itch.io

Tried a run and got to the boss fight at the end of the map. The vibe and aesthetics are cool, definitely a good overall direction there, and I can see the appeal of the alchemy system, it's the sort of thing some people could get really hooked by. Overall my impressions were pretty positive, I'm interested to see where the game goes. 

Some thoughts and suggestions:

1. The game is very rock-paper-scissors. That's not a bad thing, in fact it's probably an under-explored approach to this sort of game, but I think the design needs to take it into consideration more than it does at the moment - it feels like if you're playing a "rock" deck and get dropped into a "paper" fight, you're just fucked, and not because of anything you did wrong. So if some monsters are just hard counters to some builds, and vice versa, then it probably makes sense for the player to have ways to avoid bad matchups, rather than making it pure luck. Maybe players don't necessarily have to kill the enemies in a combat encounter to continue - if it's something they're equipped to fight they'll get rewards for doing so, but if the player is all specced into fire and the room's full of golem enemies it makes more sense for them to just run for the exit and miss the rewards. So there'd be an element of picking your battles, fighting the ones worth fighting and dodging the rest - success would come more from strategy, less from random chance. And, similarly, why not show partial information about the fights on the map? You don't want to completely lose the random element, of course, sometimes the player should end up in a tricky situation unexpectedly and have to find a way out, and some runs should be luckier than others. But when matchups are really polarised the player needs to be equipped with enough forewarning to feel like they had a chance to either avoid it or be ready for it. In slay the spire, for example, some of the end-of-act bosses are really punishing to certain builds, but it compensates by telling you which one you'll be up against. The game gets away with some bosses hard-countering your build because you get the entire act to adapt your build to handle it. If you could see the act boss and roughly what health types each room contains from the beginning, you could plot a route to give yourself better odds. Depending on what rewards you got along the way and how your deck started to shape up, you might change your plans as you go (say you get offered some nice fire cards, and had been planning to go through a golem room, for example). Again, it'd mean the swingy rock-paper-scissors matchups become something you can beat with planning and strategy, rather than luck. Of course, the more the player can dodge bad matchups the more you'll need to adjust the overall difficulty up to compensate, but I definitely think it would make more sense to give the player more responsibility for picking their fights.
2. I think the tutorial needs to do more to communicate really explicitly how central the idea of damage and health types are to the game. Not sure how much this was random coincidence, but I took the suggested tutorial fire starter build, and was put in rooms with golem enemies at least a couple times early on. I suspect the idea was to teach me how fire damage and golem health interact, but it wasn't really spelled out. I'd read the description on the game's page enough to work out what the deal was, but the average player will wander in, not know why his damage isn't damaging, get frustrated and leave. Even knowing what was happening and what the intention was, it felt a bit like I was being set up to fail, given fire damage and sent straight up against enemies who get healed from it. I think I'd have a much more explicit "your fire damage healed this guy, because of his health type. go look at his health type to see his strengths and weaknesses. damage and health types are very important, always keep them in mind."  - and maybe give the player something the golem is weak to, to use after they've learned fire won't work.
3. Have you considered having the damage and health types gradually unlock as you play? Having a deep varied alchemy system is cool, but new players will be overwhelmed by it, so why not start them with maybe 4 (two pairs that counter each other or something), and then gradually expand what they can use and what they go up against as they make progress?
4. There are a few ways the interface could feel a little smoother: 
   1. If a card only targets yourself, should I really need to click on my guy to use it? Can I not just play the card without any target selection? 
   2. It would be nice to have a more convenient way of deselecting things - maybe after I've clicked a card to select it I could deselect it by right-clicking anywhere that right-clicking wouldn't mean something else, or by pressing escape, or something like that. Having to mouse over it again before I can deselecting it feels a bit awkward.
   3. The map screen looks cool, but I think the lines connecting the nodes are too hard to keep separated, you end up with lots on top of each other and it's harder to make sense of than it ought to be. Maybe if the vertical spacing between rows were greater that'd help
5. I mentioned it's very rock-paper-scissors and that that's mostly fine, but there were a couple things I encountered that I suspect just aren't good things to include. Like someone else mentioned, if enemies outrange you there's nothing you can do to answer that - in fact, enemies with long range attacks are always going to be miserable. Best case scenario, you have lots of long range attacks too, and you both just stand there shooting each other from across the map. Worst case scenario, you have to move, get shot at, move, get shot at, eventually get into range, then kill them, at the cost of a lot of health. And if it's flipped and the player has lots of range and the enemies don't then you can just nuke everything and ignore the spatial element of the game. I think long range attacks are probably a bad idea in general the way your game's set up, they're always going to be broken for whichever side has them. Similarly, I encountered skeletons with machine guns that did lots of little hits. Maybe there's some damage-reduction mechanic I could have had that would have trivialised them, but as it was I had shield cards that had been useful so far, but now were almost entirely worthless. I'd spend all my actions on adding two points of shield, and then get hit for 1 damage 9 (-2) times. I think if the shield mechanic is going to be central to the player's defence then you should avoid having enemies that make it useless, or if the player's meant to be balancing having a good defence against few big hits and having a good defence against lots of little hits, then the tools for both should be in the starting deck - I don't think I ever encountered anything that would have helped against those machine gun skeletons.

Hope the suggestions are helpful, and like I said at the top, overall my impressions were positive and I'm keen to try out the next version when it comes!