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Diogenes stood, brandished the bald chicken and shouted, “Behold—a roguelike!” Plato, perhaps missing the point of Diogenes’ criticism, then continued to amend his definition to include an actual map.

It's correct in the sense that you do end up with a result that meets the goal. It also leaves potential on the table that could have gone toward "more game."
If there are two hypothetical undershot projects that both end up polished and complete but differed in level of ambition, I suspect we'd agree that the more ambitious one got the better result.

Yeah, this is the smoothest I remember it having gone. It was downstream of an intentional decision to limit the number of mechanics.

It feels a bit double-edged, though, since I *like* games with lots of crunchy interactions and I maybe could have gotten away with more. I think the ideal calibration would have put things just barely inside our limits, and from that perspective I undershot it.

I guess each time it's better to go under than over, but if you never go over it's probably because of not taking enough risks.

I fall into the same trap a lot too. Lots of time spent on foundational stuff that would be cool to build on top of, and then not much time building on top of it.

You might have run across the movement restriction from being next to a monster. This tripped up several playtesters and I don't think I figured a clean way to indicate it in the UI.

I'd love to see screenshots if you hit that again. (Score screenshots, too, if you get a winning run!)

I had to get the treasure early. I don't think it's possible to get the gnome early - when I've seen it revealed with an orb it moved to another free space after I clicked it.
The difficulty basically came from needing to corner the gnome without as many fights.

It took several tries to get here. It turns out this is  possible, too!

Now that you pointed it out, I realize that in my own playtesting I was avoiding the queue size and notebook upgrades. It feels bad to spend resources on stuff that doesn't make progress! That's definitely got to change.

There are keys!

123: use item.

Space:play/pause.

Enter: start fight / end of replay / finish replay.

W/up: start of replay.

S/down: end of replay.

A/left: step back.

W/right: step forward.

You can break up a dancing pair

Yes. The weapons have different strike patterns similar to Crypt of the Necrodancer.

Please share any bugs you discover here.