Misc. Feedback

[mondsemmel]

Hey there! I'm enjoying this game a lot, so thanks for making it. I already finished it once on Normal back in 2018-11 (with the Scholar), and now managed to beat it again after a ton of tries (with the Alchemist).

Here's a bunch of bite-sized feedback, mostly related to the UI, which you might find actionable:

• Most important by far: Items and enemies in the bottom row of tiles in the dungeon are basically invisible. Feedback in one screenshot: Screenshot[i.imgur.com]. Games with isometric graphics suffer from the same problem, and solve it by making the front-facing walls transparent or only drawing the bottom half. Another suggestion would be to draw the item outline on top of the windows or something. Ultimately I imagine there must be *some* low-effort way to fix this issue, even if my own suggestions ain't it.
  
• When I die, there's an option to dismiss the game-over screen. But what I really want is to access the full log, which is either not possible, or I don't know how to do it.
  
• In Icehouse, I can't tell from the minimap whether I've already entered all Ale storage spots or not. I wish that were clearer and more obvious.
  
• Why is the right-hand text in the Options menu so much tinier than the rest of the text? Screenshot.[i.imgur.com]
  
• You can cast Wring on the indestructible grave in the Graveyard, and thus generate infinite blood.

Finally, it's great that there's a character sheet screen, but I think it could be a lot better with a bunch of small tweaks, e.g. if it displayed some information that's currently missing. Here are a bunch of independent suggestions:

• Display my human spells and vampire abilities, no matter in which form I am. If I'm in vampire form, gray out the spells or something, and vice versa. Such information would be very helpful for making the decision of whether to transform mid-combat, for example.
  
• Display the stats such that I can tell at a glance what my base (human) stats are, vs. my vampire stats, vs. temporary bonuses from e.g. a potion or the Hone spell or something.
  
• Display unopened grimoires and manuals here, or better yet somewhere in the main UI. I rarely heal to full health, and sometimes play most of the game as a vampire, and then forget that my character could become so much stronger with some simple actions. (EDIT: Oh wow, an icon for this apparently already exists? I didn't realize that.)
  
• It's not clear to me how the Defense stat is calculated from my various pieces of equipment.

EDIT:

• Here's another one: When you change the difficulty, the selected class is reset to Officer.

[♥ jere ♥]

Thanks so much for the feedback. I'm not sure when I'll be able to get to the next update but I'll keep this stuff in mind. The full log on death idea is particularly good.

[mondsemmel]

I'm glad you found this feedback useful!

Here are some more thoughts, after I tried the (aptly named) Despair mode:

Minor feedback:

• Wring can extract health even from hittable environmental doodads, like the big cooking pot or gravestones. Is that intentional? It would be the only ability in the game that can generate health with no significant downside like hunger cost or having to risk yourself in combat. I like that the ability works on golems and plant monsters, where it could still be interpreted as extracting "life force" or "essence" in the form of blood. And while this interpretation would work for random bushes, it makes less sense for furniture, and in either case it's probably overpowered.
  
• Upon character death, another thing I want to do, but can't, is to access the character sheet.

Harder to improve:

• As vampire, climbing stairs in Despair mode feels like Russian roulette. I've died several times to ascending into sunlight. Maybe that's intentional? If not, here are a few ideas on how to make that behavior more predictable. In all situations, I'm next to the stairs in floor 2, and want to know whether I can safely ascend to floor 3. Option 1, if the stairs tile in floor 3 is lit up, also light up the corresponding stairs tile in floor 2 (in a weaker, not painful version). Option 2, replace the current vague warning dialogue with something more precise, something like "you can see sunlight at the other end of the stairs" or some such, if the stairs or one of its immediate surrounding tiles are lit up. Option 3, if I've already explored the other end of the stairs, give me the option to peek up / down (or alternatively, to "remember" the area around the other side of the stairs), and thus see a preview (or memory) of the room, with current sunlight, but without enemies. But that third option seems a) much more effortful to implement; and b) it doesn't even solve the initial problem, because you could still die to sunlight coming from a broken offscreen window which you hadn't scouted yet.
  
• I just died to a Crocodile hitting me for 58, when I thought I wasn't taking any risk at all. Ideally I'd love to know at all times whether a fight I'm about to take is risky or not. One way one might display that is like in Brogue, where the "examine" action tells you how quickly a monster could kill you in 1v1 in the absolute worst-case scenario: Screenshot[drive.google.com]. That might be overkill, but I at least want to know if I'm within 1-2 hits of death.

EDIT: More minor feedback, added later on:

• Bug: Uncovered mimics have no useful Examine info, e.g. they're missing "chance to (be) hit" stats.
  
• I just saw a potion spawned *below* (i.e. on the same tile as) a statue (on floor 4, in Despair mode) for the first time; I only realized it was there via the minimap.
  
• I like how the Rest mechanic works as a human. But I had to unbind the Rest hotkey, because resting constantly got me killed as a vampire.

[♥ jere ♥]

Wring hitting furniture is intentional, though it could be nerfed if it's really that strong.

Showing if a tile above/below you is something I've avoided because it means simulating the whole lighting for a floor you're not on. Maybe an easy compromise is just not dealing damage for the very first turn you are moving between floors?

Thanks for the other feedback. Good stuff.

[mondsemmel]

Wring hitting furniture is intentional, though it could be nerfed if it's really that strong.

I might have been wrong about this being too strong, though I do still find the Alchemist one of the easiest characters. I realized Wring was less strong than I'd thought because it costs 15 HP and most furniture only yields like 5-6 HP back in blood. When I wrote that comment, I thought most furniture was more like the big cooking pots.

The only areas I see where Wring still seems potentially too strong are those full of destructible tiles, e.g. the Greenhouse (with all the destructible plants), b) the graves in the Graveyard, especially with the indestructible grave which yields infinite blood, and maybe c) the Grotto, though I don't recall how dense the destructible tiles are there.

Showing if a tile above/below you is something I've avoided because it means simulating the whole lighting for a floor you're not on. Maybe an easy compromise is just not dealing damage for the very first turn you are moving between floors?

Yes, that would also work, though it might require a bit of design or tutorialisation to make this behavior intuitive to the players, and it would make the current warning when using stairs as a vampire obsolete. In terms of story logic, maybe our player character just has some intrinsic item or skill or ability to evade the sunlight in that situation. Or the idea is that (in-story, though not in-gameplay) they only partly ascend / descend stairs until they see sunlight.

Other than that, this change might affect the balance in some weird ways, which you might care about.

Finally, one could still end up in the situation where you use stairs, are unlucky and the stairs immediately break down, and then you can't go back down in time to not take damage from the sunlight. But maybe that part is fine, because one then has at least one turn to use a potion or something to escape.

Oh, I just thought of an alternative suggestion: Maybe in a vampire hotel, the entrance and exit tiles to staircases are protected from sunlight (like with a sunshade or closed-palanquin-ish design or something), and just can't be lit up by sunlight, period. Or similarly: maybe in a vampire hotel, these tiles are magically kept in permanent darkness, similar to the effect from one of those psychic enemy types.

---

I've now beaten the game 3x on Despair mode, which required some extensive savescumming but gave me a much deeper appreciation for the game's systems and philosophy.

For example, I found the effect in Laboratory I almost irrelevant in Normal mode, but in Despair mode the accelerated time cost me two ultra-precious Soul Elixirs, and the run deservedly became misery after that point. Now I properly fear that stage. Similarly, that mode also made me both appreciate and fear sunlight much more.

So once again, thanks a lot for making this game! I've moved on to other games for now, so here's my final feedback:

• Miniscule bug: In Fane's throne room, the Forgive action and the Toggle Torches action are on the same hotkey, so if you press "E", you forgive Fane and, in the same action, extinguish the torches in front of him.
  
• Self-inflicted bug: In Despair mode, I savescummed by making backups of the package.nw \ saves folder in the main game directory. Apparently I should've also made backups of the game data folder in %LOCALAPPDATA%\gkh, because my morgues now had win streaks of -170 or something. And because negative win streaks are supposed to be unreachable, the game doesn't reset or clamp them to zero. So now I would've had to win hundreds of times consecutively to get proper win streaks.
  
• Bug: However, I just reinstalled the game to take a screenshot of the aforementioned problem, and the game now says that I have no morgue data at all. Which is weird because the game still correctly displays with which classes I've won so far. Also, I'd experienced some Steam Cloud sync issues in the past. So maybe those issues were connected, and this sync problem, probably combined with the uninstall, erased my morgue data.
  
• Suggestion: Should Invisibility effects protect characters from harm due to Sunlight / Moonlight? I have no strong opinion on this but figured it might make physical sense depending on how the invisibility effect works, though not necessarily narrative sense depending on how (vampire) vulnerabilities are supposed to work.
  
• UI: The ability to mark Hawker items for later is great, but because I used this ability extensively, I came to wish that it took fewer clicks. Currently you first have to select the item, and then in a new menu choose whether to mark it, for 2 clicks per item.

[mondsemmel]

... So when I wrote in my last comment that this was going to be my final feedback, that was before I had the impulse to be competitive and decided to beat Despair mode with all 18 classes (!). That took a ton of savescumming, though I also won one run completely legitimately with zero savescumming (my second Despair win with Assassin), and a whole bunch of runs with <10x savescumming, including 2-3 runs I consider essentially legitimate (e.g. with Berserker, I only savescummed once when the Gorgon killed me with a hit from Blast 3 for >100 damage, when I'd taken no extra precautions because I'd thought I had enough HP to be safe).

Anyway, that was a lot more playtime spent on the game, and hence I have much much more feedback. The amount of feedback is getting too messy for a forum thread, so in addition to these comments, I've turned it into a spreadsheet[docs.google.com] which contains all the feedback from my three comments above, plus all the feedback from this new comment here. (The feedback from this fourth comment begins at number 21.)

The spreadsheet is the recommended format for reading this feedback, because it's formatted and categorized much better. In particular, it has paragraph breaks. I've also distinguished problem descriptions from suggested solutions, and assigned a severity/importance rating to each piece of feedback.

Bugs

• Aesthetics (0): Sometimes my character's skeleton will briefly flash for no reason. This is intentional if one gets hit by a shock attack, but occasionally happens even if no enemies are in sight. Maybe some monster is using Shock spells off-screen or something?
  
• Aesthetics (5): There's neat music in the main menu screen, but it just disappears entirely, and is replaced by nothing (/ by silence), in the character select screen. Why not let that great main menu music continue playing? It continues playing when I select Morgue or Options, but stops when I select Start.
  
• Balance (2): Unexpected miasma behavior, unsure if bug: https://i.imgur.com/zul43je.png In this screenshot, the area marked in red contained three bees. I cast Miasma 2 at the honey comb wall between us, and they all died, because the Miasma explosion somehow goes through walls, or at least through honey comb walls.
  
• Balance (3): I'm pretty sure something buggy happened in the turn before this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/FcFq5qj.png I entered the Hive and was unlucky that a red bee spawned either directly next to me, or maybe one tile away from me, I don't quite recall. Anyway, I cast Miasma, and as you can see from the combat log, I immediately took 45+46 damage from my own Miasma spell somehow, in two separate damage instances, but all within the same turn. (Oh, and then I hit the 1% miscast with Heal 3, and died.)
  
• Balance (4): Once in the Ice House, an Ice Golem spawned inside the little 1x1 tile where an Ale is supposed to be. The 1x1 tile is behind a door, so once you enter, you just get an immediate and unexpected hit for very high damage (58 ice damage in my case).
  
• Balance (4): Enemies with speed above your own can step into an environmental hazard, die, and still hit you once. This happens e.g. if you flee into sunlight and a vampire happens to follow you in a turn where he has a free movement. || E.g. this happened in the turn before I took this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zfG5eoS.png || A vampire moved into the sunlight, hit me, then died, before I got another turn.
  
• Balance (1): I saw a monster spawn on one of those levitate pit puzzles. This was really annoying, because I couldn't kill the human hunter with bullets or spells in my human form, and my levitate ability was a Bat potion which didn't last long enough to kill the hunter, either.
  
• Clarity (2): (I'm not 100% sure whether this bug actually happens. If you can't reproduce it, ignore it.) If, as a vampire, you attack a Samca (the enemy which flees from you) which stands in sunlight, you walk into the sunlight without the warning message.
  
• Clarity (2): When you charm eels or sharks, they don't display their red-ally-heart-symbol while in the water. They only do if you move into them from land, so that you switch places with them and they're briefly on land.
  
• Clarity (2): Underworld 6 was too big or something, so part of the map wasn't displayed in the bottom left minimap.
  
• Clarity (2): In both the Hive, as well as in the starting room layout with the bees and the honey, the honey is depicted as a honeycomb, but on pickup becomes an unidentified potion which is always honey when drunk. || I know the game can do this differently, because Antidotes in the starting room are identified as such.
  
• Level Generation (1): One of the pedestals in the Gallery, the ones surrounded by Crystals, was just *empty*.
  
• Level Generation (4): In side branches like the Rafters or Mausoleum I, the two staircases are often ultra-close together. This has been the case since I first played the game back in ~2018. I wonder if there's a bug in the level generation due to the peculiar branching nature of some of these branches? || This bug is especially unfortunate in e.g. Mausoleum I, where the design asks you to beat Mausoleum II as a human and then escape from all the vampires. That challenge doesn't happen if the level generation puts the staircases in Mausoleum I too close together.
  
• Level Generation (2): In one of my runs, the Icehouse contained only 2x food total. There were tons of water pools, though.
  
• Monster Behavior (2): My Solomonar ally did not behave sensibly in the Menagerie. See this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/WVUjuAF.png --- Once it cast Ice through the hedge, which as expected did not work; and other than that, I could not get it to follow me; it instead wanted to stare at the crocodile. I only got it to behave normally when I opened the zoo gates, but as it had exhausted its mana, it died to a crocodile, and then I died, too T_T.
  
• Monster Behavior (4): Is it intentional that the Rusalkas stop casting Entrance 3 once you've cast Glaciate to turn their water into ice? They also don't move on land/ice, but that I can understand. Also, when I moved into melee range, it seemed like they didn't hit me back immediately; I'm not sure if that's a bug, or intended behavior e.g. due to some effect of their speed value (plus Glaciate slows enemies).
  
• Monster Behavior (2): A Solomonar ally sometimes wastes all its mana on chain-casting Levitate each turn. The same applies to monsters with the same ability, like the prince boss in the Dungeon. I don't understand why either bothers when the status effect has >3-ish turns remaining.
  
• Monster Behavior (4): Vampire allies don't heal on blood when you're hurt but in human form. My poor vampire noble T_T.
  
• Monster Behavior (2): The Samca visibly floats, and moves away from you when you get close to it. I was able to chase one onto a Pit, and then... it fell down the Pit, rather than floating above it O_o. || Separately but probably relatedly: in the Dungeon, the Samca doesn't seem to get hit by spikes when it's stationary. But when I chase it into spikes that are just about to extend, then it gets hit and possibly dies. || So I suspect that the way the Samca's fleeing-behavior is coded makes the game think that it doesn't fly during the turn it flees.
  
• Performance (1): Even on my very powerful PC (which has a laughably powerful SSD etc.), the game noticeable lags whenever I pick up some of the "Books & Letters" pages. I suspect this is because the game writes to disc and halts the entire game until that's done.
  
• Typo (0): The cave wall description is just "It's a cave wall", without a period at the end.
  
• UI (2): If no enemies are on-screen, the Assassinate skill can still be used, and still consumes 15 HP, but doesn't teleport. I thought it would either not use up HP, or teleport you even to an off-screen enemy.
  
• UI (0): At 100+ bullets, the bullet number text on the Pistol icon is a bit squished against the Pistol icon border.

Impressions

• Aesthetics (2): Mimics have big fleshy mouths, so why don't they bleed?
  
• Balance (4): The Dungeon boss is *really* easy to kill even as a human. He might be the only boss one can easily kill with no preparation whatsoever: just grab a levitation cape, turn off the spikes and maybe the lights, wait until he walks into a spikes area, and turn on the spikes again.
  
• Balance (4): Baths and Menagerie both provide outsized XP, to the point that if Baths are on floor 3, I've multiple times reached level 7 on floor 3.
  
• Balance (4): Baths seems easier / better to have than Greenhouse: there's more "loot" in the form of fountains and getting to identify potion effects. And the boss can be cheesed in a variety of ways, whereas the boss in the Greenhouse is more like a hard check on equipment and potions, especially in Despair mode.
  
• Balance (2): The Beastmaster's passive ability seems useless - its pet wolf never even survives floor 2 for me, often not even floor 1.
  
• Balance (4): I died once in the Great Hall because I moved a bit too fast and the boss had just thrown a bomb into my path which I walked into. -> Suggestion: I wish we had the same warning message for walking into bombs which we have for sunlight.
  
• Balance (4): Werewolf with Focus is silly strong. I beat Despair mode with <5x savescumming (only needed until I properly understood the character), then tried entering the Underworld, only had to savescum a few times in Underworld 19, and stopped out of boredom after defeating the boss in Underworld 22.
  
• Balance (2): Is it intentional that Underworld bosses scale with number of unique rings collected (capped at 9), not number of rings collected (including duplicates of the Demon ring)?
  
• Balance (3): I feel like the game has gotten harder for spellcasters because it introduced a bunch of support spells, so grimoires often don't yield a damage spell. This was really tough on Despair mode with spellcasters which didn't start with consistent damage spells. I figured I might as well play Light Mage as a brawler, and Warp Mage as a pacifist until he finds a damage spell from a grimoire.
  
• Clarity (3): Is it possible to know if you have a Master Key? I'm not aware of any place in the UI which could tell me that.
  
• Clarity (4): It's often hard to know if a blood pool is worth 20+ hp, or more like 2 hp. Knowing this would be very helpful in close fights. -> Suggestion: Consider adding 2-ish tiers of smaller blood sprites (a low-effort way would be to just shrink the current sprite), e.g. for 1-5 hp and 6-10 hp or something.
  
• Clarity (3): The starting room layout with ice, water, and blocks of ice teaches a wrong lesson about the game: The tile which contains an item is a Floor tile, but looks like ice. So you can move on top of it without sliding into water, which is what happens if you try to copy the same moves anywhere else ice appears in the game, like in the Icehouse. -> Suggestion: Make the tile on which the item is visibly a floor tile, rather than looking like an ice tile.
  
• Clarity (1): There's no minimap icon for Iron Maidens, i.e. rescuable allies.
  
• Clarity (2): I cast Blink on top of the Watchtower, and my final two lines in the log were: "Select a direction for BLINK." and "You died." From this I concluded that I fell to my death, but the log message could be clearer. The same happens if you walk off at full health.
  
• Fun (0): The Hawker can have multiple copies of the same equipment, e.g. once it offered me 2x Copper Shield (+3). That seems superfluous.
  
• Fun (2): Finding an Arcane Hammer feels lousy because they always upgrade your worst equipment, i.e. the one you're most likely to replace. I think they're meant to be an exciting discovery, a rare item, but I always wish I'd found a piece of equipment instead.
  
• Monster Behavior (1): Is it intentional that if monsters are next to both you and an ally, they *always* attack you, rather than the ally?
  
• Monster Behavior (2): If I am targetted as a vampire by a human Champion, i.e. if I stand on a red this-gets-hit-next-turn-square, and then I use a Soul Elixir to transform into a human, then is it intentional that I still take damage? I thought even delayed attacks are not supposed to harm allies.
  
• Monster Behavior (2): It's unintuitive that the Eel has a ranged attack that looks like the shock spell but doesn't cost mana and has no cooldown.

[mondsemmel]

My last comment reached the character limit, so I put the suggestions in a separate comment. But again, the recommended way of reading this feedback is the spreadsheet.

Suggestions

• Aesthetics (1): -> Should Green Man (half human, half plant) be vulnerable to Blast damage?
  
• Aesthetics (1): -> Husks don't have any listed vulnerabilities. Maybe they ought to have the same ones as the Green Man, or at least share their vulnerability to fire.
  
• Aesthetics (1): -> Flavor suggestion: Vagabond's slower metabolism could coincide with increased poison resistance.
  
• Aesthetics (1): I wonder if the Wet status could do more. Currently it only increases Fire resistance. -> Maybe the Wet status could also lower Shock resistance or similar? Pure water is a good insulator, but non-pure water is a decent conductor.
  
• Balance (5): Besides off-screen sunlight, the second frustrating way one dies in Despair mode is by dying to insane critical hits from (almost) full health. For example, in Despair mode, if you get in melee range of a Ruby Golem, they can easily one-shot you from full health with crits >100 damage. So one either has to savescum in Despair mode, or never even allow such monsters the chance to attack, or fight them and hope that they don't get lucky. In any case, dying to huge crits is not that fun, and offers no counterplay or learning opportunity. || Examples of the biggest hits I've taken: || - A Ruby Golem hit my Shapeshifter (while I was in Werewolf form) for 108 damage once. That did not seem reasonable, though I somehow survived. In a separate occasion, an unidentified enemy in the Pharmacopoeia killed my vampire by dealing 109 damage to it; it turned out to be a Ruby Golem again. || - In Gallery, I took 103 damage from the Gorgon's Blast once O_o, and another time died to a Blast for 102. || - I died once to a Lapis Lazuli Golem hitting me for 52 damage, and another time to a hit for 51 (on floor 3, when I'd already cast Enrage and was therefore on ultra-high stats, namely 16 str 15 dex). || -> As the dev, you probably have better ideas what one could do about this problem than I do, but anyway, here are two suggestions: || For example, have monsters announce their insane OTK critical hits in advance, like in e.g. Slay the Spire or Into the Breach, by making them glow or displaying an icon above them or something, all so you know that you must not stay in melee range with them. || Or, if your HP is high enough (maybe >50% or something), make it so critical hits don't OTK the player but instead set them to 1 HP and give a hefty debuff like ""Barely Escaped Death"" which reduces player combat stats or something. The player will probably still die, but now there's a chance of counterplay (via potions, spells, or running away), which would make it feel more like the death is my own fault, rather than mere bad luck. "
  
• Balance (5): Player enjoyment: I die in a variety of ways in Despair mode. Some are entirely self-inflicted. But one type I find extremely frustrating is when I'm walking down some straight corridor as a vampire, and then get hit by offscreen sunlight. I know I could in theory pay attention to sunlight during every turn, but that's not a reasonable expectation in practice. After all, even my fastest winning runs take ~6000 turns. So instead I circumvent that by savescumming, but that's also unsatisfying. || Example morgue death: http://goldenkronehotel.com/morgue/cb29ce00aed7360131915d984336b375 - I'm fighting a Rat Soldier in a corridor, then unexpectedly take 36 damage from sunlight. I survive on 2 hp, but stand in sunlight. I take a Soul Elixir to survive the sunlight, the Rat Soldier doesn't miss me next turn, and I die. || -> So I wish the game was either less deadly here (e.g. by warning you that the tile is going to be dangerous next turn, though that's just one very handholdey suggestion), or much much more clear about where sunlight is going to be in the future. || Oh, here's one idea: You could show which tiles are going to be illuminated by sunlight 1-5 turns in the future, e.g. by displaying them as bright but less bright than sunlight; or by displaying red Alert icons on them; or something. || Side note: my suggestions re: balance are mostly to make dying Fun (in the Dwarf Fortress sense). If death comes from a learning opportunity, that's great, and then I won't make that mistake in the future. But I can't really learn not to get hit from offscreen sunlight, at least not in a way that doesn't require moving at a crawl through the game.
  
• Balance (4): -> Player choice: If I have many unread books, I wish the green ones (which grant stats) were always read before the grimoires (which grant spells). Because my decision of which spells to take depends on whether I get int points or not. This suggestion affects balance, but would imo be more satisfying.
  
• Balance (3): Walking through doors can expose you to danger which is hard to prevent. -> I wish there was either a way to open Doors via interacting (i.e. without walking into the door tile, and thus potentially into melee range of enemies). Or even more straightforwardly, that the act of moving into a door just removed the door and did not in the same action move you into the door tile. The former option would have the benefit that you could go through doors as quickly as right now, provided that you didn't mind the risk of getting ambushed.
  
• Balance (4): I feel like the patch which made vampire allies not feast on blood while you're hurt was meant well, but was actually a significant nerf to such allies. For example, they often produce blood outside my range (e.g. 4-5 tiles away, when it expires in 4-ish turns), then don't even use it, thus wasting it. -> Compromise suggestion: Maybe let allies eat blood always when human; and when you're a vampire, let them eat it if you're above 75% or so. The limit can't be 100%, because as a vampire your health is never at 100% for more than a few turns. || Right now allies die soooo fast, and that small change would mitigate that slightly.
  
• Balance (3): -> The Pistol would be stronger if I could aim at any square, rather than only uncovered reachable squares. See this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/6WZlnWa.png -> I can't shoot at a tile such that the trajectory would hit the Samca, because the tiles behind it are either wall or undiscovered. This behavior was particularly frustrating as the Sharpshooter in Despair difficulty, where lining up piercing shots through multiple enemies is great, but often not allowed.
  
• Consistency (3): Why don't monsters get the Submerged effect when you fight them while they're in water and you're not? For several runs I tried fighting monsters in the Sewers such that they'd always be in water, only to discover eventually that the Submerged penalty was asymmetric and didn't affect them. ->
  
• UI (1): The UI for examining something is great via mouse (right-click both opens and closes the popup), but annoying for keyboard (V opens the popup, but to close it I have to press ESC). -> I wish the Examine popup could be closed with both ESC and V.