And sure, being able to add new content easily is one of the great things about procedural games!

I wonder if a few ‘environmental horror’ moments could be added, like a long room with a seemingly bottomless pit and just a treacherous looking rope bridge to get to the other side, or some precariously balanced boulders or statues teetering on the edge of their resting places. You get what could happen next in each case.

I’m also fairly impressed by your book mechanic, perhaps you could give them some game-play significance and use them to contain codes for locked doors or to instruct the player to look out for a certain glow or style of architecture in order find something like a key (the person here before you must have remembered dropping it and written it in his/her diary before they met their unfortunate end in front of the door etc.

I hope the game’s designed so new rooms could be added continuously to the procedural algorithm in a monthly update say, would be fantastic.

Keep up the good work, I look forward to release.

Nice work, but don’t overdo it. The ‘simpleness’ of the original did the job very well, don’t throw to much extra’s at it. For example, the ‘stretched face’ in the trailer is totally unneeded in my opinion. Bland texture work very well, the less distraction the better.
Just my 2 cents. Keep up the good work!

* corrected the sentence

SITUATIONAL HORROR:
I thought this was a smooth move, since the terror wasn’t in the immediate tricks. I.e. “Oooh, it’s a dungeon! Aren’t old dungeons scary!? Look! There’s blood! That’s scary, isn’t it!?”. Instead it was more the situation players found and immersed themselves in (loved the room-lighting oil lamps instead of the god awful flashlights). If the game looks like a gritty muddy-brown ‘realistic’ medieval horror dungeon, I think it can reduce the number of people finishing much of the game since they can /assume/ the rest and just skip it entirely once it gets remotely scary.

ACCESSIBILITY:
A great strength in the first Dreadhalls’ demo was that it seemed to be *accessible* horror and felt different from the rest in that it knew restraint and pulled you in without using a bludgeon. It felt like, “Oh, yeah I can see havin’ my pops/girlfriend try this out.”, whereas the new grittier look is a tad more for the horror enthusiast and I feel will have them taking off the Oculus after they turn a couple corners.

LOW-CLUTTER:
In addition, I’d like to note that from watching a great deal of Let’s Plays for Oculus that it seemed that traditional games with *too many* things to look at (Far Cry, Portal 2, Half-Life 2), caused the player to lose focus with the clutter (possibly due to the Stereo, and of course the low res of DK1). Games with less clutter and more direct visuals (especially for the environment) seemed to allow the player to more gracefully immerse themselves in the game and overall seemed less straining. Again, another benefit to the original demo with its more-or-less direct hallways and few objects in the scene to call your attention.

PEANUT GALLERY:
The new Dreadhalls definitely doesn’t feel like it’s moving too much away from its base formula (which is good!), and if you wouldn’t feel comfortable in pushing it about 20% out of the gritty-muddy-brown look (i.e. take 20% of a Zelda dungeon and that’s probably about right) I don’t think it’ll hurt all that much. Just wanted to opine is all. ^^

In my experience, the new look helps ground the scene better, so the world seems to be more solid and real. Also, having more complex geometry makes it more interesting to look at, specially in the Rift, where you can actually perceive the depth variations, and specially when you add shadows into the mix.

But in any case, thank you for your feedback! It’s good to hear different opinions on this, and see it from new perspectives.