It's alright. The unfortunate facts are that the lack of stamina regeneration baseline makes for easy deathspirals and overall limited tutorial make the game's fairly small list of mechanics have a lot of ambiguity.
There's not much encounter diversity other than some hidden number changes, I'd cut the total encounter count in half. The game becomes very stale very fast, barely warranting a second run.
It's cute, seems well optimized, but lacks any staying power or significant mechanical depth while also having fail-out systems baked so robustly into its loop that it makes the actual
content a distraction from meter management.
A next attempt should probably consider more mechanics beyond Thrusts and Plapping, especially because the hearts always seem to come in a scatter of 3x, with no real way to intervene on that front, you're really just fighting invisible timers in a race to build meter.
Probably the worst element on display here is that there's not really any between-run advantages to pick up, that tanks replayability especially badly since seemingly there is only one model of lay prior to the dragon at the end.
It's fine for a sample game made for building skills and published for free. What it lacks though is any reason to revisit, and its genuinely too long and frustratingly tedious.