Neat game!
It doesn't really feel like the whole "you've been quined" gimmick impacts the gameplay though it's nice flavor. It's easy enough to just not repeat you exact same steps. I guess it makes going back and forth to grab offensive spells and clear out all the enemies in a level a little more dangerous?
Thank you for playing!
Yeah, I wasn't sure how aggressive to make the quining. It could be very aggressive where just waiting in place in a standoff ends the game; but that gets a bit frustrating and error prone.
The game-design intent is to encourage more aggressive gameplay. Roguelikes often have to balance against safe & cautious vs aggressive gameplay. Usually you can trade time for safety in a roguelike; leading to optimal play being very slow and boring. Some of the usual brakes on this are:
a) Global count down timer to win the game
b) Non re-spawning resources leading to attrition
c) Players just finding that playstyle boring and choosing not to do it
d) Hunger clocks
Quining is a different take on that limit. The spell lecterns producing infinite spells makes, in a normal roguelike, the optimal gameplay of one going back to always "refill". However, if you do that you stand a high chance of finding yourself repeating a state. Likewise; the monsters don't charge the final step to you if you can instantly kill them. This means you can do a dance to try and avoid them and reposition - spend too much time fiddling around trying avoid getting hit and you can end up in Chess-Stalemate of repeated board positions.
But if you play reasonably aggressively I think you can easily avoid the quining trap. I kept the balance on the easy side as well; which probably means you are less driven to seek the cautious gameplay. But at a meta-meta level, I kind of prefer people being able to "win" a 7DRL than have one that is too well tuned; especially when it is art-heavy and we want people to see the full extent.
Interesting, I didn't realize the AI was "don't charge the final step to you if you can instantly kill them". In practice, because there's no reason to attack a monster you don't intend to finish, it just means the clock spiders have unique AI which in some cases makes them more dangerous than the higher-health enemies.
I have something vaguely similar in my submission, where at a certain health threshold, enemies will stop stepping next to the player, and have a 50% chance of hopping backward instead of attacking.
