32 Fear harder on the surface than in the underworld??

[MootsBoots]

Not gonna post my whole fear/arcana card set up but I felt that using the same for both the underworld and surface that 32 fear on the surface was noticeably harder. I used a pan daggers + Poseidon special loadout and it only took me 3 runs to beat the underworld with 32 fear while it took around 5 for the surface. The main issue I encountered was the timer. 5 minutes is too little for me to clear the first zone. I would basically have to gamble on getting both a Medea + Hercules room to make it out with time. I had to bump it down to 7 minutes, opting for some rebuke to replace it. Does anyone feel the same way or is it just me?

[Songbird]

32 fear is about equally hard either way. The surface threatens the timer incredibly harshly and generally has scarier enemies, but this is mitigated by the fact that you get huge rooms and the shade hordes to help you in the city, and Engraved Pin (+ Mint Condition, if you can get it) makes encounters in the Rift of Thessaly literally free. So you really just have to not die to the bosses (including Charybdis, if it appears).

The underworld can't be cheesed by the pin as hard, so you kinda have to get Trusty Shield or play like a madman to not get clocked for 70-120 damage and just die instantly in the back half of the run if you turn on Suffering, but on the flip side, Suffering becomes a lot of free pressure off the timer if you do get Trusty Shield. Erebus is still a very tight timer, and you'll often be trading a death defiance to the timer if you turn down Arachne or the mid shop in favor of getting another boon. The timer isn't particularly hard after that, and the enemies are generally not that bad compared to the surface.

The onion is almost completely free on the surface, but significantly worse in the underworld. Still probably worth taking for both, but it can mess up your ability to quickly get the boon you're targeting with a keepsake in the underworld, and going a few more rooms without Engagement Ring in Erebus, or missing Heph/Trusty Shield altogether in Oceanus, can mean the difference between winning and losing.

I did find that upping the enemy count and adding revenants made the surface a lot harder than just maxing enemy speed and increasing enemy damage. Those vows make the timer so much worse, and also make a lot more likely that you take damage in each room.

[Siegvater]

I concur with a lot of the excellent points Songbird already made in his post.

In general, what makes the surface more difficult, to me at least, is that it is considerably shorter. The underworld feels easier to me because you have much more chances to build up health and/or boons. On the other hand, the surface has the much easier boss - given that it is most likely only 50% finished yet. What I really dislike, however, is that surface-runs with a timer can be heavily influenced by bad RNG i.e. if you run into the kraken boss.