Thanks a lot for playing all the way to the final boss and for your detailed feedback! I should have taken more time to include an explanation on how the battle works.

Without entering into all the detail, here's how it works:

Turn order: you, the chicken, then the enemy.

You select one of your pieces and move it on one adjacent square. After moving, the piece will attack all enemies present in its attack range (represented by red squares). The damage inflicted will be a number between the equipped weapon min and max damage. All targets that have an elemental weakness will receive double damage.
Alternatively, you can attack without moving by selecting one of your pieces and then pressing space (this is not documented enough in game, but you can see it by clicking on the "?" button). This only works if an enemy can be attacked by the piece without moving.

When attacking, if one or more allied piece can also attack one or more of the target, they will join in in the attack. You can perfectly win without making use of this mechanic or even noticing it.

After your move, it's the chicken turn. At the start of its turn, it has a 50% chance to turn against you (reduced to 25% during boss fights). It moves to a random square like a chess knight and attacks all targets in range.

After that, the enemy moves following the same rules as the player.

Weapons have a durability. When a weapon falls to 0 durability, damage inflicted will be halved. You will have to enter a safe room and sacrifice another weapon of the same kind to repair it fully. You can also upgrade your weapons by sacrificing another of the same kind, to raise max damage and durability by 1.

The strengths and weaknesses system is way less obvious than I thought it was when I implemented it. Most weapons have an element represented by an icon next to the name. When attacking, the animation will also reflect what element a weapon is. So a thunder weapon will be effective against a piece whose equipped weapon is of the water type, water will be stronger than fire, etc., like in Pokemon.

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Thanks again, your feedback will help me make things a lot clearer when I update the game!

Thanks for the kind words and your very valuable feedback! I learned a lot from watching your video. 

The chicken has a 50% chance of turning against you (25% during boss fights), so bad RNG can indeed make battles pretty miserable at times (as it did from the very first battle during your playthrough). I almost included a "friendly chicken" option to make the game easier after the 3rd game over, but time was running short.  I think I'll nerf that chicken a bit. The original idea was to prevent any battle from stalling when everyone is equipped with clunky weapons, but I can manage that differently. I voluntarily created the weapons not equal, some of them are almost unusable on purpose, but you can use them to spam upgrades on the better weapons, to make combat a lot easier.

The lack of visual variety is due to art taking me way too long to make, too. The minimap icon wasn't nearly as noticable as I'd hoped to, it could have helped you navigate faster.

Thanks again for playing and giving my game a solid try!

Thanks for playing and your very kind words! I absolutely agree about exploration, I lacked time to make it a bit more interesting. I have some more ideas to diversify combat, but that'll be for a new version. Thanks again!

Thanks a lot for playing through my game and for your thought-provoking review! To answer your points:

Thanks for the tip on the movement buffer. You're right, it'll make the controls tighter.  I'll be sure to switch to a borderless fullscreen mode, too. I honestly find the current mode clunky  too but didn't take the time to study the alternatives.

Your remark about being discouraged to use any piece but the strongest one each turn is noted, I think I can improve that by giving different movement range to the pieces.

The chicken piece is there purely as the jam constraint, but I honestly like it as it is, unpredictable and potentially restraining the player or enemy movement. I don't want to make the enemy decisions more predictable because chess with telegraphed enemy movement sounds a bit dull in my opinion.

I tried to keep dialogue to a minimum while keeping it as natural as I could (for instance, no more than 10 lines before each boss, except for the good ending sequence where I allowed myself 15), but I still made it skippable in case the player doesn't particularly care for it (which is totally fine).

Since I worked alone (code & graphics), I couldn't add as much features in the combat and upgrades system as I wanted too, so that level of tactical depth is what you get for a week's worth of my time. I do have plans to improve it further, though.

Thanks again for your comment that gave me a lot of pointers for future improvements! 🙂

Thanks for playing and for your detailed feedback! In hindsight, I would have made the floors smaller and provided more incentives to explore. I hear you about the high frequency of random battles and abundance of weapons, fixed battles with less loot would probably work better. Combat took most of my dev time, and testing/balancing took most of the rest, so exploration was not as interesting as I would have liked. 

Thanks for playing!

Thanks a lot for playing and for wanting to showcase my game! 🙂 Unfortunately, it seems there was an issue with your capture software,  the screen was frozen for the whole 3 minutes, so there is nothing to look at. Thanks for checking it out, though!

Thanks a lot! I watched your whole playthrough, it meant a lot to see you backtrack after the bad ending to get the missing notes. It was also invaluable to understand what is intuitive enough and what isn't (I should have made it way clearer that you can attack without moving, and that your pieces can equip different weapons).

 I'm glad you enjoyed the game!

It's a 50% chance, but the chicken is nicer during boss battles 🙂

Thanks for playing of and sharing your thoughts, I'm glad you had fun and liked the chess spin on tactical RPG combat! I took some extra time making sure the difficulty is fair with a nice progression, so it's great to hear that you found it adequate. I'll keep in mind to make the resume option stand out more, that could have been bad.

Really appreciate your kind words, and I’m thrilled you had fun playing!

Wow, thanks! That's the kind of atmosphere I was going for. I have a lot of nostalgy for the 90's to early 2000's Megaten games, Soul Hackers was my favorite 🙂