TREPIDATION — Story-driven Horror Roguelite

This modpack is amazing! Definitely a service done to the 1.12.2 modding community! Smooth gameplay, amazing shaders, features that feel seamless! The level of integration is incredible! Only one minor bug with JEI.
The Mind's Abyss was frustrating until I went into creative and explored. Turns out I just had a terrible spawn that was hundreds of blocks from anything useful diamonds
The Nether is not nearly as hard as people make it out to be, but the Mind's Abyss is nearly impossible! Less monsters or a slower sanity decrease would be nice, but it's hard to stay focused when you're being two-shot by literally anything everytime you exist lol
Overall great modpack!! I would put this up there with CursedWalking and Reclamation easily!

Although it felt unfinished, it was an incredibly promising mod pack. I was really surprised to see such work coming out of the Minecraft modding community. I experienced details I wouldn't find in mod packs with 10 million downloads. We're seeing a job that's been put a lot of effort into. The animations, atmosphere, music, character development, and sense of exploration were all excellent. If the creator of this pack is reading this, I have something to say: Please stop working on Minecraft and make your own game. Making games with Godot has become much easier. Go make that game you want to make. I'll be your first customer.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Starting off strong, the current state of this mod pack is impressive, laying a solid foundation for future growth. Not only is it a reverse playthrough experience, but it very much resonates with a single word: Escape. Once you play for a while you very quickly realize that this isn't a finished mod pack yet, which is completely acceptable considering what it currently offers and what it could bring to the table. It successfully builds a sense of challenge and danger with every step, encouraging risky maneuvers for faster progress at the cost of potentially losing everything.

The overall difficulty and balance I would say is a mixed bag. While there are enjoyable mechanics and adaptable play styles, some of the enemies currently feel skewed when it comes to gameplay. For example, the basic Flayed enemies are well-designed as swarm-type mobs, but their damage output makes them disproportionately threatening, even when encountered alone. On the other hand, newer mobs like the Revenants strike a good balance. They aren't overly fast but can blink to the player, staying close. Their low damage output combined with a moderate HP pool makes them deceptively dangerous if you allow them to swarm.

The look and feel of the Nether and other biomes provide a massive level of immersion. However, there are a few areas that could be refined, such as the Erebus. Transitioning from the brightly lit Nether into pitch darkness feels abrupt, especially when considering the presence of the Deep Dark. For a location that has a ton of plants and wildlife, it'd be nice to see even a bit of base lighting, even if only dim light. 

I will say that I was unable to experience the full potential of the mod pack due to the heavy shader pack provided, which can be demanding on system resources, particularly for AMD users (Nvidia users may have a smoother experience.) It might be worth seeing if the pack can't support a few different types of shader packs, ranging from the default one it uses now to a much lightweight variant of it. This would allow for a good amount of players to still get the feel and effects the shaders provide, which I feel is a major key to the level of immersion this mod pack can provide.

In terms of replayability, this mod pack seems best suited for speedrunners rather than casual players. However, I do feel that it's a good pack for everyone to at least try once or twice. Even for a casual Minecraft player, this could be viewed as a "Dark Souls" level speedrun pack, which can provide a different experience than you'd be used to. That being said, in no way does this factor detract the quality the mod pack provides. The mod pack's mechanics, such as death systems and the one-hour time limit, are perfectly tailored for speedrunning, achieving their intended purpose seamlessly.

The only other point of information I'd like to see touched up on is the documentation. While the existing guide book covers basic information, I feel that it misses some crucial information for progression, especially since newer updates introduce new mechanics, mobs, and routes. I do agree that some of the information can be discovered simply by playing the game long enough, I also feel that your standard player isn't going to want that trial and error experience, especially in a speedrun setting. 

Overall, this is a strong mod pack deserving an 8.5/10 in its current state. I can easily see it reaching a 9 to 9.5/10 with continued development. Though there are areas that need fine-tuning, the progress it's had so far suggests these can be fixed and/or improved upon in the future. Definitely worth taking a look at!

Gameplay
I can see the appeal, but it's not your typical type of roguelike that features dungeons and procedurally generated rooms/maps. Additionally, I came into this modpack with vastly different expectations judging from the modpack's CF page, but they were unfortunately not met. The respawn nearby system is also a huge pain because it doesn't account for y-level at all.

Aesthetics
The aesthetics are nice to look at, but it's often hard to see many things with the default selected visuals intended for the modpack.

Performance and Stability
"Stopped watching the game log because the log length surpassed 100000 lines. You may have to fix your mods because the game is still logging to files and likely wasting harddrive space at an alarming rate!"

Never playing this shit again.
This modpack gave me only feelings of rage, stress and paranoia.
The gameplay can be summarized in: Suffer, Learn, Suffer, Learn, Suffer....
You die a lot, theres a ton of bullshit mechanics and everything in the modpack is designed specifically to ruin your day in the most horrible way possible.
It's by far the most well made modpack i ever saw in my life, transforming the minecraft into an entirely different game. This however, only proves that humans are best only at one thing and thats destroying everything around them and making more terrifying torture methods than already were.

The fact that this modpack exists is a staple that the God either does not exist or doesnt care about humanity as a whole. This is a crime against nature, my sanity and everyone who will ever play it.
If hell exists, playing this modpack is the deepest circle of it.

Overall, solid 10/10, enjoyed it a lot(except the moments when i didnt)
Gameplay could benefit from a little more depth though.

:3

A unique idea that comes off far scarier than I thought possible in MC. From the juggernauts in the nether to the weeping angels in the deep dark it is a terrifying and heat pounding mod pack! I don't think any other mod pack as made me jump and scream more than this one. The speedrun aspect is amazing! so many things can go wrong at every turn you'll never know if you can be able to relax for a moment. The combat system is so cool as well! With the new animations and different weapons. Not to mention the movement mechanics! Combining the dashes with your double jump to get around quickly while being able to avoid fall damage if done right works wonders while youre being chased by a horde of enemies. THE NEW BOSS! its a nightmare!! my booty has never been more clenched than fighting a giant whither boss in the middle of a lake of lava as he destroys blocks as he chases you.

All in all this modpack is an amazingly unique take of what a modpack can be. It still has ways to go with more items / bosses / places to explore and I can not wait to see this modpack become one of the top modpacks!! I highly recommend anyone to try this out alone or with friends!!!

[self-review!]

I've been developing TREPIDATION since 2021, and what a ride it's been! I'm really proud of my work so far but also think this pack has a long way to go. Honestly, I had no idea trepidation would be this fun when I first started working on it. Hell, I had no idea minecraft could be this fun, especially the combat! Yes yes yes, of course I'm biased, but if I wasn't having fun in my own pack, I wouldn't give a damn about developing it anymore. Everything from the combat and movement just feels so fluid and satisfying. If you've played doom eternal, you'll know what I'm talking about. I want to continue to build on that.

A massive focus on the pack has also been horror. A lot of people have gave feedback and debated if a pack or game can really combine speedrunning and horror, I'm still of the camp that yes, it can. Let me talk about my reasoning.

I don't believe that just because this is categorized as a "horror modpack" means that the entire playthrough of the pack must be always invoke the feeling of horror. Good horror has a mix and explores other avenues. While I understand the main point is that much of the horror is mitigated by the ability to just i-frame and dash away, I don't actually think that detracts from the overall scary experience.
Look up the meaning of trepidation: "tremulous fear, alarm, or agitation; perturbation." That is exactly the kind of feeling I want to invoke in the pack. It's the feeling of going up to fight a Blazing Juggernaut but then quickly realizing they are avoiding all your attacks and do massive damage. It's the feeling of walking around the Erebus in the darkness and hearing a crawly noise get louder and louder. Yes, you dash away from these situations, but what makes it so much scarier is that you have control. Outlast and Resident Evil isn't scary only because of the gruesome scenes or the setting, it's scary because of the chase scenes and it's easy to get lost or mess up mechanically. It's all in your control and your fear can easily put you in a bad situation. In TREPIDATION, giving the player so many options to escape makes your brain fire off many thoughts as once, making you panic and be more prone to mistakes as you decide where to dash away to or if you should hide in a hole or what ability to use. The amount of times I've ended up in worse situations because of my panic...

I feel like that's the key word, panic. That's the feeling I like to provoke in every dimension. Just pushing "w" to run away in a game like Minecraft doesn't really put you in a panic state as much doing parkour moves while dodging and keeping track of 18 things all at once does. Dashing away quickly puts you in situations you'd rather not be in sometimes because of your panic state, and so you have to dash away more until eventually you've panicked so much that you're out of dashes. That's when the horror sets in, the feeling that all this power you had is suddenly gone, and you feel helpless and desperate. It's only going to get better as more mobs get custom abilities and as the dimensions get more content and become polished. The feeling of terror (as in suspense and dread) is there, but not nearly as much as I'd like it to be, so I have ideas for that as well.

But anyway, I just wanted to talk about that. Go play TREPIDATION and shit your pants like I have so many times during development and testing 😭

Disclaimer: I was (Discord role) compensated for this review (regardless of the contents of said review).
Disclaimer: I have claimed a bounty on finding an exploit for this pack.

This pack is unique in the experience it provides. It's highly reminiscent of the early days of a Minecraft speedrunning meta, where you didn't reset a run on a trivial mistake and nether fortresses were the primary focus. The pack is most feature-compete for the nether so I have played mostly and will focus on that.
Once I learned from external sources how to progress in the pack (a bit unintuitive to figure out), it was rather easy to get a hold of. Looting a fortress, gathering resources here and there, summoning the wither, and fighting him in the cage was a fun loop that didn't feel too random. The mobs were best dealt with running away, making the pack feel more fast-paced, though there are a variety of strategies that are effective to deal with mobs besides just kiting, which I am highly appreciative of.
Right now it's a bit of a short pack that gets its wings from replayability, which is currently a bit low given there are only about 15 minutes of gameplay finished, but as the pack shapes up I think things will fall into place rather quickly.
Takes up a bit more resources than your standard 1.12.2 pack. I softlocked my entire system several times because I left another app open with it.
Having art direction be under the hands of the modpack to such a degree is invigorating. Curious to see where it ends up.
The scepters and future items needed to progress should come pre-bookmarked in JEI in my opinion.
I'd happily check it out after every major dimension update in the future. This was a fun pack.

I think the direction that this modpack is going into is perfect. The number one "issue" at the moment is the fact that its simply not finished. This of course has an impact on the gameplay and player experience, but is by no means a huge problem when it comes to this modpack, as it is a WIP with a very small developer team (stay strong Mari!).
While sometimes there are problems with performance and stability while playing, these can be resolved quickly most of the time. The discord is a great place to ask members of the community or the dev themselves if youre experiencing crashes/framedrops.
The 1 hour time limit is also fitting i belive. When first starting out with this modpack, I believe an hour is a reasonably challenging time to get through the game. More experienced players wont need anywhere close to an hour. Nevertheless, I do believe this is a fine time limit. With the modpack only becoming more well-done/finished in the future, I expect the difficulty to rise accordingly and thus justify the time limit.
The bonus timers that you can get after defeating bosses/from chests however take away from the experience in my opinion. The timers may not have a huge impact on the gameplay, as they only restore 1 minute of the 60 you have at the beginning, they do however make the clock even less of a factor in the players mind. I believe the tension or stress that could build from a limit of 60 minutes that is set in stone would greatly add to the survival horror aspect of this modpack. The limitation of the time you have should be pushed more to stress the player further, because time, just like arrows or food, is a limited resource.
The tutorial, or lack there-of, can also be a point of critique. While some players would certainly critique the lack of direction given to you in-game, I enjoy these types of games. Total freedom to figure out how to survive in this hellish world is quite an experience, and sometimes I do miss that lack of knowledge like when I first started playing this modpack.
Overall, Id say its a close to perfect Minecraft modpack to play alone or co-op. Highly recommend it.

DISCLAIMER: THIS REVIEW IS FOR AN OUTDATED VERSION OF THE GAME. SEE DEVELOPER REPLY FOR INFORMATION ON CHANGES.

It's a very cool premise, but it barely delivers on what it promises. One of the main problems is that 1 hour is FAR too long. You get bonus time after each area, but it's a pitiful amount. I think the system would be much better if you started with a lower amount of time, and got more time after each area. This would keep the game more tense, and would feel more fair. As it stands, you can mess up a lot at the start, and not realize you've run out of time until much later, which feels terrible. If you make lots of mistakes, you should lose sooner rather than later.

The skill system is very shallow, and abilities vary wildly in power. Some abilities are nearly worthless, and some are alright. There's a purchaseable dash ability that you'd think is pretty good, but you already start with a dash that you can do while in the air over and over, giving you absurd lateral movement, even across empty space.

This game also has tons of binds, and many of the binds conflict right off the start, so getting that working is a pain.

The moment to moment gameplay isn't too bad. Fighting enemies is more fun than vanilla, though that isn't saying a lot. Your main way to progress is mining ores to get better ores. Basically it's normal minecraft progression, but scaled up to have more tiers, and you're on a time limit. Also you're mining upwards instead of downwards. I was hoping that there would be more to the progression than this, but it seems like that's all there is. It means that you're reliant on RNG to decide whether or not you find the ores in time to progress. And as previously mentioned, even if you take a long time to find the ores, you get way too much time at the start, so you won't know you've spent too long until way later.

The item system is also not very interesting. It advertises itself as sort of a roguelike, but me and my friends only ever found 2 or 3 special items, which is an absolutely pitiful amount. That isn't to say we only got 2 or 3 items, we found plenty, it's just that we kept getting the same 2 or 3 over and over again. They also seemed to just drop from random enemies, there was no fanfare or way to find them intentionally. I much preferred Muck's system for getting items, where there are designated objects that give items. I feel like that system would work well in trepidation, you could have little platforms floating out above lava in the nether, and you'd have to bridge out and get them, and maybe give up some amount of XP to unlock the chest. Of course, for this system to be meaningful, they'd need to add more special items in the first place.

To wrap the review up, the mod seems unfinished, and not very well designed. It looks pretty nice, and the premise is cool, but a game that is cool in theory does not always translate to good gameplay.