Been playing a little bit beyond the sisters in Chapter 3 on my (so far) no reincarnation save. The difficulty definitely ramped up immediately with new enemy types, but I'm loving the additional characters and reveals of all the horrible things that have been happening at the Asylum.
My Academic still gets one shot often with around 100 hp. Maybe it's low resistances on the gear she's wearing? Gabrielle has resorted to 'seemingly' betraying the party almost every battle despite me trying to pre-cast every anti-mind control magic I know, and these horrible tentacle monsters can often one shot my tankier party members, or just drag them out of reality entirely. Luckily they die to a few good crits. I just have to get lucky and finish them off before they attack too much.
I've discovered that the door next to Vissago goes to the East Wing of the hotel, but haven't found a way to open it yet.
If I can't make much progress soon, I'll probably commit to a swap to the occultist and see how things go trying to get back from the beginning.