Seed No.:132644864

A lot of healing special cards! At one point I had 5 but lost some due to blending. I thought I was invincible but then stepped on a carrot who knocked out my blended 14 defense card and killed me in one hit...I think I may try the seed again to see if I can make it through this time aware of what the carrot does.

In a different run I got an Escape! Now to find the use of the Mysterious Artifact...also I hate carrots! I'm not sure how they work just yet.

First impressions are I would say the first level is pretty hard unless you send yourself a card in the rocket then it's much more managable. I would say overall the game relies heavily on your card managment and board strategy. The only thing that I think makes it a little easy is the frequency of health powerups. I usually end up with a ton of tokens because I don't spend them much on healing. I may have just had health power up heavy seeds though.

I'll type up something more comprehensive later this week, but for now, I just wanted to say that our user impressions of the game's difficulty and its curve across zones might be biased, since we're totally in the dark with respect to the final zone, facing The Thing Below.

Whether that final stage hits like a sledgehammer or feather-duster remains to be seen (or rather, felt). Lotsa roguelikes require the player keep in mind that final skill check, as it were. This usually means deft tactical maneuvering on the player's part towards some end-game, end-boss viable build (*ahem FTL*).

Final Boss aside, though, I'd say the difficulty curve feels pretty good for a one-setting-fits-all build. Lotsa small interactions and cues to learn and streamline into a best-practices mindset. Not sure how much room there is for individual experimentation without just feeling suboptimal.

I tend to hit a sweet spot, usually in the middle of the second area, during which my confidence in the that runthrough's odds surges as I feel the build coming together.

Again, I'll pen a longer and more specific, itemized account of my experience so far later on.

I find that whether or not I'm going to do well in a run is based on the first few enemies I face. If it's a bunch of woms out the door I'm gonna do alright but if it's the ergons (sp?) then I'll take quite a bit of knocks straight away that usually means I'm prob not gonna last that long.

To be fair though, I play a lot of binding of issac and crypt of the necrodancer and it's not dissimilar to how their systems work to a point. If I don't pick up enough decent items early game in BoI I'm pretty much screwed late game unless I get very lucky, so I'm used to that kind of dynamic. I found in my last game I spent much more time at the end trying to balance my cards out for the most effective use of att/def points.

I picked up a revel map card early on in my last run which is how I ended up with such a good score and actually make it to the end. The maps can get crazy spawling at times. Was able to pinpoint some good cards and go straight for the escape pod.

The healing skills feels pretty game changing every time i get it. I think I'd remove it as a drop and instead offer it as the world 1 quest reward. Would make it less overpowered to stack them, but also give it more consistency. I never reached world 4 yet, so i don't know how valid my thoughts on balancing are atm.

"Increase cost of Reveal Map card to 3 tokens."

Shouldn't this increase with the world you're in, like the health machine?

For me the weird thing right now is that attack feels OP relative to defense. Largely because a tactical player will rarely if ever engage when they don't have first-strike. So I find myself running the later levels with 40 ATK and 4 DEF (of course if I screw up, I die in one hit)

More substantive commentary will be coming later: I'm new to both the game and to the Itchio service in general, and it's a late evening for me. My commentary will be based on my own experience and video I've seen (such as the recent Polygon preview of the PS4 version).

First major balance concern: I'm finding it interesting (in a bad way) that this game is missing the Roguelike staple of a 'wait one turn' function. There's no way to idle without moving, which combined with the erratic enemy movement makes the time-cycling mechanic punishing without benefits.

Looting taking a turn is more good-interesting than the above, but still doesn't feel great. There's not a notable risk-reward element caused by it 99% of the time, and the 1% where it causes issues it's a frustrating nightmare.

I've just completed my first run. I am aware it's not the whole game.

The game felt a tad easy. However, it might be because I was lucky? I don't know how the average generation turns out, as I completed on my 3rd attempt (I think? roughly, bad at counting). I'll have to play much more to know. Here are some of my thoughts so far:

Healing seems too strong. I feel like it trivialises certain aspects of the game. This is especially so when acquiring more than 1.

Being immune to bomb also feels really strong too. I only had to fight a few enemies that exceeded my attack because I would just dance around bombs when I encounter something that is too strong. Many other items are also strong, however, they require tokens to utilise. Perhaps deducting a token for each turn it protects you would be a viable balance?

Additional health never feels worth a slot. Although this might be because I'm not experience enough to understand why it's good?

First world is feels a little too easy. Hence, it might run the risk of feeling repetitive/tedious because it's the stage where you always need to get through. I feel like there is a difficulty bump from world 1 to 2? And if world 1 is very slightly more difficult, it will balance be a smoother curve. Edit: I take back what i said about first world being too easy. As someone else mentioned it really depends on the first few enemies encountered. It can be very hard, or very easy. Hmm :)

Edit Edit: Still not quite sure how i feel about the first world, there is something about it that I kind of dislike, maybe it is because the decision tree isn't as varied? And as a result, it feels like I am not making enough meaningful decisions.

This might sound silly but, I feel that the "escape" thing which looks like a sandcastle isn't communicated well: I ran around the entire map looking for the exit before realising it's the sandcastle I need to get to. It will probably only affect first play-through but still...

Turns seem like a weird metric for leaderboard scoring, but then again, it's pretty hard to come out with good metric for randomly generated games. :\

It bugs me that walking into dome takes a turn while pressing E doesn't. :P

I think it had a great learning curve. I beat the game on my 5th or 6th playthrough I believe and made it a little further each time. There were some uncertainees while playing, but I felt like the consequences each play wasn't so high that I couldn't just test things out to better understand the systems. I loved the game, particularly the aesthetics and cutscenes, This is one of the first rogue-likes I've played since I was a kid.

Hello!  I got this game recently and have been playing it like crazy, but nothing I do can get me past the 2nd area.  I've noticed that a lot of the monsters spawning here are upwards of 3 or 4x  my def/att and that makes progression in the game very difficult.  It would be great if you could add a better curve to the levels so theres less of a gap.  Or even adding a difficulty setting to the game for players that may be struggling.  Overall I absolutely LOVE this game but due to its difficulty I will likely not play it again until the pacing issues are fixed.  

Thank you for taking my input into consideration