One of my favourite combat-focused entries. The highest difficulty felt very tightly tuned towards forcing me to fight in suboptimal conditions and use items to keep things from getting even worse. I ended up using a strategy that was heavy on Toxic Bombs, but I talked to John afterwards and he said he didn't buy any of those. It's really impressive that it supports multiple playstyles while still feeling incredibly tense throughout the last dungeon (I wasn't even able to fully heal up before the final boss!) The uncontrollable party member made fights feel dynamic, and the elemental weakness system combined with the encounter design kept me guessing about the best approach to the tower's upper floors.
I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the game on Hard! Avoiding full-on lock-and-key design is really important to me, because part of what makes RPGs interesting to me is creating a textured problem-solving space - otherwise I would just make a puzzle game. My hard-mode strategy at least partially revolved around stun sparks - they're very useful for the final boss or Stoners, or for stalling out Shadows. It's been really fun to see several players explore the space in their own way. Thank you for playing!