Slice Tower

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Slice Tower

by chaosteil

Cart #slicetower-0 | 2024-01-14 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | No License

9

Slice Tower

Slice Tower is a extreme minimization of the action hack and slash platformer written with pico-8.

Your goal is to be up in the air as long as possible to keep your score multiplier going. Use all available tools at your disposal: your oversized sword and your teleporting dash will help you defeat and tactically avoid enemies.

Can you slice your way around the Tower and maintain a High Score?

How To Play

The goal of the game is to reach a high score. Combos are kept only while staying in the air. If you touch the ground, your multiplier resets.

• Use your attack to slice and dice enemies. Observe the attack patterns and try to use them to your advantage to stay in the air.
• Use the dash to evade enemies or attacks, but make sure you don't touch the ground, so you keep your multiplier.
• If you hold dash, you leave a ghost to which you can dash back to for a limited time. While the ghost is active, you keep your multiplier.

Had a lot of fun working on this one, curious what scores people will be able to achieve.

It's a cool looking game, and a lot of stuff is happening, but controls are very confusing to me. It seems like I'm doing a lot of stuff, but half the time I have no idea how I'm doing it. Sometimes it feels like character just does stuff on their own, like dashing in some direction or "magnetizing" to an enemy, and sometimes they aren't doing that. I know it's PICO and we only have 2 buttons to work with, but some tutorial or even just a wall of text, explaining how things work, would really help the confusion here.

Also after quite a bit of time spent I still have no idea what that the shadow with the green line is for. I think it's to teleport you back to the original position, but I've yet to encounter a situation where it would be useful. Maybe I'm not far enough in the game or maybe it didn't clicked yet, but yeah.

However, despite the confusion, game feels surprisingly good to play. I can see it being very fun if I could understand it's workings, but the confusion makes it a bit frustrating. It just makes me feel like mashing would work just as well as trying to do things deliberately, because I don't really feel in control either way.

I hope it doesn't come off as "too critical", because I do think it's a fun game and I do this that I will enjoy it, once I understand it.

Thanks for the awesome feedback!
It's extremely invaluable and helpful.

I agree a lot of the mechanics we were aiming for were not very well translated or were added with the 'rule of cool' in mind.

We wanted to push the engine to the limits and were constantly running into roadblocks. I think in an ideal world we would love to introduce the mechanics organically instead of having them all available right away.

We will look into having a bit of a tutorial // visual guide on the game's webpage (hiddendagger.games) for any future happen stances that come across the game.

Thanks again for trying it out!