Nice work! There were some cool ideas here and I enjoyed the writing and tone a lot. I don’t gravitate towards card battlers so being outside of the target audience some of my thoughts my be off the mark. There were a lot of rules/modifiers to take in and I definitely got a lot of them wrong as I played, thinking some effect would happen but then it didn’t. After the first few battles I ran out of attack cards so was stuck ending my turn till I died, I didn’t see any way to abandon the battle, which would have been nice. The fact that I didn’t didn’t bother me, just that it was tedious to get back to try again. I can imagine splitting up some of that info across several battles, or if the player is losing, having an additional dialog stating how the previous pawn did not even have a change to learn about X.
I think there are a number of UI improvements that would help a lot, the bestiary was helpful but it really could have take up the whole screen to quickly look at all the monsters (also showing pictures). The translucency of the chips in battle was very noisy and I had to think about them. Stacking the same ones, or at least grouping them, would have been nice. Not a huge deal but just small cognitive drain I always felt.
It’s possible I’m over-indexing on this one line, but all bold “IN CASE OF NOT HAVING ENOUGH MONEY YOU WILL BE LEFT TO DIE!” feels like too much yelling. Also that’s the only place I could see the res cost, having forgotten it after playing. Maybe something drier like, “And what if I don’t have 300?”, “Your corpse will promptly disposed of.”
The tension of constantly spending money is interesting but I don’t think it’s a mechanic that appeals to me personally. I generally hoard resources and part of me appreciated having to use things but I also didn’t feel incentivized to experiment much. I can’t remember what it was called but Hades had a list of rewards for trying different boons so even if you have a bad run you might find a new moveset you like or, at the very least, get some extra currency. The UI did hint that there might be some meta progression so it’s possible there’s more of a draw and I just didn’t get far enough.
Misc closing thoughts: the audio that was there was nice but it was so quiet a lot of the time, definitely wanted some text bloops and a little ambience. Even though I didn’t actually use it, “Mental Checkout” is my favorite item and description. Being able to play with gamepad is so nice!