My review (9/10)

[sgt0pimienta]

I wanted to share a honest review since the devs are so active and obviously listen to the community.

VISUALS & ART: 5/5

Simply put, this game has an incredible style. The design is crisp and readable, but also evocative and beautiful. Enemy designs are extremely functional with their layers indicating damage and armor, and providing clear visual feedback. The art style, while simple, shines for being very original.

SOUND: 4.5/5

The sound is great in this game. Enemy sounds are a little quiet and hard to read at a distance, and the songs, while really great, can get repetitive after just some hours of gameplay. However, what is there already is pretty good. I'd love to have more songs per level to add variety. Weapon and FX sounds are pretty good and fit in with the world and feel.

WRITING & STORY: 4/5

It's funny and creative. Every character is an interesting chat, and the worldbuilding feels whimsy and interesting while being the right amount of dark and scary. Right now there is not a huge amount of story and writing to go over but the direction it's taking is very good.

GAMEPLAY: 5/5

This is the game's golden star. The food system with the mystery recipes is extremely engaging and fun, and has you constantly thinking about what you should eat, what you should cook, and managing your inventory space while constantly upgrading your healing. The weapon customization is also a lot of fun with enchantment scrolls, scroll mixing, and oils all balanced with ammo scarcity and having to repair your items.

I hope the devs will push those two systems (food & weapon customization) to the max and well into late-game: make it so players can get to craft really special and complex food items with long-lasting buffs (kind of the way potion-brewing feels in The Witcher franchise) and make it so you can have really old, used-up, powerful guns that you will bring to your toughest runs (and you will miss dearly if you lose them).

WHAT I'D LOVE TO SEE DOWN THE ROAD

- More of the same: recipes, ingredients, maps, enemies. The general direction is extremely good.

- More options for run length and risk/reward: I like that you can go for a half-run or a full-run. I'd love to see some more options in terms of difficulty and length. For example a map that will have a really long run, or one that will be short but extremely hard, etc.

- Customization for armors and clothing: food and weapons are already a massive success. If something this fun could be implemented to clothing it would be awesome.

- IMHO: having no save options mid-run is not bad. I'd like that to stay as it makes each run so meaningful. Sometimes it discourages you from trying the longer, more interesting runs, which is why it would be cool to, maybe, have something like a "quit and take only a small box of loot with you" option or something to allow you to at least save your most valuable items if you try your hand at a long run and life gets in the way mid run. Still, paying 1000 gold for a talisman recharge before leaving is a reasonable price.