Either I am just really good or the game needs more balancing and smarter ai, since on my first try I won and took zero damage (I got lucky) and you can win pretty easy. I think having the drug test of the enemy show exactly which pill was taken makes things quite easy. I just felt that made it too easy to trick them into taking it themselfs, since then you can just pick any other pill if the enemy does not take it and I’ve noticed they prefer to go for the blue pill even though there is only one left (so death is guaranteed). So if you plan the usage of your items, you can consistantly win. Staying on the topic of items, letting me choose the items myself is too good. If we take a look at buckshot roulette (the inspiration), you get random items and you need to work with what you get. Here I can just pick the drug test, duplication (since it allows me to duplicate items from the enemy as well) and skip all the time and I just win. I did really like the tolerance mechanic, since that adds a bit of extra strategy. But by having that mechanic you can just skip your turns and just have them die by letting their tolerance run out (I thought it was too easy, but I think that might be intentional). I agree with other commenters saying that having the first level just be luck is not the most fun thing, since there isn’t any mechanic (to my knowledge) to force the enemy to take a pill, which I think is a welcome feature. I think this was done to prevent the game from being to similar to buckshot roulette, but I would like to see some sort of a counter in the first round, like having a single item for example.
thanks for the feedback! The enemy AI is very broken at the moment and the way they use items is not right. We are trying to improve the enemy AI and item using first. The drug test suggestion is definitely a solution we can try out.
The choosing 2/4 items was done to add some strategy. But like you pointed out there might be some items that are considered way stronger than others. Maybe we can potentially add a weighting system based on items. At the moment the enemy AI doesn’t use items in the right way but we hope that when it is multiplayer that choosing items will become more clear.
As for the first round being random. We wanted to make the first round luck not to overwhelm the player with new information. But we will add item choice in the first round as soon as the player has beaten the AI once. We want to potentially add a campaign
I personally found the AI quite good, even if it isn't perfect. In fact I only won 1 of my 5 runs to be honest XD. He did use an injection at the end of a round for no apparent reason (he had enough inventory slots for new objects). But apart from that, unless I was unlucky, he properly used every object for a reason. He once ate the last blue in my runs, but in that case it was his last life and he had 1 tolerance left, so there was no good option anyways.
And although I ate the bad pill 4/5 times on the first round, I didn´t see that round innecessary. Because it maight work as a pill tutorial so you don't learn about pills and objects the same round.
You have good points, though. I just comment to give a little bit more of feedback.