Still coming back to this game every few months or year,since I both hate and love it.
For about the first 70% of the game I feel like you always have jsut one upgrade less than would be comfortable.
Like you do a hard as f section, finally get an upgrade.and the next and pretty much only possible area now has enemies that hae higher health, more skills and such so that with the new upgrade it feels jsut as hard or harder than how the old area without the upgrade felt like.
Like upgrades here feel like a small piee of bread in a world of emptiness. making sure that you dont starve for one mor day or a few hours but the pain and suffering didnt really get any better despite the bread you got.
On the other hand the game is great, otherwise I wouldnt torture myself with it.
I remember playing itmany years ago, likely the 1.0 version or so and it definitely was even harder.
Like some section , comparatively felt almost easy, when the 20 room long section had like a health drop around the mid point that it likely didnt have in the previous version.
anyways great game. hate it but cant get enough of it.
back then I couldnt even make it into the lava caves, aka couldnt clear the 3 rooms in the south east of the stone caves.
Now within like 2-3 days I almost breezed through, relatively speaking.
still hard as f but I often can make it to like 1 or 2 rooms away from the next save point so it is obviously possible if I jsut lose less health per room.
currently have all the gems, everywhere explored, in the final area before the secret final boss.
god, there aint no strategy for this, this is sjut pure bullet hell here where you sometimes jsut gotta take the hits to shot the enemy in the face or tackle him to death
nice having a full health regen in each room.
something I dont remember being there in the first version either.
sure hope you might make another game one day :-)
Edit: Looking back at my old comments and how it complained about lots of rooms along the way , the game definitely must have become way more easier since then! :-)