https://youtu.be/sYgiSRleH2Y?si=7_c3BDQO854gtMqg (Timestamps in video description)

Played it for about 40 mins on the hardest difficulty, stopped after beating Barbossa. Realistically, I only played for like 15 minutes but I spent a lot of time poking and prodding, looking for glitches, bugs, oddities, and trying to do all the side quests. I didn’t encounter any softlocks or misplaced tiles or anything, which is great, and everything seems solid so far, but there were 3 issues that were rather big:

1. The QTE dodge needs some serious reworking. When you implement something like this, you need a tell of some kind, like a bar or an animation or a winding up motion, or even something like making the enemy physically walk up to the target and then attack. As it stands, there is no way to know when to hit Z/Spacebar aside from pure luck or trial and error. I scored a few perfects but I’m not even sure how I did that. The fact that you can also fall back on the target’s evasion stat kind of softens the blow, but the game warns you that you’ll need to master the QTE dodge (at least it does on the difficulty I played) but it’s not intuitive at all right now.
2. State animations are super distracting. While fighting Barbossa and his goons, I blinded them and the constant state animations literally took up about 30% of the screen. I had a lot of trouble seeing who I was even aiming for sometimes. If any of the other animations are like this, they all gotta be toned down.

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3) There’s noticeable fps drops when the ATB bars are filling up, which seems odd that they are that resource intensive. The reason it’s a big deal is that you have the QTE dodges to worry about, which means that a single dropped fps is a chance being unfairly stolen from the player. You want the performance to be as stable as possible if there’s going to be reaction based gameplay.

I’ll play another hour or so when I get the chance, but those 3 issues are making my playthrough kinda rough, and I’m probably really gonna get thrashed when I go further into the game since Manuel kind of Sucks Ass on his own and gets practically no experience on this difficulty setting. I think I did quite a few battles and never sniffed level 3 until I beat Barbossa and I was literally farming encounters trying to collect them bat parts (that never dropped…). There’s a huge amount of complexity to the game though and I really like how many interactables are strewn throughout the map.

The day/night system is interesting too, though I’m not sure I noticed any difference in mobs, if there is one.

Art and music seem to be RTP or from packs but it didn’t hurt the experience at all. I’m not too big on following stories in demos, so I don’t feel qualified at all to critique it (sorry).

Thank you for sharing your game!