Before (entire deck in hand):

After:

Final boss, zero damage, first-turn kill.

(This only unlocked Ascension 1, because of the bug mentioned in https://itch.io/post/15621563 .)
Before (entire deck in hand):

After:

Final boss, zero damage, first-turn kill.

(This only unlocked Ascension 1, because of the bug mentioned in https://itch.io/post/15621563 .)
Successfully accomplished the infinite loop:

Removed enough cards, got some card draw, and had a couple of Hemorrhage cards. Now I can have one card draw the other, and keep playing them indefinitely. Kills every enemy no matter how much health, and since I have the Ingot, I get one gold every time I draw a card, so I can also get arbitrarily large amounts of gold.
This is awesome; thank you for having a delightful set of game mechanics. ❤️
Bug: playing against the skeleton enemy, had the one starting defense, played a card to get a second shield, enemy swung for 1 damage, but that deleted both shields.
Confirmed in a second battle: the animation of the shield breaking up plays for the rightmost shield, then the left shield just disappears.
Just discovered a serious bug: I went back and played a game without any of the Ascensions available, then abandoned it mid-game (using the “Abandon” option on the main menu) and played another (not sure if that’s required to trigger the bug), and then after that game ended in death, the character selection screen no longer offers Ascension 1 and 2 that I’d previously earned.
It may be relevant that I gained a level from that run.
Managed it once again, and this time I almost managed to achieve a loop of zero-cost cards that do damage or gain gold.

Need to remove a few more cards for that. If I can ever get “remove Exhaust from a card” with the card that removes one card from the deck and exhausts, that’ll be easy; otherwise it’ll take a few more removals at every opportunity. But I think if I can get a deck smaller than 10 cards (not counting cards that exhaust such as those that gain more energy, and not counting the cantrips themselves that are free and draw more cards), I can loop playing as many gold-gaining cards as I have until I have however much gold I want, and then play as many damage cards as I need to, to win each fight on the first turn.
Looking forward to pulling that off.
I’m not suggesting that it bypass hunger or fatigue; I’m suggesting that it should affect the length of time it takes to run a node from the player’s perspective (including the passing of hunger and fatigue as normal during that time), but not the speed of animations or of movement. Movement should be independent of demon time, because it’s almost unusably fast with it, and painfully slow without it.
UI observation: the way that “demon time” makes both the background animation speed up and movement around the map speed up, is it just speeding up the overall game loop? That’s going to cause a whole variety of problems, and would explain several things people have observed here in the comments.
You may want to make it just a divisor for how long nodes take to complete, not a change to all time-based things in the game.
In particular, scrolling with the arrow keys should always be the same speed, something a little slower than the demon-time rate and much faster than the non-demon-time rate.
Yes, but most of it felt worth it, and contributed to making it an accomplishment.
The main thing that felt painful rather than providing a sense of accomplishment was chewing through Raw Materials to get Refined Salt randomly. Potash is available elsewhere now; it’d be nice to have a reliable way to refine salt as well. Doesn’t have to be a way to obtain it directly; it’d be satisfying if there were a way to make it that wasn’t up to chance. It feels like, there’s already a hugely random way to get a Screaming Mandrake quickly; Alchemy should be the slow-and-steady way to get it without dealing with randomness.
In its current state, I did it once for the achievement and the feeling of accomplishment, and now that it’s done, I don’t anticipate wanting to do it again.
Other than that, it was mildly annoying that many of the ways to obtain Alchemy used up precious resources that couldn’t be spared; I had to get almost all of the Alchemy from the Stale Soda / Arsenic mixing and from completions of the raw materials refinement while hoping for refined salts. But if not for the randomness, that would feel like a somewhat interesting puzzle: do you want to spend all your Alchemy effort and resources towards a single reliable Screaming Mandrake, or do you want to make all sorts of other potions instead?
It’s possible to walk past the void stone without rejecting magic, if you carefully get enough agility to cross the river to get to the logger’s camp without getting 10 magic. However, it’s annoying to do, because then you can’t expand most of your Shadow Comprehension tree, since much of it is gated on nodes that gain all basic attributes. Since those nodes primarily exist to speed up gameplay on subsequent runs, would you consider splitting those nodes so that “gain all basic attributes” nodes other than the +5 aren’t in the way of at least one set of nodes for each specific attribute?
Found some text that could use clarifying.
After “Descent into Darkness”, the help text saying “once you leave you can’t re-enter via the same entrance” wasn’t clear. I thought it meant that once you took the first action inside that place, you were locked in and would have to leave a different way. It wasn’t clear that if you leave the way you came in without doing anything, you can’t re-enter. Could you phrase it to make this clear, such as “If you return to the campus, you cannot come back to this place via the ladder.”?