First off, I've been waiting for this release for a while! I'm quite surprised and happy with the direction this game decided to go! It's clear there was a lot of effort and love put into this. The graphics are effective and charming, the music and sound effects match the graphics perfectly, and the core gameplay is very engaging.
I think right now the build is fun, but I think (as a fan of roguelikes) that going down the roguelike path more could be beneficial. Fully proc-gen maps, though with enemy types being locked to different stages (e.g. how Spelunky does it).
I've been getting to stage 3 pretty consistently and there's one thing in particular that's becoming an apparent problem: the upwards direction. When standing in the center of the stages with enemies and when simply traversing around the map, the up direction is being biased against. You can't see as much which means enemies spawning from the top have an advantage, and you also can't see what's in rooms above, making it difficult to adequately scout beforehand. I'm not sure if this is just because of the resolution on the laptop I have on hand right now (1920x1080), but it is a bit of a problem.
I've also only run into a single curse so far (the double fire one), so I haven't really seen the risking/gambling element come into play that much. I think having a random effect appear after each combat room similar to how Riskit has gambling after every wave could work nicely, although I haven't played enough of the game to know if that would be balanced or in line with your vision of the game.
Also I noticed some random bugs.
(Playing on Windows 11 at 1920x1080)
1. Gold/bullets will sometimes randomly despawn after a fight has completed
2. Bullets, especially the arrow ones, will sometimes go through walls. This typically seems to happen at the "door" section of the walls when the doors are closed, but I believe I've seen it happen on arbitrary walls.
3. Not sure if this is a bug or a joke, but on floor 3 the <strikethrough> text </strikethrough> is not striking through the text (attached below)
I'll be playing this more soon; I have an entire day of flights and trains ahead of me, and I'll update as I make progress :)