I guess what the tutorial is missing is just an initial "what is this game about". It looks like a roguelike, plays realtime, has cubes (which in and of itself is kinda confusing), so an average player, even one well versed in traditional roguelikes, is very likely to get lost.
I'll take a look at the readme though!
That's the thing. The closest game like it is probably Cube Chaos, and even that's almost a genre of its own. But it does seem people versed in traditional roguelikes tend to have an easier time with the controls, if nothing else. Overall, the premise is simply to survive, and adapt to what's thrown at you.It's just that there's a lot of different things that can be thrown at you.
It's so charming but difficult to understand as a game. I have no idea what Cube Chaos is. I guess the question is - as a game, what are you trying to do? What are the choices you are making?
I understand cubes are being thrown at you, so is your objective to simply dodge and decide to break a cube or not? What is the overall strategy behind dodging and breaking? I've even watched your gameplay but still don't quite understand the systems.
The choices? Let's say you see a Flamethrower cube. Obviously, you can decide to walk into range and die. Preferrably, you would also find a way to destroy it, or leave it be and mark that area off in your head as unsafe.
Another example: you can build a resource farm by placing Water Portals and devouring what comes out of them, then spend those resources on cubes it can afford. Scaffolding is always useful, in both getting away, and getting to things, but you can also set up a small base of your own, complete with healing machines, fragment farms, grindstones, and the Charge systems that may or may not be needed to power those. But if you're like me, you're probably going to die running into something you knew would kill you, before any of that, lol.
In terms of deciding what to break or not, I would often deliberately keep around certain fallen cubes even if they were dangerous to me, as I knew they would also be dangerous to other cubes that might be worse. Or a passive cube might be useful as a wall to build my foundations on. I'll destroy a cube if I decide it not worth the risk keeping around, or its fragment value outweights it protection.
There's of course another playstyle where you don't build anything at all - it's pretty risky, with no rewards, but nothing's going to stop you.
The playing area is small to account for the heavy amount of vertical content, and to ensure cubes that fall actually get a chance to interact with the layer around them. Not to mention, we don't want height accumulation to be a slog.
The text space is large as the game features a heavy amount of text and reading compared to most roguelikes. The text in general is large, as again, there's a lot of reading and I would prefer to avoid eye strain. That said, you can change the font size in settings.
The game, ultimately, isn't exactly a roguelike, though it shares some aspects such as being text-based with heavy reliance on procedural generation. Permadeath is optional, you aren't crawling a dungeon, the genre is survival, and for the most part, the game runs in real-time.