Crimson Hope

Just as The Absorber this game has a very unique artstyle and gameplay that is very enjoyable, even if it gets a little grindy/frustrating at times it is very challenging and fun.

I also like playing games from the same dev that hint and make reference to a shared world/universe, it is very nice world building. the music again is really on point and fits with the looks of the game and whatever is happening be it a fight or a scary moment.

The story in this one is far more solid and it was really interesting seeing how the plot develops; And the little animation when encountering the Grandpa was really good.

Sadly I encountered a bug that crashed the game early on my playtrough, I don't know what causes it, probably playing it on the Itch.io desktop app, after getting to the river interacting with ANY enemy will cause it to crash.

Keep up the good work!

Hello,
Last weekend I streamed your game. Overall I found it to be a frustrating game.

Crimson Hope captured my attention when I was browsing for games to stream due to it's striking artstyle. If there is one thing that is done well in this game, it is most certainly the art (even if the black-and-white aesthetic has been done to death in the indie space). The wavy backgrounds were also cool.
Additionally, I was thankful the game gets the player to the main game quickly - at least when compared to many of the games I have played in the past.
However, the game itself is just frustrating and unfun. My experience with the game began wondering fairly aimlessly through the forest. One of the things I noticed right away is that enemies hit hard and right at the beginning are applying status effects that are punishing and impossible to remove due to limited resources. This discouraged me from fighting. That is, until I came across a boss. Now, because I had avoided fighting due to the punishing nature of it, I was under-leveled which required grinding, except grinding became a chore due to the aforementioned status effect. This resulted in me fighting a single enemy, that enemy would ALWAYS apply poison, so then I would be forced to turn back around, change map, save (to remove the the status and heal), then go back to the map where the enemy has respawned, creating an endless cycle of kill, heal, kill, heal, kill heal. (Side note, if I am going to have to grind like this, it would be nice if the save stones would heal the player regardless of whether they save or not.)
Once I defeated the boss from grinding, I also found out; well, I'm what I would call "soft" soft-locked. Not actually soft-locked, but due to a difficult barrier in the way, I might as well be considered soft-locked. The enemy ALWAYS cast poison first, so if I bumped into it would poison me. The poison state does way too much damage, making any future fights likely end prematurely, so the best course of action was to return to the save, heal, and try again.
Overall, this felt like it might not have been play tested well enough. The game was not fun, nor scary since constantly grinding and face-rolling the "scary" enemies takes any tension out of the atmosphere.

I would watch out for putting "bull-shit" into you game, even if the "intent" is to create tension, it can also lead to annoying your players.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.

edit:

I want to make a small edit here to talk about the music since you brought it up in your bullet points: Overall, it's actually not too bad, but the mixing is a little bit on the basic side of things. It's hard to say for certain, but it seems like you may be using a basic tool for the job. I think you might be able to blossom into writing very capable music if you took the time to migrate to a more capable software. I grew up using Mixcraft but I can't really recommend it due to how buggy it is, so I personally recommend Reaper. It's not very user friendly, but if you can get past it's clunky UI it's incredibly powerful (and cheap! and has a generous trial period!)