3 AM Cathrath

Hello,
I streamed your game this past weekend. Overall, I didn't hate the concept of it, but it lacks clarity and lacks the spice to encourage continued play.

The biggest most frustrating flaw that I think hurts this game the most is how obtuse and dense it is. With no tutorial whatsoever, but a wall of menu items and HUD elements, the game feels like opening an old cryptic tome written in another language. This feel really discouraging at first, because fights are trial-and-error, but not really trial-and-error in a sense of learning enemy patterns and attacks, but more in a sense of just figuring out what menu items do.

On top of that frustration is the font and a very unfortunate menu buried in the equip screen. When the font is rendered small, many letters become garbled messes of pixels, making things difficult to read. Coupled with poor kerning between lines, and my eyes begin to go crosseyed just trying to figure out what things say.

That said, I like the concept at the foundational level of this game. There is something satisfying of deciding what stats to upgrade when you reach the shop or deciding what objects to buy. As is typical with this game, a lack of description makes shopping feel unnecessarily stressful since as the player I can only assume what the stats mean, but without any tutorial to give concrete information about the stats and skills I am left to my own devices. I would play more if there was more to break up the loop of fight-shop-fight. Even if it was a short hallway between fights for players to catch their breath I think that would go a long way. In addition, I think incorporating rogue-lite elements may be beneficial to the surprises the game can throw.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.