There's... a lot going on here. It starts off a bit too "dark & edgy deconstruction" for me, with the sword-dispensing old man's famous warning written in his own blood and the ~ chosen hero ~ dying right in front of you in the first dungeon. I'm not really sure where it's going with this, since the rest of the game from that point is horror lite at worst. As far as I can tell, at least. Maybe I'm missing something.

On top of its glitch / self-aware / fairytale derailed schtick, there's also a weirdly laboured critique of the finance industry packed in there, with pun-spewing banker skeletons and even a stock tracking slot machine minigame. I don't know how well these fit in with the main premise. I genuinely do appreciate the puns, though.

Meanwhile, there's a side quest where you gather lost books for your local lesbian librarian, ranging from ~ deep lore ~ to skeleton themed filks of popular music to a monster girl romance novel of her own creation. (I actually ended up impressing her so much with my book-finding skills that she joined me as my companion and the rest of the game has become a weird dungeon-crawling date.)

Some of these books, NPC dialogue, and other writing are pretty amusing - I really prefer this light stuff to the attempted glitch horror content. For example, there's flashbacks to the big bad (?) exasperatedly trying to teach their crew of dungeon bosses not to make fatal tropey mistakes. Like opening up their incredibly vulnerable mouth to "eat the mean arrows" when the hero attacks them. It's very reminiscent of the Nightmare Knight in Cucumber Quest.

I even found myself writing down the number for a pizza delivery company based on a jingle sung by a boss in one of these scenes, so that I could call them on the in-game mobile.

Speaking of bosses, their designs are interesting enough, though most fights are a bit short. I'd say all too short, but the most recent boss did at least surprise me with an amusing second phase of sorts, where I had to input the Konami Code on a teleporting joystick while evading minions.

I can't end my review without talking about randomisation. I get why roguelikes are popular, and I know there's even a niche but popular cottage community out there of Link to the Past randomisers. But for a small "couple of hours" indie experience like this, I'd really prefer hand-crafted, curated content. I'd much prefer a solid, short experience than a disjointed one designed to justify itself through ~ infinite replayability ~.

I covered the first four dungeons and exactly half of the world map in my session, then I went back for more. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the second sitting so much - the later dungeons are just bigger with more procedurally generated rooms, and they felt like a bit of a slog.