SAGE 2023 - Demo David Get Keen SAGE 2023 Demo

This was great! I'd been wanting to try out this game and I'm glad I did. I love the art style and the momentum physics. Felt pretty good to just fly through stages. My only gripes would be the 1 hit KO and the enemy lock on. I think rapidly spinning through enemy hordes with a lot of momentum would actually be a ton of fun if you didn't die in one hit.

Also, I enjoyed the characters and dialogue. I thought they were all really fun with good designs (and gave me good gameplay tips also David himself looks awesome). Wishlisted cuz gameplay was solid and I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes!

this has so much potential but it feels like the game doesn't understand that. the speed is infinitely more fun than the slow platforming challenges scattered around the narrow path and the game gives you all the tools to skip everything, which is extremely fun. so, like... why don't u tap more into that? you have speed that is actually fun to acquire and not tied to a single boost button AND the control to make it so the speed is never too much to handle. it's absolutely perfect. it's what boost sonic wished it could be, yet the level design isn't interested in that at ALL. down to the enemies. you can't homing attack unless your character (not the camera, the character) is staring directly at the enemy, which are all over the place so you don't wanna do it cuz zooming with speed is more fun. but if you do homing attack, it removes all your speed. like, what? why??? the little sky island where u gotta go in circles to get all the buttons and the bob-omb battlefield-like climb were the best part of the game because gaining speed was actually useful and it felt intended. like i said earlier, it's everything boost sonic wished it could be, yet the game is too busy wanting to be a crash bandicoot/sonic adventure slow paced mix with sparsed out moments where you should actually go fast to actually tap into that. make it so you always go fast. don't make the speedy moments a reward. the speed is part of the systems, and the systems build what the game will be. please PLEASE delay this if it's actually "coming soon" this could be the "3d pizza tower" all the kids seem to be wanting yet still it's own thing. this could be so great.

also minor nitpick that u can totally ignore if u want: the way the characters are written is kinda pretentious and hurts in the "cringe receptor" part of my brain but hey this game is obviously aimed at younger demographics maybe i just dont get it

My only issues are the camera and the fact you die in one hit but the rest of the game DAMNNNNN
I can easily see myself getting absolutely addicted to the full game! It’s like incredibly fun and very speedrun-able!

Preeetty fun, the graphics are super great and the moveset is very fun to play with once one figures it out properly! A good few things I'd love to see improved, and yeah the first is the camera. It's at times very difficult to aim to some platforms, especially to the smaller ones, espeeeecially when jumping from high up. I reeaally wish the camera would tilt downwards on it's own to make aiming down easier, and I wiiiish the camera control was faster in general (or, for best results, have an option to adjust the speed to fit each player). The tilting down thing shouldn't happen aaaalways though, but yeah, it would reeeeally help in some areas. That, and some sort of a stomp or fastfall, to make a faaaast and instant landing to a platform below.

The first area of the first stage was prolly the worst area in it, the stage got a bunch better after. The platforming was just a bit awkward in that first area, trying to find all the buttons and avoid the weird endlessly spawning enmies. In that area I noticed that the dash move doesn't kill enemies, which is a bit weird since it has similiar looking black and white effects as the spin does, visually it gives the vibe of "this deals damage" yeeet it doesn't, I don't really see why it couldn't, it wouldn't hurt the game to have that too defeat enemies, and would give players more options to defeat them. Maybe different attacks could do work differently on nonstandard enemies? Anyway, the veeery last large jump of the stage was also... well, let's say challenging, took a while to figure out how to combo moves to make it, satisfying once figured it out tho. Jumping taking speed away is a bit of a shame tho.

I was at first also very, veeery confused by the red glowing effect by the brdiges you activate with buttons. At first I thought it was a wall/forcefield blocking me lmao, and when I was able to actually walk through it I was ??? confused. Changing the color once the bridge has been activated to, let's say green, would be great. The buttons on the other hand are fine as red I think, but I wish I could just walk over them instead of needing to jump.

Some other lil problems include the kind-of unfitting music, the lack of sound effects for maaany things, Time counting ten thousandths of a second is wtf (wow tooooo accurate, especially for the retro vibe) and getting stuck at 999.9999, Score being able to go to -99.9999 by dieing, aaand the lil ragdoll death animation after falling to death. The homing dash thing was also a bit weird being so instant, and I at times wished the range for using it was longer.

Anyway yeah hah had a bunch to say and much to mention I hope will be worked on all since I really dig this so far and hope to see more!

I think this game is really good, and its like if sonic just allowed you to break its stages as much as you want with physics. My first run through the farm level took me some 10+ minutes, and my second one under 1, lol. I just kept dashing up walls, and spinning downslopes, running back up and doing it again to build speed and skip whole sections of the level.

I feel like the only reason I gave it a 4/5 and not a 5 is because actually trying to go through the obstacle course seems very difficult. Jumping on buttons is pretty tough when you're also running from infinitely spawning enemies that one-hit kill you. dashing into small floating walls when its tough to even judge where they're at is really rough, and sometimes the walls are hard to see.

Meanwhile, breaking the stage, while very fun, was also super easy, so it almost feels like you're just supposed to break it, idk.

Wishlisted it on Steam, will probably give it a try on aesthetic and movement alone, but if I could change one thing it would definetly be the one-hit kill thing, that was quite annoying and is the main reason why I just decided to break the level at the end.

Well, to start with my SAGE 2023 journey I started with this game, I like what it is going for and I love the style , the whole CRT aesthethic and looking like a PS1 era game.
Gameplay wise I love the sense of speed and platforming, it encourages me to always get on the move since that makes it easier to complete the levels, of course you can slow down and get dem collectables.
Music is... adequate, it's not masterful but at least it's not annoying, so I leave it as a neutral point.

The game is not perfect tho, like configuring the controls was a nightmare, specially with a tiny window, and the pause menu being inconsistent because you can only use keyboard but not mouse. Hopefully these will be fixed soon, because otherwise these flaws don't detract from the greatness that the game offers.

Overall, it has potential and I hope to see more lore about the characters soon.