KUTO Playtest Week One: 153 Deaths, 30 Hours

The first week of the KUTO: The Lock of Time closed playtest ran from September 16 to 22. Players spent 30.9 hours in the game, died 153 times, and told us, fairly bluntly, that the combat is too weak. Here is everything we counted.

Who came

285 people got access. 52 of them launched the game, and between them they played 113 sessions.

That gap between access and launch is normal for a free playtest; people press the button and forget. What surprised us more was that players sent 60 invites to friends. 16 were accepted, and 43 are still waiting for an answer.

How long they played

The average session was 16 minutes 51 seconds. The median was 10:48, so half the players stayed longer than that.

One person played for 2 hours 59 minutes without quitting once. We don't know who you are, but thank you.

Where they played from

Location and room stats below cover 50 players. Six countries and 25 cities. Ukraine is almost everyone, 44 players, with Kyiv (11), Sumy (6), Lviv (4) and Ivano-Frankivsk (4) at the top. Poland had 2 players, and the US, Spain, Norway and the Czech Republic had one each.

Russia and Belarus don't get access. There are 15 requests from Russia and one from Belarus in the queue, and they will stay there.

Where the game kills you

153 deaths in a week. 22 reached the end of the build. Athena died 34 times, and the Minotaur 73 times, at the hands of 26 different players.

Three rooms did most of the damage:

Room	What happened
R10	62 deaths across 24 players, the deadliest room in the build
R11	36 deaths
R12	199 entries from 45 of the 50 players, the first real wall

R12 is the interesting one. Nearly everyone got there, and people kept coming back to it, which tells us where the difficulty curve bends first.

What the feedback said

We got 21 feedback forms. Four people, independently of each other, wrote the same thing: the combat is weak.

"Mashing one button gets old."

"I'm the most casual of casuals, and even for me this is too easy."

This is the most useful thing the week gave us. Movement was the first thing we rebuilt before the playtest. Combat is now the loudest item on the list. A game about controlling time in a fight needs the fight itself to ask something of you.

How fast we're patching

Five builds in six days, from 0.1.21 to 0.1.26. We'll keep shipping while the playtest runs.

If you want in, press Request Access on the Steam page, and when you've played, tell us what broke through the feedback form. And if you'd rather wait for the finished thing, wishlist KUTO on Steam.