Let's talk about the difficulty aspect of this game

[CaptainPOCK]

To say this beforehand for anyone reading who has just started playing or hasn't gotten deep into it: This is going to get a little spoilery. I'm not going to talk about any big story elements, but I will talk about a few things here and there which may be considered spoiler territory.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about the difficulty.

So, what do I like about the difficulty? Well obviously it's a rouge-like game, so getting as far as possible without any significant healing on demand is what I expected, even if the healing is abundant with enough Ether. It's also worth noting that the weapon upgrades aren't basically "switch from a scrap launcher to a rule of god". Lastly, it's a Danmaku-style game, so having about 827 bullets on the screen is also expected, and is something I can easily handle since I've played various bullet hell games in the past.

And to be fair, it's not the rouge-like aspect or the danmaku aspect I find questionable, I find the increase of difficulty questionable. Obviously when I started out, the whole game was new. I had to learn everything first to be able to make sense of the game. And after about 5 or 6 attempts, my first run carried me to the end. I had a lot of close calls up to that point, but this whole "first playthrough" - going from the overgrown ruins to the desert up to the citadel had a consistent difficulty. You had to learn patterns quickly. But overall taking a hit wasn't that punishing.

Starting from the echoing ruins, it took a steep spike.

Now here's the thing: If enemies get increasingly difficult to dodge, get more tanky and they attack more frequently compared to early-game enemies, isn't it kinda useless to also up the damage to almost an entire health bar?

At least in my personal opinion, high damage attacks like the ones from the swimming leviathan things in the abyssal scar which - even with some protection and health upgrades - almost deplete your entire health bar shouldn't be hard to predict amids many other things happening simultaneously. Additionally, not as frequent as it does. I ate through 6 Silphium vials and one big silphium vial after fighting two of these things one after another in the same room. I eventually managed to defeat them but then died later on by the same enemy. Of course this time without vials or means of healing.

That was - needless to say - frustrating and unnecessary.

My idea: Don't ramp up the damage immensely if you're already making them physically tougher, harder to predict and harder to dodge. Or make a difficulty option for better pattern learning. Though that's just my opinion. Could be the only one, could be among many.

Kind regards - Captain POCK

[zingrook]

*rogue-like

[CaptainPOCK]

Also works. Excuse my non-native English.