(found this profile from Metroidvania Month 31 x Magical Girl Game Jam 13 recruitment post)
Oops. The waves were so long, I looked away around Wave 25 and then the grandma told me I was a brave kid and I have no idea if it was the true ending or the game over message. Plus the game auto-pauses on window unfocus which prevented me from doing other things on my computer for a while, so I ended up picking a book and that’s when… Did I do all of this for nothing?
Paradoxically, time goes on during the tutorial and I lost 2 HP at the beginning because of that, causing my ultimate demise at the end I suppose…
That said, I really like the risk-reward mechanic of letting enemies go closer to increase fear and buy more upgrades, instead of traditionally killing enemies to loot resources.
I think this game would benefit better from short sessions, a few waves to push the player to run that risk (balanced in a way that it’s impossible to win if you kill all enemies near the entrance at first).
It has been set to last many waves to advance the story but at some point, I could win without adding further upgrades and lost interest. It would be better to advance the dialogue after every wave instead of every 4-5 waves, but in counterpart making each wave increment much harder than the previous one (and obviously give fear resource proportionally to it). Because I’ve been very patient and I suppose I failed, so very few players must have been able to get to the end.
P.S.: you should update Xina and link to tokubetsuna.itch.io to add the new name Stardust.666. It took me a lot of time to understand what Stardust.666’s role was on this game (and it was important since I come from a recruitment post).