First thing I have to say, is you should consider making the intro text pause at the end and or certain points in the text to give people the time to read it. I kept up the pace up until the last few lines... then it faded before I could finish it. Given it has an appearance like cursive writing... I would image if you did not learn cursive writing, it would be much harder to read at that pace if at all. But also it would have been nice to take a moment to really ponder on that text and really take it in... as it felt as much as a poem as it was a story intro.
I also did not realize I was controlling a character at first until I panned to the left because I had seen red flashing at the bottom of the screen only to realize after I had panned back left, it was text. The a short moment after that, I realized it was a character being controlled. Dropping into the scene after reading the intro text left me feeling like I was scrolling a camera and the story would continue with my view focused on the camera and not on the tiny character. It can be easy to lose sight of the character after scene transitions.
The playstation style isometric style graphics were nicely done. I really had Diablo vibes from this. The music is so **Peak**. The music really puts you into the atmosphere, along with the use of scale really emphasizing this feeling of darkness and despair. This further accentuates with the moments you are reading the texts.
I was not too fond of the enemies running in to you when you have the text overlapping on the screen and either have to battle through the text or read it as you take damage.
The combat was fair. I didn't find it really engaging though because of the scale of the character and enemies, which made the combat feel off putting. Spamming arrows across the scene and cheesing enemies in between screens was useful to level up for the sake of being able to get your shot rate increased. I would look forward to experiencing visual feedbacks added to the combat~ it would make the experience feel more impactful.
To be honest, I actually abandoned playing the game because I could not stand getting to dead ends and then spending minutes at a time to back track to find another space where nothing was going on, essentially spending dozens of minutes navigating with no direction. This absolutely killed it for me. This was where I was like... a mini map would be so helpful right now, then at least i could have a better understanding of where I could back track to and continue exploring something I may have missed. Also there is a normalize direction issue with the movement inputs so I took advantage of this by moving in diagonal patterns the whole time, hoping it would spare me time of travelling the endless empty corridors. There is a bit of graphic collision artifacts that allow the character to appear as if they could be walking along the side of the geometry instead of on top of it.
I found this experience started off amazing and I was very impressed but then after I descended into the crypts, the feeling faded into irritation as I wandered around hoping to find the next great text or event that would hook me back to a similar feeling that the first 5-10 minutes had given me.
This was an extremely entertaining experience, and I am disappointed that I abandoned it, but I also was not going to go to another dead end and get lost possibly running back into the same dead end I may have already been in. I really hope this project continues to progress. This has so much amazing potential! It really does a lot of great things in unique ways and invokes such great emotion and the need to invest the time in the things I feel it does great.