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I got typified as a "Brave Gamer" (interesting, what's this about?). I played on normal difficulty.

I almost never play/enjoy bullet hell games, but the format of your game is interesting and enjoyable to me - it gives a sense of a lonely world that has a past to discover, so I feel encouraged to explore the game world and learn about its contents.

I sort of "missed" the defensive treasure that increases HP to 3, then attempted to fight the first boss of this version of the game - failed 16 times. I backtracked, found how to get it, and then defeated the boss on the 17th try.  The difficulty feels appropriate here.

I feel that the second boss (took me 20 tries with my HP at 3) is quite a jump in difficulty compared to the first boss, and felt significantly more difficult than the third (I beat the third boss on my first try). I believe this may have something to do with the rotating hitbox lines that force the player to move in circles around the enemy; the first and third fights don't have that, making them a lot easier in my opinion. I'm not sure that these boss fights are necessarily done in this order, but hopefully you can understand what I mean by my descriptions.

The game ran fine for me, and I played with a mouse/keyboard. The controls/menu navigation are pretty easy to understand as they are.

I liked the NPC interaction, and found myself wanting to interact with more, though the lack of them does give a lonely atmosphere to the game that is nice. The soundtrack is provokes the imagination and adds a lot to the atmosphere. Also, I noticed there's no combat outside of boss battles. Will there be combat other than bosses? I would like to shoot at things other than bosses and switches, but a boss-centric game might be pretty cool too.

Hi and thanks for playing. I'm glad to hear that you found the world intriguing and that I was able to make a genre that you don't normally like appealing.

It's good to hear that you were able to backpedal and get the August Attire even after skipping it. The "hey you missed an important item" is pretty blunt I feel, but I was worried that some players might just ignore that message, find the game too hard and quit.

I think it's been a fairly universal opinion that [on Intended Experience difficulty] Sarcoph August is a bit too challenging, and that Orobas, Oracle Of Obscurity is too easy. Especially considering that most players will fight Sarcoph first. I've already made Orobas more challenging, and I hope to tweak Sarcoph later today.

I feel that in terms of getting the most out of development time, the sort of boss-rush format is a very practical choice for me. It takes me a long time to design and implement bosses, so it's good that I can usually squeeze a good 10-30 minutes of gameplay out of players for most of them. Normal enemies would still take while to develop, but probably wouldn't provide as much dev-to-gameplay time value. The other issue is that I think that hiding behind terrain and kiting would be very powerful when fighting enemies on the overworld, so I would almost be required to make areas have an arena-like design in order to make enemies work well, I feel.

That isn't to say that I'll never explore the idea of having lower-tier challenges. Maybe something interesting would be to have some weaker enemies that you fight on their own, only to have them appear later as minions during a boss fight. We'll see!

Thanks for your feedback!