This is a review of the latest patch.
I will start off by stating that I am very happy to see that my balancing suggestions from earlier were implemented. Firstly, the status conditions can finally abate and eventually run their course which prevents stacking status conditions from being a viable strategy. Furthermore, it made some encounters easier. Secondly, magic is now finite in numbers since you can no longer stack manastones. Now, I can say with confidence that the major balancing issues have been fixed.
With that said, I feel the new relics, which I guess were inspired by other games featuring permadeath, were added too soon to the game. They are completely broken right now and were added right after a patch to fix the pre-existing balancing issues of the game. I know that a game can get stale if nothing new is added to it, but even then I have seen great suggestions in the comments that could have been taken into consideration instead. For example, someone suggested to allow the player to switch from their base backpack to another with unique gimmicks. There could be a backpack that can either increase or decrease the damage output of a weapon depending on where it's placed or one that can improve the effects of foodstuff while reducing the effectiveness of potions. However, the update provided us the relics which can be used in tandem to completely take advantage of the game. First of, there is the comment under mine, but also I managed to combine multiple relics together to create an abomination of a powerhouse, the elephant fossil (I can not remember the real name), the stopwatch, the knives and the empty bottle all provide substantial damage bonuses to my weapons for a small drawback. Thanks to the knives, I could deal over 150 damage on my first turn after which the damage output resets, though the stopwatch also added +3 for the duration of the battle (See build in screenshots below).
Long story short, I'm not that much of a fan of the relics. If anything, the treasure chest that you can open right after beating the boss should have featured legendary items instead of the run-of-the-mill common that I can find casually in every chest of the dungeon.
Another problem to note is there are items that are worse than others, this is made blatantly evident with the club, the spiky club (Not to be confused with the spiked club) and the mace. The regular club is the best weapon out of the 3 while the mace is the worst one out of the 3. The regular club deals 7 damage points and adds 1 weak to the chosen enemy, the spiky club deals 7 damage points and adds 1 slow to the enemy, and the mace deals 10 damage points and adds both 1 weak and 1 slow to the enemy at the cost of 2 energy.
From worst to best, the mace is bad simply because you can usually only use it once per turn due to its energy cost, given it's 2 while Purse without any energy item has 3 energies to begin with. Even then, the damage does not add up, it adds down. If you somehow manage to use the mace twice, it deals a total of 20 damage points, but both the club and spiky club if used 4 times deal 28 damage points. Although in my opinion that would not make the mace a good item, I think the least it could have is a base damage output of 14 to match with the club and spiky club. As for the club and spiky club, it comes down to the status conditions. Currently, and since it is a roguelite, weak is better because it ensures you do not take too much damage from enemies while allowing Purse to dispose of them at a decent pace. Slow reduces the armor that enemies put on, but most enemies don't ever shield up and all the ones that do, except for the Armadillo, only defend themselves every pair of turns or every 3 turns, so the player will always have the enemy open for an onslaught. Compared to the spiky club, the club is useful on every enemy in the game, except the Snake and the Wizard Frog.
To this day, I still have yet to understand the meaning of the pick and the bricks. The pick is a weapon with a base damage of 0 that gets +1 if a gem is near it, but gems are so rare, so I could never use it. If you compare it to the cursed blade (I'm sure the name is different), the key sword and the fish sword anyone would quickly realize how bad the pick is, at the very least the aforementioned weapons have a base damage output of 8 or 7. As a weapon, it is even more insulting than the mace. If I'm being honest, players use a pickaxe to mine diamonds in Minecraft: why not give it a base power of 4 and whenever Purse kills an enemy with it you get a rare gem in exchange? As for the bricks, why would I use them over armor pieces? I guess they only become useful once you get your hand on the berrserker's ring because this gets disabled if any armor of shield item is in Purse's inventory, but given I have seen it a total of 4 or 5 times across all my runs this makes the bricks pretty much pointless.
Aside of new balancing issues from the relics, I was pleasantly surprised of all the additions. The forge is a fantastic idea that allows the player to improve existing items, the chance guy who operates the roulette and the cards minigame lets the player get new items or get trolled by a curse. The trader allows the player to exchange an item for another item of equal rarity, if the player has a useless legendary item they can try to trade it off for another legendary item and last but not least, I encountered an optional miniboss who you can fight to get rare items from. Personally, I fought him because I was short on money for the healer and I had already defeated all the enemies on the map, I did not take any of the drops other than his money yeah, the fox rapier sounded like a pretty cool weapon, shame. Existing events have been recontextualized to each feature a NPC, the healer is a porcupine for example. Before that, the only event with a friendly NPC was the shop with the toad.
This patch made the dungeon feel less empty and more interesting to explore, I have no idea on which quirky character will show up next on a random chance if I ever step on a random event spot. That is definitely a plus in my book!