keyboard that it lets you use when you type on your name. Why can’t I use that keyboard? Granted I don’t think anyone would want to use that keyboard because it doesn’t have a qwerty layout but still. While were on the topic of keyboards seriously, change the keyboard in the game to a qwerty layout please. Game has issues with controller support in general. The game shows the mouse cursor and does not remove it even after you start to use a controller. The main menu of the game does not update to reflect that you are using a controller and will show keyboard and mouse icons on startup. The only way to update the menu is to enter the game to the campfire screen, then back out to the main menu. This is pointless as once you close the game and restart, it will default to keyboard and mouse icons all over again. The reconnect controller screen is bugged to the moon and back. There are times when I would use it to reconnect both controllers, then then I hit the “resume” button it would disconnect one of the controllers and make me start again. This cycle would repeat and the only fix was to restart the game. I also encountered a bug where after the “reconnect” screen whether I was using keyboard or controller, it would not function at all. Nothing on screen was interactable and I would have to hard reset the game. I ran into this issue numerous times and I had to constantly restart the game. Which was an issue for a very specific reason outside of being annoying and hard locking the game, which I will talk about in the game mechanics section. R2 to view deck is broke. -UI Elements: I don’t know why but the text in this game is blurry. It’s almost so small you can’t notice it, but after an hour or so I had to take a break. Certain actions like the skip action are bugged. If one person is holding down the button to skip, then the other person presses that button and lets go really quick, it will cancel the action for the other person despite the other person not letting go of the button. Not entirely sure if this is a bug, but the show status elements button doesn’t show what the icon means on your enemies. For example the enemies have a red sword that means they are going to deal 5 damage on their turn. But when you hold the status button it doesn’t show you what this icon means. It will show you what icons mean that are on your person but not the enemy. There is a part in battle when you have to choose two cards to potentially fuse and then both cards appear on screen and you have to choose which question you want to answer. The cards and their questions blocks the icon that shows what th enemy is going to do during their turn and it makes it hard to strategize. Heres another nitpick, but when you disconnect for whatever reason during a game. It would be nice to see during the “reconnect controller screen” which character is player one and which is player two. When the run starts you name the charcters and I think it should say the characters name instead of “player one” or “player two”. This is because the whole time during your run, it uses your character name instead of calling you player one or two and I think this is one of those aspects that make the game seem unpolished. Last nitpick for the UI elements section, but during the screen where you answer the fun personal questions, the game doesn’t give you enough time to read them. If you both answer the same, makes sense you don’t need to review. But on those times where my partner and I answered differently, I wanted a moment to see what they choose and read it, but the game would remove the answers in a heartbeat. It didn’t really give time to see what they answered or discuss it. Which I found was half the fun with this game. Having a fun little discussion for every question we answered differently. Also I have an issue with how they show the answers. It shows a P1 and P2 icon to display what your answers were. The issue is that these icons are both an identical red. Not to mention you loose track of whose player one or player two because the like I mentioned earlier, the game doesn’t call you player one or two after you name your characters. Why is is using P1 and P2 as the icons? Shouldn’t it be like an icon that’s the character? Or even different colors? Seems like an oversight. -Game Mechanics: When I talked about the controllers and the issue with reconnecting them and then the game soft locking and I would have to restart the game. This issue was made worse, because if it happened on the map screen it would cause you to miss events. The map you navigate has events like most roguelikes, and I found that unless the event was a battle event, if you had to pause the game or return to the menu it would force you to skip the event. You cannot pause the game or quit during an event, because when you come back it skips it and your now on the next event. This was an issue because if I had to quit the game because of the controllers acting weird, the game would make me skip the event. I also have a nit pick with the way the UI elements show which cards fuse into what. Card combine mechanic doesn’t seem to show correctly what card will be created. I had a barrier card on the left side ready to go, then on the left I had 3 card options. “pay with blood”, “slash”, and “headbutt”. Each time I examined the card the game said “+ barrier = spinning staff”. I inspected each card and each card would create the exact same card if merged. It didn’t seem to correctly show what that card would be despite having 3 different card to choose from. Should each card create a different and unique combo card? This one might not be a glitch, maybe barrier combined with either slash or block create the same card spinning staff, but I don’t know why that would be. Its possible this is the case because the combine card mechanic seemed to work at other times with other cards. But overall the merge mechanic is very confusing. I don’t know why the game wants you to constantly use the inspect button instead of just showing you the merge happening in real time in the top portion of the screen. Maybe I’m just not far enough in the game, but I wish you could see in real time what cards would fuse into what without using the inspect mechanic. There' plenty of screen real estate on the screen to do this. Simply make it so I don’t need to press inspect every time.