Really enjoyed this one, am playing through your sketches and I really like how they boil down gameplay to the essentials and throw the player into things pretty blind.
At first I was fighting everything, it was only a few screens in when I noticed my resources dwindling that I started running, haha! Probably why I haven’t been able to beat Butterfly yet, I refused to run from anything and that didn’t end well for me, haha!
“the enemy whose item you’re least likely to find is also suggestively named (an anxiety-born compromise which I regret).”
I am glad you did this to be honest, it was a pretty great EUREKA moment when I arrived at the door, realized I didn’t have the key, thought back, and remembered I had run from the monster you spoke of.
Had you given it a more obscure name, I would probably still be playing, frustratingly poking every tree, looking for that key XD Still got real unlucky with drop rates for the key, but on the other hand the final boss didn’t use silence on me until it was almost dead, so (and all that grinding meant I had the meat/blood I needed).
Great work, I’m gonna play more of these :DDD