Hi, after playing your game for a few days and almost winning with a half-troll, I feel comfortable enough with the game to establish an overall opinion. First off, props to you for maintaining a game for this long and without diluting its identity like other trad roguelikes do. The ambiance of the game is really well delivered; you really feel like being in a dangerous place you don't belong to, with all the traps and various enemy types and whatnot. The small tiles are sometimes a pain to decipher, as the characters often blend with the environment, and their details all blend together. Also, not a fan of the AI images during events, quite frankly.
As for the gameplay, again, props to you for making all the important info available at the tip of the cursor. So many roguelikes nowadays are stupidly opaque and it's easy in those games to feel like it's the fault of the game holding off the info, rather than yourself. There is also a ton of variety in playstyles, items and events, so you're bound to find something that fits with your preffered way to play; plus, it's very easy to branch out which weapons to use. My favorite is the half-troll warrior of Lastarviak, it's a very straightforward combo, with a big beefy melee dude that one shots everything and a god very easy to please and level up with.
Speaking of leveling up, that's where I have issues with the game: Leveling up in itself, and the absurd difficulty curve. Gaining a level is extremely slow in this game. I was glad to see it is very easy to branch between skills in this game, but the way to do it - spendng skill points - is a bit of a hassle, given how you only gain one on level up (2 gods also offer them, but that's not the point), a how you won't necessarily gain a level on every floor; sometimes it can take 2, or even 3 floors if you're unlucky, and you desperately need skills points to get the most basic defenses up and running, because the things they protect you from are so crippling they might as well be insta-kills.
For isntance, poison in this game is extremely difficult to avoid and get rid of without the Poison Resistance skill or a ring of similar effect. If you get poisoned, you either need a healing source ASAP, or you get to see your character dying a slow, inevitable death. The chance for the poison to go away on its own is incredibly low, and if your character doesn't start with an an affinity in rogue skills, you'll need to gain 2 or 3 levels before being able to afford the basic level of that skill.
That's way to long, and you also need to raise your offense to be able to hit anything, because your starting accuracy is ridiculously low. That's why I always start with the Warrior class, because it has Advanced Combat, which raises your hit chance by 30%, which is a huge boon in the early game, because you really can't afford to waste your skill points like that.
As for the second problem, the difficulty curve, I think it simply comes down to how the odds were tweaked. In this game, anything can happen. And it can happen on the first floor. That issue I had with poison? You can get poisoned at level 1, and it can kill you even with the free health potions you can get on the first floor. Out of the last 30 defeats I had in this game, I can confidently say that more than half of them are due to poison alone. Curative potions are common enough I'd say, but with how limited your inventory space is, you're gonna blindly chug enough curative potions unwillingly to leave enough space for more useful items.
Same issue with diseases. Most diseases are game-ruining to the point where my first skill to train is always Disease resistance. The stat draining ones especially, because the game doesn't use your base stats for skill training, they use stats AFTER any modifier is applied. Which could be good if you buff your statd with a potion, but since diseases are semi-permanent, you can be locked out of your class' best skills because you couldn't find a way to get rid of your diseases.
Also, anything can be a booby trap in this game, which I like, but I don't like how frequent it is in the early game. They all perform STR/DEX/INT checks, but at the start of the game, they might as well not bother, because you're gonna eat every trap the game throws at you. Special mentions to the Sorceror's puzzle, which is just a giant annoying waste of time, and to that specific trap that dealt 35 dmg on the first floor, where I was still at lvl 1, with a max HP of 35. Great, love to see that.
The next points aren't as egregious, but worth mentioning:
- Potions of strength and dexterity are way too common, but strangely there's no potions of intelligence?
- Most gods are a pain to use. I love them all conceptually, even the minor gods you don't see often, but most major gods you can start the game with have a few species of monsters you cannot attack, lest you get your faith points nuked to oblivion. For Lastarviak it's not an issue, as he's very easy to please, but the others take a while and/or have requirements pretty hard to fulfill. And given how useful some of their abilities are, you really don't want to waste them.
- The skill requirements to avoid booby traps should be lower in the early game, and higher as you go deeper in the dungeon. Past a certain point, around lvl 20+ or so, I could disarm or avoid most traps without even checking what they were doing.
But overall, despite the negatives, I had a pretty good time with this game. It's just that the negatives can really sour the experience at times. I like all the gods, I like the skill system, and I like the vibe and the events changing the entire run in an instant. The game just needs some tweaks here and there to make the experience more palatable.