Wall of text of thoughts and feedback for the devs

[MaelstormM]

As title says, just a big ol' wall of text of thoughts and feedback after around 20 hours in on most parts of the game...

Art is solid, interface is decent, weapons filled their role and fun to use. If I hit left, toon was running left responsively. The powering up method between stages was neat with using a lore concept. Couldn't really tell about the music over the sound effects sadly, but the sounds were nice. Everything from a presentation standpoint is great!

That said, into the bit murkier realm of gameplay and systems I go...

For my foray into the game I just stuck with Lillia. After hundreds of hours on these types of games I'm pretty confident in my skills so getting her entire talent tree unlocked, dozens of cards & weapons, some S ranks was a breeze. And the march went swimmingly until the Desolate Ruins, where I got my bottom handed to me many times. That change in difficulty was like going from Algebra to Calculus 3 in a minute. Went from a rather smooth uphill climb to almost sheer steel wall, definitely needs leveled out some more. But I was determined to get Lillia through it, so after a couple hours of experimenting and cursing at garbage RNG, found a setup that works and marched through without too much trouble.

Then got to Road to Madness with Lillia, and then the game goes from Calculus III up to like Evolutionary Quantum Physics. The sheer steel wall now has an upside down part and covered in oil. Had Lillia spend hours on that, but never could get past like 10 minutes. Started asking myself "What am I doing wrong here", but after looking around the response seems to be to ditch Lillia and use another character. So I began leveling up other characters given the seemingly impossible wall Lillia ran into. Sure enough, the balancing between characters is absurd. While playing as Doridori, for the lore unlock I needed to do like 50000 damage with their evolved primary weapon, so for giggles I went to the endless stage. That little ball of death reached level 100 and survived easily for 75 minutes, only losing when I decided it was good enough. Got 3/4 S Rank for the categories (because just couldn’t get another weapon, why is that even a scoring metric). And that was without best card setup and without all talents unlocked. Then took the little ball of death to Road of Madness and cleared it first shot with barely breaking a sweat. Even subsequent attempts I was still winning it like 50% of the time. So definitely goes without saying there is major problems with balancing between characters. In Lillia’s case, looking at her talent tree, sorta looks like she’s meant to be the Health/Revive character. Only problem is health is usually far less preferred over damage, since enemy scaling will almost always result in you being overrun and healing can’t keep up. She needs like a “Heal X% of Damage” or “Does X% of damage for every 10 current Health” or “Does X% bonus damage for every Revive”, just something that allows her to have a damage output built around her having/maintaining a high Health/Revive pool.

The balance issues between bosses also really comes out in that last stage as if your character doesn’t have a certain threshold of speed or pool of dashes, the bear bosses can kill you and all your revives in one multi-dash attack. On its own, not a big deal, but it doesn’t scale well when in a stage filled with boosted lil enemies compared to the other random bosses. There’s also buggy behavior in that stage where the bosses would just start taking 1 or 2 damage per hit, making them impossible to kill before they hit like an enrage timer and murder charge you. I’ve also had the exit warp appear under event buildings and one time almost out of bounds, so that prolly needs tweaking.

Building on that difficulty line of thought, the character's hitbox is like a boat. Like Silver Surfer on NES, your character is just too chunky. I'm guessing their hitbox is the lil arrow ring at their feet or at least close to it, which just feels way too big for trying to thread the needle through a pack of critters like it was a Touhou game. It could also be that the enemy’s hitbox are bigger than they should be. There's also times where you just seemingly take damage and nothing is near you. Which aside from genuine hit detection issues or bugs would make me think there's enemies or attacks that look too much like the biome so you can't see them in the firefight. There’s also bosses like Anubis who the telegraph for the scythe swing absolutely does not match where you actually will get hit by it or the frog bosses spit just appearing out of thin air under you even though you’ve been dodging the spit projectile.

And to build on that line of thought, some of your own attacks are a bit much on the visual clarity to tell what's going on. The environments overall do really good in not obstructing your sight, like how bugs in DRGS can't be seen behind walls giving you cheap hits. Here though, your own weapons and critter coloration cause the problem there. The Big Missile and Bone Dragon come to mind immediately. The pillars from the Holy Light’s evolution make it hard to see power ups light pillars, etc.

There’s also something I think this entire type of game suffers from, the obnoxious over reliance on randomness as if it was a free to play mobile gacha game desperately trying to fleece people of their money. Since this game (and the others) aren't that, there's no need for all the RNG that's in there. A light sprinkling of RNG sure, the casino lights and jingles when you get a power up or treasure, sure. But this game (and the others) develop these fun weapon combinations to make like a minion build, an AoE build or a Tank build... but then make you have to go fishing for the right things to do it. And when you want to play with a certain setup and just can’t get it because RNG nonsense, it’s not a positive experience. Let the weapons need to be unlocked, maybe add a bit of friction by requiring gold for extra rerolls beyond the free ones, but don’t waste peoples time with obnoxious and antiquated mechanics.

When fighting with that last stage as Lillia, wanted a very specific load out. Would get 4 of the weapons, but the RNG just wouldn't give either of the other 2 I was looking for, so I’d die or reset to try again. And again. And again. Like 30 minutes went by of fighting with the random number generator garbage just to get 8 of the 10 things I wanted to push on with. It's just not fun. If you build this great system, don't be mortified at the thought of letting players play with it without all the excessive friction. It makes a case of it actually getting worse the more I unlock since it makes the RNG pool larger so I get weapon combo's less often, which a player shouldn't be annoyed at unlocking more things. At the very least definitely give more (waaaaay more) than the 1 reroll and 1 banish option Lillia was stuck with (I since see that you do earn more slowly as you get achievements or other character's filled out, but still a far cry to short). A good dose of more deterministic leveling up for loadouts can do a mountain of good for player feelings.

To expand on the RNG pool point, there’s way too many of the secondary skill choices. I thought after I played with the other character’s that I would unlock their primary weapon’s in the pool of choices, but I was mistaken and seems each primary weapon is hard locked to the respective character. That means there’s now around 10 secondary skill choices that will take up a slot and likely block you from getting the evolution of one of your weapons since you can never ever get the weapon that goes with it. That feels absolutely awful, even moreso when RNG gives you all duds as your choices and you have no rerolls or skips. Or you get a minion skill, but you never get the minion weapon so you literally just have a useless skill taking up one of your slots. I would say to cut the number of the skill choices down to half, combine things like Crit Chance and Crit Damage into a new skill that has like 8 or 10 ranks, then link 1 character’s primary weapon AND another weapon to it. Alternatively make a skill that’s just for primary weapons and tailored to the respective character. Other things to manage the RNG nonsense would be to guarantee that the 1st choice will ALWAYS be a compliment for a weapon or skill you already have. Adding the primary weapons to the pool for all players after getting the evolution achievement could also help address the poor character balancing since at least now other characters would have a chance at getting the busted weapons. Could even diverge from the Vampire Survivor flavor more and perhaps have the maxed out secondary skills also combine to free up slots to get new ones, say the +Crit chance and +Crit damage become +Super Crit. Or give each weapon and skill a card suit and just have that be what is checked for to evolve instead of a specific power up, like Spade tagged weapon links to 1 Spade tagged skill. Lots of ways to tighten it up so there’s not so much RNG pool bloat and dead end choices to sour a run.

There needs to be a detailed in game explanation of stats. Like say Luck for example, sure it probably gives you more choices on level up, but once you’re done leveling up is it now just a dead stat? (Truthfully think Luck should just not exist, there’s already way to much RNG present in these kinds of games already)

Like the character’s, the card power ups are also wildly unbalanced. There’s the legendary soup that gives like +30% Attack/+30% Defense/+30% Health and on the same tier is a card that gives just +35% Attack. The latter is just wildly inferior despite being the same rarity. Hiding the cards when you get the 3 choices of them also seems sort of unnecessary, like why even give the choice if there’s no way to tell either way. I could see it being more useful to show card choices you already have collected so you can choose between the effect you know versus the unknown card. There’s also what seems like bugs in some cards interactions, particularly the one that makes projectiles explode. Like taking the dog ninja out with it, his weapon has the projectile tag on it, but after many attacks I never saw an explosion on an enemy or at the end when it returns to me.

There should be an option to have an arrow just automatically point you to the nearest event rather than having to manually select ones to mark, or perhaps in addition to marking them. And it probably should be on by default since as a new player I didn’t even know the houses counted as events since in my mind I’m thinking an event was going to be like spawning a rare boss, not talking to a building. The fairy bottle event that gives temporary weapons feels like it would be nicer to have a choice to maybe have them also give you a heal, rerolls or revives as a choice if you really don’t care for the temp power up.

To anyone who made it this far, thanks for reading to the end.

To any of the devs who made it down to here, it just needs a fair bit of polish and you can have an amazing game. You have a very solid framework in place that’s just waiting to shine brighter!

[MaelstormM]

After 45 hours spent now, all stages rank S, all progress and collections done. Bit more thoughts and feedback to pass along. Even finally managed to get Lillia through that Road to Madness stage. The game engine runs great I must say. Over those 45 hours I never had a game crash and aside from maybe a split second of slowdown when some bosses spawn in it’s been running silky smooth.

Start with some one off observations/bugs...

The black notches on health bar scaling does weird things when you get health pools into the 1000's, turning solid black eventually. Could see just fixing the notches at quarters instead of using scaling. Perhaps just putting your max health value at the end for reference or make it a toggle for the player to choose.

Damage numbers looks like they stop displaying correctly when they go over 99k, displaying things like 07k instead of 107k.

I know RNG of choices at level means it’s statistically possible, but on Aster trying to get the skill to unlock his super weapon at one point ignored like 50 rerolls, 50 banishes and 4 stages with it never popping. After quitting and relaunching the game, the needed skill popped up like on second set of choices.

In the endless stages, instead of Weapon Count it should be using Events. Since Elena gets an extra weapon and then there’s the one card that removes a weapon slot, it rewards/punishes a player for making certain choices whereas if it was scored on visiting the events scattered around the stage then regardless of which character a player uses or if they want to use that card, they have a fair shot at that part of the scoring.

On one run in Road to Madness, the boar boss just kinda froze (Was one of the ones that spawn in middle of match rather than at end). I killed it while it was stuck, its health bar showed empty and stayed on screen, and for the rest of the round it just kinda sat there. Killed the final boss and jumped in the portal to leave.

The enrage timer on the middle of the match bosses in Road to Madness where they murder charge you after 2 minutes started to feel unnecessary, especially with how some weapons are designed which would make it way harder than it should be since you have to be in close to the boss like the Golden Radiance. Trying to use weapons like that when the Golem and Anubis boss constantly spam huge AoE’s just punishes players trying different weapons or the currently weaker characters, since the overpowered characters are just going to melt the bosses in 15 seconds with their primary weapon anyway. At least without the enrage timer a player using a weaker character or a sub optimal weapon build by choice or because RNG shoved it down their throat could try to hold out rather than spamming reset and getting annoyed at the game.

With everything flagged as completed and said mentioned 45 hours in, I’m still missing 7 cards which is making me think they’re probably another victim of excessive RNG. I see new card stuff listed on the roadmap so hopefully that’ll make it getting them a touch easier. Given how many cards there are and how many of them do the same thing, just at a different rarity like -15 cooldown and -30 cooldown, makes me think maybe just having 1 card of that effect and giving it ranks. Would help get the card pool size back under control and could be another way to have players have reasons to pick the weirder cards and stay engaged with the game. Like say you start with the -15 cooldown card, complete Dusty Road stage with S Rank while it’s equipped, and it evolves into the -30 cooldown card. -30 cooldown card equipped and complete Road to Madness stage with an S Rank and turns into a -45 cooldown card.

There also feels like there’s some stat’s that don’t have a card that gives some condition to scale that allow some character’s to turn into game breaking murder machines.

Jumping back to the character balancing thought started before. After the struggle with Lillia and seeing Doridori laugh at her and roll to victory in stages she struggled. I wasn’t ready for seeing Aldreya, who made Doridori’s run look like a joke. Then Benimaru in turn made her look weak. And finally I think Vera might be the most insane of the bunch.

With Vera in that 3rd Land of Erosion stage (Ero** Endless Infil****), equipped with Mystic Sword Arts + Blessings of the Holy Symbol + Precision Guidance + Limit Break – Strengthened Physique cards. In just 30 minutes she was level 129 and had 108095 health, 324% regeneration, 3325 attack power and 569% critical damage. Other stats were insane too, but those 4 pretty much made her invincible and hitting anywhere from 20k to 125k (or more) per attack. Going back and trying Lillia again with all the latest and greatest cards, and still struggle to hit 15 minutes with like any loadout I could come up with.

In Lillia’s case, her talents really make her look like she wants to be a survivor, with health talents, weapon skill needed is the revive one, the talent that keeps her at 1 HP for 8 seconds, the talent that make her hit harder at lower health, gaining a shield when low health. Problem is she doesn’t have anything that scales like all those over powered characters mentioned above and without a stat scaling then that means there’s no cards or skill power ups that double dip that can help augment her to keep up with the baddy. So she starts out on par with everyone else, then eventually gets left in the dust. Like in Vera’s case she gets +2% Max HP every minute, gains an attack bonus based on Max HP, the card that lets her deal 10% of current HP on attack, Mystic Sword giving +20% Max HP every 10 levels and Limit Breaking Max HP. It all feeds into giving Vera berserk attack power, while Lillia has like nothing that can do that. Or Aldreya getting bonus damage based on movement speed, +2% movement speed per minute and similar cards that keep juicing movement.

Just some suggestions in no particular order for Lillia and some others in similar boat as her to try and give them some scaling without just copying the others.

Change her talent that is currently “For every -1% HP, +1% ATK” to something like “For every -1% HP, +1% ATK per minute” so that it will scale with the match and still has her trying to keep the wounded gameplay going in the same vein as other characters. In that same vein, change the card “Berserker’s Creed” card to also give scaling attack bonus for % of HP lost. For a different flavor though maybe have it scale based off of kill counts, like “For every -1% HP, +1% ATK per 500 kills”

Change her talent “-20% Enemy DEF upon dealing damage” to “-20% Enemy DEF per damaging hit of Mighty Impact” so landing repeated primary weapon attacks have the enemy take scaling damage.

Add into one of her talents something like “Every 6 seconds while under 20% health gives +1% ATK” so it would keep with her playing while not at full health.

Give her dash a charge ability like Benimaru and Vera that consumes 10% Max HP to make like a 25% Max HP shield, which would give her a way to keep her HP low to benefit from her low health talents.

Inu Kage also appears to be lacking a scaling gimmick so for him, so a talent reworked to give like +0.1% ATK per dash to encourage him to keep dashing.

Elena has a scaling +2 % range per minute, so having range play back into her damage like “10% of Range as ATK” to encourage her to stack up cards around range to get some scaling benefits.

Jumping from characters now back to gameplay mechanics.

Revives feel like they should have a bit more of a grace period or set off like a hellfire bomb effect since just coming back baseline only really changed the outcome of a match for me maybe 25% of the time. I get that it adds value to the powerup that Lillia needs, but it just feels underwhelming to have to spend a powerup slot on that when I could just reset the match and hope for better RNG. Say if you always revived with full health by default, and the powerup would set off a bomb at rank 1, and give you a 25% HP shield per rank 2 to 5, maybe a speed boost in there like the one card does when you take damage. Just something more to make it feel like it’s worth giving up a damage output slot since in these kinds of games it’s usually a good offense is the best defense. Also the talents and card effects that are once per match feel to me like they should be “once per life” so burning a revive would reset them so those effects would similarly have a bit more value compared to always picking the damage output choice. Like at least non-Lillia players would maybe have a bit more pause before ignoring the Holy Cross item in favor of anything that ups damage.

The standard dash effects similarly feel undercooked for having to spend a skill slot on it. Mainly because even if you get away from a murder pack of enemies, all that’s going to happen is a new pack spawns in sorta negating the benefit during the normal stage. Even during a boss fight, having a good offense build will trump the need for spending your skill slot for a dash. A really good run and build you don’t even need to actually move, in the Vera example above she was so powered up she would kill 10x’s the enemies with just normal firepower than waiting for her charge move to go off.

Those two mechanics just feel really weak and undesirable as they are. Like maybe revives should just be tied to the account like rerolls are and retool Holy Cross power up into something else that like lowers enemy defense per rank. In that same vein the Ningu skill I think would be better served maybe having an increasing chance per rank of applying debuffs like poison, confuse, blind, stun, etc to enemies as Inu Kage already has bonus dashes and I almost never see the larger use of dashing (aside from abilities like Benimaru and Vera’s). Slapping on the Phase Boots lets you just normal run with any character to escape everything you would need to otherwise use a dash on for most part. Then change Watermelon Rind to do both dash count and dash distance (and maybe dash ability charge speed) if there just needs to be a dash related powerup skill.

The Charm of Speed and Magic Spring also feel very niche. Over those many hours of playing, I never really felt like I needed my projectiles to faster or farther even on Aldreya. There’s also so few rebounding weapons. To me feels like that would be another good area to trim some of the choice bloat in the RNG pool by merging those together or finding a different gameplay element for them to tie into.

It’s the rough life story of powerups that don’t directly help to mow down packs of baddies.

The game is so close to being positively outstanding, just badly needs some balancing tweaks and some polish. To anyone who made it to the bottom of this second wall of text, I salute you.

[Kachelofen]

Definitely agree with you on a lot of points, the characters are definitely not properly balanced currently.

Some of them atleast kinda work, few are amazing, one is completely busted.
But half of the bunch is moreless unusable due to
a) Damage - or rather the lack of a unqiue scaling factor
b) Tankiness - the crazy amount of damage in the later stages is just horrible if you're not a Defense (Doridori) or health (Vera) monster

I've played through most of the late game with Elena once I got her, having a huge, staggering, critting mass of Shadow around her was a blast.

On the contrary on what you said, Aldreya actually has a unique scaling and that is movement speed to absolute damage.

Buuut, that has the small hindrance of her minimalist lifepool and defences if you feel you got enough damage for the road, you basically tap your movement keys and immediately die as you're standing in an enemy all of a sudden due to the high speed.
Maybe some kind of dodge mechanic could help her and Inu Kage to atleast mitigate some damage.

That being said, still had a blast for the 3€, really enjoyed it overall, but being force to use one of 3 characters in the end felt a bit sad.

[MaelstormM]

Originally posted by Kachelofen:

On the contrary on what you said, Aldreya actually has a unique scaling and that is movement speed to absolute damage.

Buuut, that has the small hindrance of her minimalist lifepool and defences if you feel you got enough damage for the road, you basically tap your movement keys and immediately die as you're standing in an enemy all of a sudden due to the high speed.
Maybe some kind of dodge mechanic could help her and Inu Kage to atleast mitigate some damage.

Sorry, I probably made the wording in the strength comparison bit weird but I meant like Doridori was strong (B-tier, reflection scaling and shield), Aldreya was stronger than Doridori (A-tier, the movement scaling with boots and movement scaling cards turning into damage thanks to talent), Benimaru felt even stronger than Aldreya (A-tier, sturdier and crazy damage thanks to crit scaling talent and enemy health % bleed damage with huge AoE), and Vera was stronger than everyone to absurd degree thanks to all the HP stuff with cards complimenting it (S-tier, Makes sturdier and does more damage, just win/win). At least how they felt to me given each of their respective damage scaling methods and how well those were able to be further augmented by the card system.

When you mentioned the tapping the key and Aldreya turning into a shooting star if her speed was boosted enough did make me realize that even though I'm playing on a controller, just lightly moving the joystick verses pushing it all the way in a direction doesn't affect move speed. It's full speed or nothing, which changing that so how far you press the joystick would control what % of your move speed is used be another nice quality of life change (at least for controller users).

Thankfully with almost everything being solid and sitting aside my feelings on RNG+Choice Bloat, most of the really annoying things are just number tweaks and hitbox tweaks. Changing around numbers so all characters can have some unique gimmick to scale up around so they're at least competent in the harder content or standing to the side of a scythe swing telegraph and not still being hit. With that done I'd easily give it as a must buy given the generous price point.

[Fluxion]

I didn't read though the entire wall of text, but it was rather humorous (in a good way).

Since I see you posted this before this latest update... Just wait till you smack into that wall again... yikes... lots more unlocking and experimenting to do and some characters are DEFINITELY better than others...

I tried with Astor at first thinking it'd be easy mode as I like him and pet classes in general and pretty much got my a$$ handed too me. Then tried Ember and got to the boss with a couple deaths along the way (first try) but 1000x easier; then his mechanics vs. the boss came into play... no dodge (and didn't build for speed)... so another wall.

[MaelstormM]

Plowed through the 3rd Major Update and got all 188 achievements. Took Vera about a total of 14 tries to get S ranks in all 9 new stages while goofing off and exploring. Particularly liked the Darkness Descends silence as it let me put on Five Finger Death Punch to vibe to as the only language Vera speaks is violence, so it seemed appropriate. Then the quick grind to get the two new characters up to speed and that left the ~2 hour slog to get the couple million coins to max everyone’s talent trees.

So got feedback and thoughts to share again to share with anyone who’ll read it...

Start with the good, the new biome of the Celestial Atlas and its critters looks good. Glad to see tweaks are being made to improve it like limit break HP Boost has been nerfed from 5% down to 2%, Frost King Crab shows now instead of going invisible and it at least feels like the regular hitboxes are tighter to weave between baddies. Shows it is slowly moving in right direction functionally which is appreciated.

== Returning bugs and quality life stuff from above walls of text that still lurk...

- Damage over 99k still shows things like 07k instead of 107k.
- Health bars in the 1000’s still start turning solid black.
- Endless stages still use weapons as a scoring metric which has problems given different quantities characters and cards can give, events would smooth that out.
- Still far too few banishes (even lost 1 with update looks like) and rerolls. Super awful when first starting out and annoying after doing all character's.
- New character’s unique skill drop just make the RNG pool even worse with 2 more dead end skills.
- Still tons of balancing issues between Characters, the larger copy-paste talents at least let the weaker characters compete but in turn just makes the strong characters almost unstoppable.
- Still tons of balancing issues between Kwent cards, especially even in same quality/tier.
- The three unknown Kwent cards to choose from pickups in stages is still a waste of time and just pointlessly slows down gameplay.
- Way too many redundant or weak Kwent cards, more doesn’t necessarily mean better.
- Investing any card slot or skill slot into Revives or Dashes still feels like a newbie trap and waste of time compared to picking damage dealing options.
- RNG to earn Kwent cards is every bit as obnoxious as before and magnified by larger pool size.
- Some player weapons still obscuring too much screen real estate making it almost required to turn up transparency.
- Some enemy attacks still way too hard to see in the thick of a fire fight.
- Boss attack telegraphs are still pretty messy, misleading and outright wrong at times.
- Lack of in game description of stats and terminology.
- Joystick sensitivity for gamepad users when moving (maybe?).
- Just an unnecessary amount of RNG overall.
- Option to automatically show nearest event to prevent needing to pause spam.

(^ Edited for completeness)

Expanding on the enemy attacks being too hard to see, majority of these issues are puddles on ground which get buried under attacks, critters or just look like the ground. The tiny purple puddles are the worst offender of this and slime bosses larger puddles is a close second. There’s puddles in the field stage, the floor of the ruins is a blueish color, etc which they blend right in with at a glance. When you have plenty of room or deleting baddies as soon as they enter screen it’s not a big deal but when you kill 20 critters out of 100 right adjacent to you and half drop puddles, you just can’t see that. I’d say to make the puddles fluorescent red like boss telegraphs are and maybe even add some verticality to it like red smoke or acid bubbles drifting up. Would help it stand out as the bosses already condition the player to thing bright red equals avoid. Some projectiles fall into same boat like the snowballs and the tiny brown rock the beetle mini boss spits, give’m some bright flashing red to draw the players attention. Could even go a step further and let the player pick the florescent danger color from like red, yellow and green and have it be a colorblind option.

Boss attack telegraph issues come in two flavor: misleading and plain ol’ wrong. Plain ol’ wrong ones are like the Scorpion boss claw attack, they’ll telegraph the path line, you step out of it, but you still get hit since the danger zone is actually wider than what is shown. That one can be fixed by just making the line wider like say the Bear or Boar bosses charge telegraph. Anubis has a scythe swing cone that if you circle around him out of it instead of running away, you’ll still be hit. So it’s either the cone needs to be like a half circle rather than cone or I started to wonder if there’s actual collision detection with the Scythe since the swing does carry it out of the telegraph area. Another misleading one is the Scorpion bosses burrow. You’ll see the circle telegraph, but the boss still moves towards you another couple yards after the telegraph so unless you treat it as wider than is shown you still get hit.

Misleading boss attack telegraphs are like another of Anubis’ scythe swings where you’ll see the cone target you. Since it’s a cone it gives the impression you can dodge to the sides around’m, but since it auto targets you up to the instant of the attack that’ll just get you hit. Attacks like that should be a circle telegraph all around him so the players knows to get away even if the attack animation is a cone. Gonggong’s river attack is in the same vein, it casts this large line telegraph but since it tracks you the only reliable way to avoid it is to run away from him, so it might as well be a giant circle telegraph around him. If you want the player to know the final attack isn’t a full circle, then put the cone or line telegraph on a faded circle telegraph around the boss.

While on bosses, when the final boss of a stage dies, having them drop a Kwent card you already have is pointless as the fighting is over. Have them drop a card you don’t know (and not the obnoxious time wasting pick from 3 mystery cards) or have the final boss drop a treasure chest with a card you haven’t found yet and a chunk coins in it (since takes millions of coins to fill up talents now).

== Thoughts on stage maps themselves...

Coins dropping in alters can’t be picked up normally, the movement blocking part needs tightening up. Vera obliterated a gold skeleton and couldn’t get like a third of the coins by running over them.

Treasure goblins need to respect stage bounds like player, seeing them run and die outside the path in the ruins breaks ones heart.

Since this patch, the Orc Grunt Carts in Road to Madness have been going wrong direction and face planting in walls instead of traveling the hallway.

Kwent cards that cause stage effects like Volcano erupting under paint brush in Celestial Atlas and doing damage to it that you have no control over should be changed. Feels even worse if RNG puts several of the cards on you and you can’t even go to the middle of the stage in endless mode.


== Thoughts on the various pause screens...

On the screen with weapon damages, when weapons do damage up into the millions have it use some shorthand like the “K” that’s put in there to make it easier to tell at a glance (“M” maybe). An effective Damage-Per-Second readout would be nice too like total damage done with it divided by how long you had the weapon.

On your stats screen there can also be a perception issue where so much stuff is a low percent of a low number so you don't see or feel the impact for possibly dozens of levels. Say taking Elena with defense of 10 (before new talents at least) at level 1 and equipping Elven Forge card. Level 9 gets there and a player doesn't see any change. Finally at level 17 you can feel a bit of impact from card on defense as it shows an increase to 11 from 10. Like the stats should perhaps include the first one or two decimal places until the value is over 100 so a player can always see/feel that the numbers are in fact going up albeit however slowly.

There also doesn’t appear to be lines for damage interval or the outright damage reduction. Is projectile amount bonuses on there? Like maybe should be a basic and advanced version of the stats page for those who want the nitty-gritty or are play testing builds for optimization.

How is damage from cards like Precision Guidance, Chipped Sword, Explosion, Thunderstorm, etc tracked on summary screen (if at all)? Like is Precision Guidance damage folded into base weapon or ignored? Pretty sure I haven’t seen sources of damage that aren’t your main weapons listed.

== Player Stuff and Kwent Cards

Dazzle Card, Pseudo-bullet, Setsugetsuka, Circle, Natural Disaster, Lasting Menace and cards like them are directly worked against by the games RNG design. Since RNG is still overflowing, if you picked to use that card you can't even be sure you'll even get the weapons for them. Which can result in another bad player experience if RNG keeps getting in the way of fun, wasting time and causing restart spamming.

I like the idea of card sets, but it’s also another example of the game being built so heavily around RNG actively working against itself. Players can’t play with card sets if they can’t reliably get the cards in the first place. Cards and sets built around revives also still really feel like a newbie trap. Like taking 3 cards to buff your revives and low health just makes me think you’re really going to need those revives since you won’t have the damage output to stop the murder ball from crushing you, and typically once it starts crushing you it just keeps crushing you until you’re spent. Same with the once per match effect, just feels better to restart and hope for better RNG than to spend a card slot on something with such a low chance of turning around a bad run. At the very least I don’t think a player should have to equip more than 2 cards of a set to get the set bonus that way they can at least mix and match 2 sets reliably for fun.

Each character should have slots to save favorite Kwent card loadouts, having to redo them from scratch or bounce between a normal stage or endless stage build is annoying. Especially as the card pool gets more and more bloated.

Call of the Wild / King’s Wrath weapons, summoned minions regularly just run in place instead of attacking something. If there’s nothing nearby, they need to either run to the player or next nearest enemy.

For cards like Dwarf Craftsman, instead of giving some weapons no benefit since they can’t use an amount increase give them so other perk such as +10% critical damage.

Circle, Natural Disaster, Pseudo-bullet, Setsugetsuka! cards have set bonuses that aren’t translated into English.

Minimized or Off display option for Benimaru, Renyi and Xiaoyu’s unique dash meter (long as they got character cue’s like Benimaru’s aura).

== Game Menus

While the new talents do help the weaker characters that haven’t been given a gimmick to scale around be baseline stronger, just adding stat point nodes doesn’t offer any real game play experience. Consolidating the spammy extra talents into one node with multiple picks like the enhancement ones where you rank up twice would also do wonders to reduce the bloat on the page. But doing like a Health node with 4 ranks, then a gameplay node, then another Health node with 4 ranks would be nicer than a full page of just columns of stat nodes. Say some node where Vortex Rings for that character would also round up elixir’s, bombs, and treasures from the entire stage and drop them around the edge of screen. That would solve some of the out of bounds woes or having to double back miles to pick stuff up. Maybe a node to start with another 2 levels. A node that gives a XP boost for first 2 minutes. Or like let Lillia get another node to reduce enemies defense by another 20 or Aster some more minion damage and health. Just something to spice up the new talent section instead of just being a coin dump for basic stats.

Collect button on Lore pages should just auto complete when going into the book or have a more flashy button to draw attention to it.

An option to return to character select screen instead of main screen would be nice. Save folks some click for someone like me who doesn’t need to go back into archives or achievements to collect anything. Perhaps only default to title screen if there’s something new or uncollected.

Dunno how related it is to the update or Steam itself, but Visual C++ has been going nuts every time loading the game since the update.

Keep up the good work. Cheers to anyone who read that mass of words :)

Originally posted by Fluxion:

I didn't read though the entire wall of text, but it was rather humorous (in a good way).

Since I see you posted this before this latest update... Just wait till you smack into that wall again... yikes... lots more unlocking and experimenting to do and some characters are DEFINITELY better than others...

I tried with Astor at first thinking it'd be easy mode as I like him and pet classes in general and pretty much got my a$$ handed too me. Then tried Ember and got to the boss with a couple deaths along the way (first try) but 1000x easier; then his mechanics vs. the boss came into play... no dodge (and didn't build for speed)... so another wall.

Vera fears no wall! But trying it with that kitty summoner I can see being a big yikes. No scaling gimmick like the stronger characters get and minions are unreliable so haveta min-max to the extreme and pray RNGesus is merciful. Hopefully with all the extra stat points to grind for will help get over that wall. Half my fights with Aster I just made him into a projectile monster and ignored the minions, as weird a thing to do as that is.

[Blasphemy77]

After reading all your walls, the last one was slightly more skimming, there are two kwent cards you didn't mention that trivialize the game: Mod - Giant Cannon and Demonic Meteorite. I literally have not taken the mod card off because it turns the Giant Cannon into the most damaging thing in the game bar none, do need to lower opacity or you will not see anything. Demonic Meteorite granting 2% critical chance and 4% critical damage every 6 levels is also incredibly strong. While I agree with the RNG shenanigans being pretty bad, I am able to fairly reasonably get the Cannon every single run by banishing only weapons, getting every skill filled, then rerolling when I have a single weapon slot left. Does this lead to very samey runs, yes, is it able to clear with a character that literally just got unlocked and has nothing else, also yes.

I would agree with you on the character weapons having some form of "tiers" essentially but with what that one kwent card does to Cannon it pretty much makes it have a tier of its own and that is the only tier that matters. Which before that, and sort of with that, Multi Air Blast pretty much comes in second place for me every time. Both of them hit off screen and if you get booster stone they hit so many enemies it was absolutely hilarious at first and even now seeing the "cannon balls" blow up and hit over half the screen when they are all basically off screen is absurd. Also I do like Lillia a lot myself and I hate that her ultimate node changes the way her super weapon works because it ends up being worse for me.

I do agree that kwent cards have tons of bloat, I had the 30/30/30% hp/atk/def card before I had the 35% atk card but even the previous one was already just not valuable because the base atk and def were so low that they made almost no difference for most characters. Then I unlocked Mystic Sword Arts and getting 10 levels is super easy and by 20 levels, also not that hard, it outscales almost all the other % increase cards. My last card is Totem of the Eagle, mainly for cdr, but cdr is also kind of bugged or at least doesn't work how it would in other games of this genre because your weapon will not fire again until it has finished. The only case it will is if you level it up again, at least from what I have seen in game.

[MaelstormM]

Originally posted by Blasphemy77:

After reading all your walls, the last one was slightly more skimming, there are two kwent cards you didn't mention that trivialize the game: Mod - Giant Cannon and Demonic Meteorite. I literally have not taken the mod card off because it turns the Giant Cannon into the most damaging thing in the game bar none, do need to lower opacity or you will not see anything. Demonic Meteorite granting 2% critical chance and 4% critical damage every 6 levels is also incredibly strong. While I agree with the RNG shenanigans being pretty bad, I am able to fairly reasonably get the Cannon every single run by banishing only weapons, getting every skill filled, then rerolling when I have a single weapon slot left. Does this lead to very samey runs, yes, is it able to clear with a character that literally just got unlocked and has nothing else, also yes.

I would agree with you on the character weapons having some form of "tiers" essentially but with what that one kwent card does to Cannon it pretty much makes it have a tier of its own and that is the only tier that matters. Which before that, and sort of with that, Multi Air Blast pretty much comes in second place for me every time. Both of them hit off screen and if you get booster stone they hit so many enemies it was absolutely hilarious at first and even now seeing the "cannon balls" blow up and hit over half the screen when they are all basically off screen is absurd. Also I do like Lillia a lot myself and I hate that her ultimate node changes the way her super weapon works because it ends up being worse for me.

I do agree that kwent cards have tons of bloat, I had the 30/30/30% hp/atk/def card before I had the 35% atk card but even the previous one was already just not valuable because the base atk and def were so low that they made almost no difference for most characters. Then I unlocked Mystic Sword Arts and getting 10 levels is super easy and by 20 levels, also not that hard, it outscales almost all the other % increase cards. My last card is Totem of the Eagle, mainly for cdr, but cdr is also kind of bugged or at least doesn't work how it would in other games of this genre because your weapon will not fire again until it has finished. The only case it will is if you level it up again, at least from what I have seen in game.

There’s definitely some cards that once you get them, they almost never come off unless you have a certain goal in mind. Mythic Sword Arts I don’t think I take off any character for any build since it’s like the ultimate scaling card regardless of normal or endless runs. Sitting that card aside then you have your choices of cards between front loaded like Pigeon Soup that can help you struggling early on with a large stat chunk, looking for long term scaling with ones like Demonic Meteorite or Elven Forge or the limit breaks that can get lots of stats in really late game (endless runs I’d say mostly). Which is a solid setup for players looking at starting, midgame or late game goals. Thinking about it, guess Elven Forge + Ancestral Armor Shards and Dwarven Forge + Demonic Meteorite were the first card sets before it being a formal system now.

I’m at the point now where I pretty much just use two builds for anyone with single card changes depending on if I’m going for an endless stage or not. Mythic Sword Arts + Dwarf Craftsman + Elven Archery + Precision Guidance, then get Boomerang Dagger + Air Blast + Ice Shards and pick from Fireball / Chain Lightning / Magic Pinball... and you just turn the screen into a firework. Ratchet Disc and it’s evolution is also pretty fun with a huge amount. Then there’s the Vera style build I use of Mythic Sword Arts + Totem of the Ox + Blessings of the Holy Symbol + Precision Guidance, which lets her rapid fire bombard the screen. In Endless swap one of the non MSA cards for a limit break appropriate. Since this update, those builds have gotten me through every stage with pretty much every character... even Aster lol, no minions for him. And that’s where in order to break that meta that seems to work for me every time, the cards and weapons really need to be balanced much more.

Even with everything maxed out though, so like 4 pre-stage banishes, 3 in-stage banishes and 6 rerolls I still have about 20% of my runs where RNG decides not to give me the weapon/skill load out I want (shops get it to about 15%). Which I usually still finish easily now, but still, with all achievements done, talents unlocked and nearing 80 hours in the game, to still have that much of a chance at things going off track is questionable. Let alone when starting the game and poor Lillia only having like 1 reroll and 1 banish which felt absolutely awful and annoying and that’s the most important time to try and have player’s get a good experience to be retained.

Which is where the ponder comes in about who is that RNG friction put in the game for? Once the game’s bought, whether I play 1 hour or 100 hours, the developer has gotten paid already. There’s the psychology of getting a chest and you see it turn into a 5 item drop instead of a 1 item drop which feels good accompanied by all the bells and whistles like a casino, which feels good since you get more than you expect, a neutral result and a positive result. Your loadout though is more to be expected because that’s where the game play lies and when you don’t get it that feels like a bummer (to me at least), like a chance between a neutral result and negative one. Made even worse if you then wipe or have to start reset spamming because your loadout was messed up and couldn’t get their super weapons because dead end skills keep sticking onto them, which is going to happen more to new players, which are the players you should be trying to give the best experience possible to so they stick around for DLC’s. Extra worse is there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of reroll protection either to stop the same things from coming up repeatedly. Then on the dev side, you have to spend resources coding the various banishes and them being omitted from the RNG pool, coding rerolls, coding the conditions to unlock more of them via progression. Whereas if you just had players able to pick their basic loadouts before the match (with random still being an option for slots) and let the level up choices be random from your load out choices and shops random from the entire pool, there would be no need for banishes or rerolls at all and players would always be able to play with whatever build strikes their fancy.

Then as a means to get people to play with more builds (aside from fixing the many maaaany balancing issues), give incentives to do sillier stuff or try new things. Just to spitball a random idea: since there’s an absurd amount of Kwent cards now (I still got like 66 to unlock... uhg) add an archive entry for them all (should already have an archive for them I feel) and have them list a condition to unlock. Set conditions from simple things like “Get Rank B in Snow Foothills” to very specific things like “Get Rank S in The Embodiment of Death using Inu Kage with Fiery Tornado weapon equipped”. You could even combine it with the other suggestion of mine above about having Kwent cards rank up from useless versions to stronger and relevant versions by doing stuff to reduce the redundant card bloat so every card would then have a obtain method and an advancement track. You could even make a challenge for say the final rank be to do an endless stage with the card in question equipped and all weapons set to random. It would give players a deterministic path of progression they can see, control and be encouraged to do lots of different stuff. It would open up dozens (hundreds?) of hours of gameplay without taking the cheap way out of a dice roll after 12 minutes to see if you wasted that 12 minutes or not.

It’s like Vampire Survivors or so has this entire genre mindset on the obsessive amount of RNG, when even it has lightened up on the RNG buy outright selling rerolls and banishes in the merchant shop, dropping candy boxes, arma dio’s, letting you pick Arcana that will drop those things so you can pick what you want and having set weapons and power ups in the stages. Like the lesson World of Warcraft had to learn in Shadowlands when they just piled chores and restrictions on top of the player which built up animosity. It’s like who is the restrictive design and RNG friction for? How does it benefit the developer and the player by not letting them play with the load out of their choice or at least making it easy to do even for a new player? Does it somehow make the developer more money by all the RNG? Do players enjoy not getting to use the loadouts they want or picked cards planned around? Is it that good to pad the games average play time even though it’s because players have to spend extra time fighting with RNG and the game systems? Is it the relief of you getting the load out you want and not being screwed over by RNG is made better by just knowing RNG could possibly screw you over? I get the psychological gambling and casino aspects in regards to treasure chests, but I just can’t see it as a greater positive than negative for normal gameplay functionality. At least not in a game that’s a one-time purchase, as F2P/gacha/loot box games and whatnot need to keep players hooked to keep pumping those micro-transactions with obnoxious RNG and the gambling psychology book thrown at the player.

Guess back to Kwent cards from game design ponderings and philosophy, some more ideas on handling the bloat and expanding their use...

Move stage effect Kwent cards from player selected ones to be a modifier for stage itself as a means to increase difficulty and rewards. Like Thunderstorm, Ice Storm and Molten Lava Domain. Tweak them to be a bit more unfriendly to players, but let a player add up to 4 cards to a stage to make it way more of a challenge, but say give way more xp, coins or using the idea above unlock other Kwent cards (or ranks). I can’t imagine many players are deliberately picking those for their normal runs, and since they’re uncontrolled anyway would give them a nice new purpose. Then can add new cards to buff enemies, spawn giant exploding enemies or add a wind effect that pushes players in a random direction. Would slim the main card pool bloat down, give new life to lesser used cards and create new stage experiences for players. Could even have stage specific ones such as avalanches accompanying blizzards in Dragonroar Snow Peaks.

Move weapon modifier Kwent cards to the weapons themselves from the main player pool, though imagine only 1 card to avoid conflicting effects. Since they usually have a tradeoff like Golden Radiance losing it’s slow to do more damage probably could be tweaked to be mostly neutral (or using the rank up idea above could make them a bit better maybe?). Say could have Air Blast being scaled down but getting to use rebounds, or fly out in a spiral. Would allow the use of more weapon types without having to keep bloating the weapon pool. Combined with the letting the player build the load out of their choice would also avoid the rage of picking say Mod – Air Blast card, then not getting Air Blast thus wasting your card slot for the run.

So doing those would make 3 pools of Kwent cards to divide up the current giant pool to keep it more under control, allow way more customization options and lots more reuse for stages.

== Other tidbits for this go around...

Since there’s now cooldowns showing on cards, shift some of those other once per game affects to use that instead since I have yet to see one of those once per game effects that truly feels impactful enough to be once per game (Resurrection effects still could be once per life instead of once per game).

Gonggong could use a bit more of a spawn in animation so he doesn’t just drop on top of a player as much as currently does if they happen to be in the section he starts in or always spawn opposite of player.

Was in Celestial Atlas, playing as Aldreya, Gonggong was dead and not spawned in, I didn’t have any kiss/curse environmental cards on me, but somehow it kept taking damage. Given how things spawn in can’t imagine it’s able to be damaged by little baddies too, but is that a thing?

== Ideas for the weapon visuals to make it so folks don’t have to turn so fast to reducing visuals to see...

Giant Cannon, keep the cannonball a more normal size, but add a flaming wave around it appropriate for the damaging areas size. Sorta like if the cannonball was a jet ski and the flaming wave was it’s wake, keep the “wake” to a reasonable height. Then have the final explosion either sped up or go out more like a flat shockwave.

Holy Bombard change the light pillars to be music notes like Soul Sonata uses so it looks different from pick up light pillars, cap the height or change it to like a swirly smoke puff.

Summons like Bone Dragon and Stellarfall, give an option to just show their outline.

== More character thoughts...

After goofing around with Emberfire and Renyi, start to feel like all character’s need the basic dash. Before the extra talents added some padding to make the weaker character’s more playable in Land of Erosion, Emberfire would just get swarmed and overwhelmed before could try to build up levels unless really lucky. In Emberfire’s case, could have a half second charge move to shift mode otherwise normal dash. Renyi gets a dash when in Panda-Man form, so maybe just have’m use a charge move to shift weapon forms otherwise dash. With basic dash being baseline for all character’s would also open up avenues for new types of stages, say dashing across bottomless pits in a treasure hunt stage or dashing through hedges in a plant maze to get away from enemies. While me myself would never want to use a skill slot for a dash power up, the basic dash at least lets you avoid feeling like you must pick up Phase Boots (and thus probably locking you into wanting Ice Shards).

Cheers again to any peep still reading these

[Blasphemy77]

I definitely want to re agree with the upgrading of tiers of the kwent effect because I'm not about to put on all the lower attack, def, damage reduction, or cdr cards when higher tiers just outclass them.

So the exclude function is a step in the right direction for making the runs less RNG reliant but for some odd reason it has a coin cost? I haven't actually used it just saw the coin cost and decided to not touch it for now since I still have to upgrade all the characters, I only have 3 complete. Something that I am surprised isn't in the game is "lock", which is a staple for these games so if you have two things in a single roll that are good you can hold one for later. That massively cuts down on RNG for the obvious reason and I don't understand, aside from what potential programming issues might arise from it, why it wouldn't for sure be in the planning for the baseline game.

While I do like that each character has their own "meta" upgrades, the lack of a true global upgrade system hurts for sure, which I guess kwent cards are supposed to be the replacement for. Really big issue for that is I don't think I have seen a single kwent card, not sure how many I have but it is most of them, that grants magnet/shard pull range. The quality of life that being able to just get exp from further away brings causes me to almost always grab spatial ring just so I can maybe snag that crystal from a little further to get a level up that secures the run. I am not saying we need a new kwent card that grants actual pull range, not the every 2 minute have a pseudo magnet ring or whatever. I want something that we can put coins into that will give some of these global upgrades to the characters that would make the game more enjoyable.

The mod cards need something, same with the use all these weapons to get x effect cards, they just don't seem impactful enough. Some mod cards like the golden aura just isn't impressive and it is also in part how you said @MaelstormM, turning off the slow for damage isn't a great trade-off and more generally not getting the weapon you have a mod for kills a card slot.

Finally, just hard agree with needing a dash, these special attacks or modes on dash just aren't nearly worth the invulnerability that a dash provides, which is way more consequential early in a run before you start ramping.

[MaelstormM]

Originally posted by Blasphemy77:

So the exclude function is a step in the right direction for making the runs less RNG reliant but for some odd reason it has a coin cost? I haven't actually used it just saw the coin cost and decided to not touch it for now since I still have to upgrade all the characters, I only have 3 complete. Something that I am surprised isn't in the game is "lock", which is a staple for these games so if you have two things in a single roll that are good you can hold one for later. That massively cuts down on RNG for the obvious reason and I don't understand, aside from what potential programming issues might arise from it, why it wouldn't for sure be in the planning for the baseline game.

While I do like that each character has their own "meta" upgrades, the lack of a true global upgrade system hurts for sure, which I guess kwent cards are supposed to be the replacement for. Really big issue for that is I don't think I have seen a single kwent card, not sure how many I have but it is most of them, that grants magnet/shard pull range. The quality of life that being able to just get exp from further away brings causes me to almost always grab spatial ring just so I can maybe snag that crystal from a little further to get a level up that secures the run. I am not saying we need a new kwent card that grants actual pull range, not the every 2 minute have a pseudo magnet ring or whatever. I want something that we can put coins into that will give some of these global upgrades to the characters that would make the game more enjoyable.

Even with the lock function, still can’t wrap my head around why so many of these games cling to that RNG for your weapon/skill loadouts. At least to me, It’s just spending dev time implementing a new system to fix the inherent flaws of having the base system built around RNG. And the lock system is even after having to build even more systems in the form of reroll, anti-duplicate rerolls, banishes and bad luck protections. Just needing to program bandaid on top of bandaid to try and control the RNG Instead of just being like “You want to play with Ratchet Disc, Explosive Trap and Ice Shards so that the Cold Treatment card works for you? Sure, go for it, have fun!” and away the player goes to have their fun trying out the card they wanted to. It’s sorta like taking the wrong lesson from what makes gambling and casino’s fun by making it RNG to just get in the door with no fanfare instead of RNG to win a million dollars on the slots with fireworks and all the fanfare to go with it.

There is a lack of magnet effects, woulda liked to see maybe one or two nodes in the new talent sections to maybe give some moderate boost to your magnet range as well as the upgrade to rings to pull the non-xp/coins closer to you. Think only Lena, that one card and the vortex rings get collecting perks. Can keep on hoping to see it in future iterations of talents which will hopefully better level the playing field for all character’s as well as do more gameplay related things in the new section beyond just a attack, defense and health stat dump section. Between barrels and the later stages having lots of bosses that both drop vortex rings though it hasn’t drove me to crazy, but seeing elixirs and bombs scattered on the map screen far away from me does drive me nuts lol. Could maybe have some more multi purpose Kwent cards that toss in some stats, effects and also magnet range since there’s no shortage of dual stat cards already.

I feel like maybe trimming the repetitive talent nodes from the individual character’s and putting it into a global talent tree like other games have could be a neat combo. Up the node price accordingly in the global one but just have it apply to everyone and that way the individual character’s talent trees can just focus on the transformative gameplay parts for the respective character like their respective scaling gimmicks, unique weapon forms and a sprinkle of stat nodes for character’s who just get more of one type. If the insistence on keep the RNG leveling up in there, then could scoot rerolls and banishes to the global tree too.

== On Feedback front, buggy behavior found...

Bug found while doing my random runs for giggles and hoping to get more Kwent cards. While taking Vera out to randomly kill everything, was looking through Kwent card list under the “All” section. The “All” section shows I was missing 52 cards going by the blank ‘?’ card slots. When switching to the “Common” showed I had them all, “Rare” shows I was missing 5, “Epic” missing 5 and lastly “Legendary” shows missing 2. So the “All” part was 52 while totaling the individual types shows only 12 for a difference of 40 ghost cards under “All”. Also despite either way showing I was missing cards, pressing right-trigger tells me “You’ve collected all available Kwent Cards”. So a good few things amiss there. (Edit: After posting this got a Mimic legendary card, so at least the collected all available Kwent cards part is definitely not accurate)

After playing other steam games, Twilight Survivors is the only way that seems to have an issue with Microsoft Visual C++ 2022 X86. Tries for an install script, eventually fails that it can’t find vc_runtimeMinimum_x86.msi so I cancel it twice and eventually the game will launch.