Nyctophobia by TheJohnyFeeD
Nyctophobia is a top-down survival horror. The player will have to move deeper and deeper through the dark basement, fighting disgusting monsters using his ingenuity and a very limited arsenal of weapons and ammunition.
WARNING: This game contains strong language, scenes of violence and suicide related scenes. You have been warned.
Controls: - WASD - Move - LMB - Shoot - RMB - Aim - V - Melee - E - Interact - R - Reload - Ctrl - Heal
Note: There are two versions of the game - fixed, and, well, not fixed. The difference between them is that the fixed version is slightly shorter, and it has a few bugs fixed (e.g. player not being able to reload a shotgun or enemies walking through the walls).
Music by: Kevin Macleod, Darren Curtis

| Link | https://thejohnyfeed.itch.io/nyctophobia |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/nyctophobia |
Ratings
| Overall | 60th | 4.242⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 69th | 4.153⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 630th | 3.459⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1093th | 3.508⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 61th | 4.565⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 646th | 3⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 2th | 4.685⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
And all of this combined with great storyline and creepy atmosphere. Well done!
The sounds like steps, reload, shooting did also match pretty good.
I liked the "riddle", and the origin of the solution for the riddle.
The "huggers" were pretty call and a real thread, while not having another weapon beside the first one.
2 Issues:
1. You forgot to normalize the movement-velocity-vector, so moving diagonal was faster than moving horizontal or vertical.
2. sometimes the enemies tend to get "stuck" on a corner, so you have all the time in the world, to aim and shoot them in the head.
Really decent submission, i really enjoyed play
ing the game.

It seemed really well **polished**, with a smooth control and great mechanics.
The **gun** feels SO good. The sounds, the particles... This game felt like what a 2D Resident Evil would've looked like back in the day. I want to play more!
The little "puzzle" is also very nice, my only regret is that I remembered the solution right as I was finishing the game, I'm an idiot :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:.
I don't know how many people participated in this, but **Kudos** to you all :clap:.
:x: My only (*tiny*) beef with the game is that the "hugger" enemy is very tough, particularly the first few encounters when you're still learning the ropes and you only have the knife.
Also, very minor, but I understand this might be a thing for keeping the suspense and whatnot, but maybe try to encourage the player in some way to **use the gun more**. In the end I think I still had 20+ bullets left, because I was always saving them expecting a bigger threat to appear next!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003703630
Only 2 minor gripes. I do not like the use of V as a melee attack. FPS games barely get away with it, but it's such an annoying thing to stretch my finger down off the movement keys. The other thing is that when I hit escape to try and pause the game (more out of habit than expecting pause to be implemented in a jam game) I went to the main menu and lost my progress, so I didn't get as far as I liked.
You don't see too many top-down horror games these days, so this was an awesome surprise! You really nailed the atmosphere with the visuals and the audio. Sorry it ended up looking so dark on stream! :frowning2:
If I could make one suggestion, it would be great if the attack button was mapped to a different key. If I wanted to attack, I had to either take my hand off of WASD, or take my hand off the mouse in order to hit V so that I could move around and attack in quick succession. Other than that though, I'm blown away by the quality here!
Pros:
- Love the pseudo-horror aspects
- Very good graphic-wise
- Soundscape adds to the mood massively
- It's kind of reverse 'deeper and deeper' theme game
- Guns have actual 'ompf' feeling
- Mood is very much there
Cons:
- Melee combat sucks to be completely honest, took me a bit of time to understand timings to not get grabbed
- Wish there was any boss fight
- Enemy AI gets stuck on corners
- It does not really fit in a 'humor' grading, but I don't remember whether you could opt it out or not
I also think you took a bit of inspiration from your previous entry, which was a blast to play as well. Solid work here as well, congratz!
I think the music difference between scenes took out the mystery of when you enter a room, and the knife was quite terrible compared to the guns lol! I probably wouldve opted out of the humor rating, since I really dont think you fit the category..
Awesome game! Keep up the great work! :v:
Nice game. Good work!

Pretty cool and incredibly polished game, almost felt like a finished title. The atmosphere is really cool, I loved the random events with those mental patients.
There's only one thing I can say as constructive feedback, and it's that for the most part of the game, there are too many bullets for a horror game, once you get the gun it's fairly easy to traverse the levels.
Other than that this is an spectacular, super moody horror game.. Congrats on making it, awesome job!!
Just curious though, this is probably the first time throughout this entire Ludum Dare I just had to download a single exe file for the game, what did you use to create it?