Hey there, thanks for playing the game!
There's a lot to respond to there, so I hope you won't mind if I go through all that as bullet points?
* The Esc-quit-game problem is a bug. It should hopefully be fixed by the next update.
* Can you give a bit more information about what you mean with the Talk commands and Pets repeating? If a conversation becomes available between characters, it should always be availible. Moving chapters shouldn't reset it. Likewise, Petting scenes should not be repeatable: every character has at least one unique one. If you can tell me a bit more about what's going on there, I might be able to fix the issue.
* Dead levels is a thing I'll need to look into but thanks for raising that.
* A lot of people seem to vary on how difficult they find Chapter 4. We're trying to re-balance it a bit.
* Thieves are being balanced out because, yeah, you aren't the first to mention the busted-ness of them.
* Magic is getting a bit of a balance. However, you are *meant* to use the anti-magic harp to negate it. I do agree that the buffs could be a bit longer (and I will probably incorporate that) but that is what the harp is there for.
* I might experiment with enemies not having crits, but we'll see how that goes in testing.
* I don't know what you mean when you say "Any character dying = Game Over". That isn't supposed to happen and no one else has mentioned that bug. There is no permadeath, and characters come back if KO'd. The only exceptions are Freya (the main character), and any character you need to defend as part of a mission (like Nimue in Chapter 6). Again, if you could give me a bit more info, that would really help.
Thanks for playing the game! I am still in the process of working on some updates and bug fixes, so I hope that you'll stay tuned for those!