Thanks so much for giving it a try and for being so thorough!
Your criticisms were valid, and the update I’m currently working on aims to address a good number of these things.
Many things you mentioned were caused by poor balancing. Several things just need to have some values tweaked and I hope that my new update will improve the game in this regard. (For example, Predator creatures for do actually become satiated after hunting but I set the satiation value too low so its not really very helpful since it wears off too quickly and there’s no log message for it).
A few of the other things such as the potions resulted from my design decision to avoid any menu UIs or convoluted keybinds. I have been working on some changes that will hopefully make this better or at the very least give the player a way to save themselves from unlucky potions.
I’m very grateful for your review though and I appreciate your rating and detailed feedback. This is my first roguelike so it helps immensely.
Also I wanted to mention that originally the overarching goal of the game was to work up to a duel with a necromancer (hence all the corpse mechanics) but I ran out of time near the end of my 14 days. However, if you’re lucky enough to surpass level 30, then you will be able to see the Necromancers as I did decide to add them to the end-game spawn pool since I didn’t want to cut them completely. They are still kinda half-baked though.
(Also I want to apologize for blasting music into your ears without giving you an in-game volume option or explaining how the config file settings work.)
(Also the reason for the post-jam version being a smaller file size was that I removed a lot of ambient audio tracks that were unused anyway)