Game's an absolute audiovisual treat, with solid gameplay and one of the most interesting interpretations of the theme I've seen so far! Here's a list of thoughts and feedback in no particular order:
- Probably the biggest thing that stands out to me is the choice to not have any healing and to make death an instant restart from the beginning, and I don't think it's the correct one for this game. The core mechanics - weapon ordering and and overkill = levels - are begging for experimentation, to try out different things in different slots, to use big risky weapons, and generally just go wild. But then it's punishing in a way that forces you to play cautiously lest you risk losing all your progress in terms of built up inventory. Getting hit feels awful because the attacks on their own are easy to dodge, but the damage sticks and each mistake compounds on the last no matter how well you do in between.
- The enemies left = weapon selected is a super creative mechanic. I wasn't sure how fun it would be to play at the beginning, but it turned out to be super satisfying to craft your perfect inventory for different scenarios!
- The hooded crossbow guys are the bane of my existence and have probably ended more runs than anything else I've seen so far (got to around floor 120 before dying on my best run).
- Like another commenter mentioned, a bit more feedback on when you take & deal damage would be nice. Some of the enemy windup animations feel a bit droopy, and I've been hit by things that felt like they came out of nowhere in a crowd.
- If I'm not mistaken, the overkill is based on health before the killing blow, given that the same enemy gave me a different number of levels. I think that it should've been done differently, you can't see enemy HP to know if you can finish them off for max overkill nor do you know when your 12 damage weapon is going to give you no overkill because the enemy just so happens to have 11 HP left after taking some damage earlier on in the fight.
- The shotgun and the dual pistols are extremely satisfying in higher slots once you get multiples, just start blasting at the big enemies and then thin out the crowds once they get in your way.
- Enemies feel like they have 3x the health they should, spending a minute and a half hacking away at one of the big knight enemies who's too slow to meaningfully hurt you is not fun.