Let me start by saying this is the first Jam game I've completed and I was pretty excited to sit down with it the moment I saw the sprite sets :)
There are a lot of good ideas here, and some stuff I am not crazy about.
To get the negatives out of the way:
- I feel the player's survival is too dependent on random potion drops. At least one enemy per troop generally goes faster than you and there's no way to avoid incremental damage on fights, even with the "correct" attack selections.
- The high encounter rate/offset by limited encounters doesn't work for me. It just makes it annoying to explore /solve the puzzles until you've cleared the room of enemies, IMO.
- I don't feel the encounters are particularly balanced, especially on floor 3. The first two times I got to that level I wiped on the very first fight; one death was due to an unlucky round 1 burn, granted. But then I accidentally pulled the boss with nothing but a Longsword and full HP, and was fine.
Strong points:
- Excellent use of retro-styled battlers and tile sets.
- Good music/sound choices.
- Enemies feel unique and the hidden weaknesses were fun to figure out.
- Weapons all have unique characteristics which adds a very cool tactical element, independent from enemy weaknesses. The player is incentivized to mix and match the characteristics on their equipment loadout, which is neat.
- Secrets ranging from very simple to very clever.
- Durability mechanic is solid thematically but did suffer a bit in terms of gameplay impact from the drop rate being super inconsistent.
- Score system for completionists, enhanced by the unshakeable feeling you missed a super secret somewhere...
Overall, very good job, and I am glad to have prioritized this one. Also, sorry for the long comment!