played with controller. very solid from a game-mechanics-design perspective. kinda had to figure out stuff like what healing was and what button opens doors etc. but the combat was all very intuitive and functions like you'd expect if you ever played a souls-like. lack of feedback makes it feel bland, but i guess making it function and balanced was for dd65 and the particles and feedback will be dd66.
i do feel some enemies are very overly passive only to immediately block when i then decide to do something about it. there's a button for that i guess, but for that to work i need to anticipate the npc going to block my next would-be attack. a solution for this would be to implement a tell/animation that signals "i will attempt to block your next attack" or maybe you can animation-cancel your attack with your shield-break so i'm not wasting stamina on a (i assume) input-read block.
overall good improvement over last time since could (and wanted to) figure stuff out. maybe next dd i'll figure out what the b button does?