Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• "In the archive" offers you to explore a dungeon/library to find artifacts and notes about great sealed monsters, and eventually gather enough gear and info to battle these great monsters. I'd say the main mechanic is that each weapon has several keywords (piercing/slashing/blunt, fire/ice/light/dark, etc.), and you have to work out what enemies are weak against what types - the same extends to great monsters, for which you can find corresponding notes. I found this premise interesting enough to finish the game once, but has some feedback: * The dungeons all seem to be generated by the same algorithm, just with a different color. This really doesn't inspire to explore them further after the first one (I think the enemies were different, but since I mostly one-hit them, I didn't care). Having a different generation algorithm or some other feature of the terrain would make it more fun. * I found most (all?) of the notes on the very first level of each dungeon - would be nice to put them at the very last, or encourage player to go to the final depth in some other way. Also, a teleport that takes you back to the archive would be very welcome - at least in my case, cause I mowed down most enemies on my way down. Which brings me to: * The balance is way off, I did not feel threatened ever after picking up an armor and a weapon. I essentially brute forced the right weapon and armor against half of the great monsters, because I had a full arsenal and 20/20 heal charms. * Finally, having to press the key every time I need to move (as opposed to press down once and move repeatedly) is very taxing on my keyboard :)
• I appreciated that this was a traditional roguelike, but had an unusual setup and a unique feel to it. Just the choice of glyphs and colors gives it a different feel, and the setup of building an arsenal of weapons, charms, and armor to take on bosses is pretty cool. It requires some patience from the player for sure, but I like the idea of having to write stuff down. The theme is improved immensely by the flavor text for me-- instead of just saying that a boss is weak to fire, there is a bit of history explaining why. This sort of thing makes it feel more like you are fighting creatures that existed before you got there. I felt that although there were a bunch of different armors and attacks, they were all basically the same other than the boss fights. I mostly used charms to get the first hit, and then used my weapon to get the killing blow. Because the charms can be used on any monster in your LOS, there wasn't any thought of positioning. That's fine, it just gives the game more of a feeling of resource manager and info gathering instead of compelling combat. The biggest issue that I had with the game by far was the lack of any type of fast travel; even the ability to hold down a key command would have helped. The number of key presses to go through the game over and over as I learned how to play ended up making my hand feel strained. It is a game where you can die suddenly and there are no potions, so small mistakes are costly. Most of these mistakes on my part had to do with the fact that I would assume that an auto-targeter would target the closest monster, but that was often, possibly even usually, not the case here. I also had quite an issue figuring out how to close any menus, since the key commands are not given on the inventory screens, on the itch page, or in a separate help menu. Overall, the game has some great ideas and I like the setup of it. With some Quality of Life changes, it can be a cool and unique-feeling experience.