Hello and welcome to Feedback Quest 9! My name is Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts for this lovely event! I'm also one of the streamers, so both the game and this feedback are being done live! If you want to see the see the VOD, let me know and I'll link you to it when it's uploaded to YouTube!
So I love D&D. I also love Inscryption. This clearly takes inspiration from both of those and I'm all for that.
What I'm not for is just how utterly brutal this game is. I'm going to dive into this at the end as I think this is the most important thing to cover, though. I first want to cover a few things I made notes of.
First, I don't understand why my inventory comes up when I try to rest on the couch. What does the game want from me? I was going through my inventory while trying to find whatever relevant item I needed, yet nothing seemed to work. It would be helpful if the game did more to tell me what it wanted.
I also felt that the way to cancel out of an ability was a little confusing. I would assume it'd be the bottom most button, which happened to be labelled as "Back." However, it's not this. It's the button above it labelled "Cancel." Choosing "Back" causes the player to back away from the game board and stand up, which I feel like doesn't make sense to do in the middle of a fight since... well, what does this even allow the player to do? It's not like they can move around and change their perspective on the board.
Speaking of getting up and moving around... while I understand the intent of the fixed perspective, I feel like that doesn't belong here. In tabletop games, players are always able to get up and move around. You even let the player do the first part of this. As such, I think it would be good if the player could also look around the entire thing instead of being limited to a specific view. It would also make some of the controls actually useful or at the very least allow you to replace them with useful controls (like leaning to one side. When I used this, it didn't feel like it was giving me a better view to see things. It just made things worse).
Next, I want to address the dice rolling. When I first began experiencing terror rolls, I had no idea what was considered a good roll. It would be nice for the player to be made aware of what they don't want instead of just having no idea whatsoever until they get the bad roll. I also felt like the stamina system for rolls is very punishing, given how it only decreases if you fail a roll.
And this lets me get to the heart of the matter: the game's absurd brutality. In D&D, your dice rolls are typically combined with your stats to come up with a final result. This final result then needs to exceed a certain amount to be successful. While a low roll can be punishing, it doesn't outright mean you've failed the roll... unless, of course, you roll a 1 and get a critical failure. Similarly, a high roll doesn't necessarily mean you'll succeed if the skill check is very high, unless you roll a 20 and get a critical success. The main point in these is that you're not bound purely by the luck of the dice on whether you succeed or not.
However, the way dice rolls work in this is that you have to roll a D20 and get a number that is equal to or lower than the stat the character is using for that ability. This means that, from the very start, each die roll has a less than 50% chance to get what you need. While rolling more dice does increase the chances of success, failure means you reduce your stamina and have less dice to roll in the future. On top of this, some actions only give you a few dice and some use stats that are so low that you just don't really have a chance to get them, increasing the odds of failure.
From the start of the game through the first fight with a shadow and then into the second fight against the two guys trying to steal my batteries, I had far more failures than successes even when always using maximum dice. When I closed the game, I had already lost my warrior in the second fight and was about to lose another character because... the enemies don't seem to be subject to dice rolls on whether their abilities hit or not, only about how much damage they do.
Now I know this takes inspiration from Inscryption, which can also be a bit brutal at times. However, one thing that Inscryption has is that the person you're playing against has the same limitations as you do. They're bound to the same rules. If enemies had to roll dice in order to succeed with their attacks with the same low odds the player has, this would be different. This isn't the case, though.
So how can this be improved? There are a few ways. First, you could increase base stats across the board so players have better odds of getting a good roll. You could also use different types of die depending on the situation. For example, using a D10 or D12 in normal fights, then saving the D20 for fights that are supposed to be harder. You could also overhaul the way the dice rolls work to get something closer to what D&D does. However, I think that the one thing that should be done is that enemies should be bound to the same rules as you. They should be subject to the same dice you use and should be subject to things like terror. When enemies get to play by different rules when the game is skewed against the player, it makes the game unfair. When the game is unfair, it means the game stops being fun. When the game stops being fun, it means players won't play it anymore and will tell others to not play it. When that happens... well, now your game won't sell and you wasted your time and money on its development. So no matter what, this needs to be addressed.
And that's all I got. I wish you luck with the game. If you do change things up, feel free to hit me up and I'll happily try it again.