Finally played this after seeing it around for a long while.
- Art simultaneously looks great and low-quality. Like the Raconteur scene is top-notch, while some of the enemies and heroes look far worse. The manticore I fought on level 5 was especially bad.
- There is a ton of polish, yet the UI feels incomplete and rough. Like, the elements moving away from the mouse is cute, but then some passives/relics caused buttons to be pushed off the little card itself. The UI for passives, swapping abilities, and party members felt intuitive once you knew the right inputs, but getting there was all on me.
- Same thing for information in combat. There are a lot of things that would be super useful to know at a glance, but I could not find them. The biggest one for me was the Fighter's Momentum. No clue how to see that at all, which sucks because all of their abilities rely on it. (I played a second run and finally saw it in the bottom right corner. Boo!)
- Since I just got to the manticore, that bastard one-shot my party! I'm not sure how I was supposed to deal with it, since increasing raw stats doesn't seem to be an option anywhere in-game. This is another one of those things where it could be there for all I know, but it was never explained.
- Music was dope.
- I do like the combination of Darkest Dungeon plus roguelike relics. And getting extra actions on crit/denying enemy actions on miss is cool, too, once I figured it out.
- The map movement just felt weird. In hindsight, I encountered a bug, but I actually really liked it, where I was spotted by an enemy on a different path, and it crossed over the chasm to get to me. It also wasn't clear how much movement I'd get beyond the initial 6. Some enemies I could outrun, and others I couldn't? I also never bothered with dice or fixed movement because it seemed superfluous. I can see the intent, but it feels bolted on right now.
- Unless there's a reason not to take everything in chests/event rewards, I hate having to click each one and then click leave and then assign them to individual party members...
Overall, really fun, just an odd mix of very well-polished and not polished, but the core gameplay is there, and it's well-done after figuring it out. On my first run, I was just fucking around until I died, but then on the second run it clicked, and I got to the manticore, who wiped the party.