Awesome! Thank you for such a long and thoughtful writeup. It feels so good to hear you say you loved the game!
The VGA DOS look was something I tried forever to accomplish with 3D texture maps and I never found a reasonable way to pull it off. So I went "actual 2D" but it's really hard. Drawing things at different distances and the such is a gigantic amount of work but I have some tools to help with it. I'm very happy with the aesthetic myself but by the end of this project my finger hurt like hell (where my drawing stylus rested on it) and I was so very over drawing pictures of trees and stuff. Also fire, I may never ever draw any fire again. The room full of candles broke me. Why the hell did I do that? No idea!
I totally hear you about the missing flee button - running away during the fight was bugged so I removed it but I figured if the game auto-loads right after the fight ends badly then the consequence of failure isn't that bad. M&M2 options before the fight are "attack, bribe, hide, run" but I wasn't going to implement all of those. As for fight and attack - one of them lets you choose the target and the other targets monster #1, this is taken straight from M&M 2. It's not particularly intuitive I know, I think later M&M games have a much better system of selecting a "target" monster and having everything just target that guy unless you change the target but I figured I'd go with the M&M2 system just for fun. I don't like it, having both "attack" and "fight" is really not intuitive at all. I plan to change it in the future, "attack" + "fight" is a bad system. The feedback about Unity's default background is interesting. I intentionally placed a blue border between the windows, that's just the color choice I went with. M&M2 uses a solid maroon red border but I thought that didn't look good with my color palette so I changed it. I intended to change the color to red when a combat started but I ran out of time. I configured the Unity solid skybox color to be black and I show that when you're looking at the character sheet.
Static gap blockers enemies are not my favorite either, I'm on the same page as you with that. Since I wanted heavy M&M2 inspiration (which is also static enemies) I went with it and I found it easier to design strategic levels this way, but I really do prefer games where the monsters chase you. I think I'll go back to that in the future. As for monster AC being too high for Hargir I hear you on that. It's probably my #1 piece of feedback at this point. I want one more day to play balance so stuff like this doesn't happen but alas I didn't have another day. Oh well.
I really appreciate the kind words and the effort you put into your feedback. Thank you.