Hey thanks for playing. I mentioned this in the thread, but despite being harsh your feedback is actually pretty useful. I consider 99% of what's in the game to be experimental, so plenty of things will be changing in the future. When you say spamming enemies in rooms, are you talking about actual rooms like in the dungeon, or in the overworld? Right now overworld enemies are randomized, other than one encounter with 5 axe guys guarding some gauntlets.
I'm a little surprised you went for that much time given your experience. I was experimenting with players needing to find all the gear with this demo, so clearly that's not working, or at least not in a way that's palatable.
I will at least partially defend the pamphlets. Tutorializing is better than not tutorializing in my experience, and if you learned the information in the pamphlets in the key rebind menu, that means you learned it which is good. As for them being randomly missable, that's fair. Like with the weapons and armor, the goal was to make exploration of the world a requirement. For the next demo day I may focus on making the game a lot more pretty, and improving the current overworld in general, (though it probably won't make the final game at all.)
With this demo I also tried making the gear screen always show up after resting, while beforehand it was a chest you checked. I might make the chest a thing again. I'll take another look at the fonts, and may change it, but it'll depend on how other people react to it as well.
To be honest, I think the combat might just not be for you. I have fun with it, a lot of other people have as well, and while you're not wrong about stun locks and ranged attacks, that's by design. It makes sense to me that a ranged attack would make things easier for the player, it's a ranged attack after all. It's the right tool for the job, ultimately, and that's what I'm going to be going for with a lot of the combat, being figuring out which weapons will give you the best advantage against which enemies, and then managing to capitalize on it despite being in fights with multiple foes, or despite having dwindling resources, or being low on health. The settings has difficulty options you can try tweaking in the future.
It's a constant work in progress. This has been my 4th or 5th tutorial, and they all change big things to see how players react. My design process is pretty iterative in that regard. I don't know if the game will get easier necessarily, but I've been trying my best to make sure the tutorial eases the player in without being overly long.