now, i didn't feel like playing the steam version, and if my experience is better there i'll probably just give it a better review there, but the game feels awkward at best and frustrating at worst, even in fullscreen, it felt like the notes were spaced farther apart visually than they were in reality, and all of the difficulty really just comes down to the vfx, as well as the fact that the mapping itself is just,, lame, i think lame is the best word i can really get for it, like, yeah it spins and turns and the notes sometimes reverse the "flow" or make you faster(which, i think the speed notes are a little bit of a useless design choice when maps can speed up even without them, skyless being an example) but all of it just kind of feels like clutter, especially when it's hard to tell any of them apart until you've already hit them(different shapes would be my suggestion to seperate them visually)
and, well there really isn't any diversity in the difficulty itself, the ratings for difficulty are kind of just there for the sake of it rather than actually there to gauge how hard the map is, for example;
is moderate harder or easier than normal?does it stand for moderate difficulty, or is it short for moderately easy?
on sapling, advanced and expert are seperated by insane, when, in my mind, insane should stand for something above expert level, and, even then, advanced and expert seem more like rankings of skill the player would have, instead of rankings of difficulty a level would have,
i feel like there isn't a need to reinvent the wheel with difficulties, 1-10+ seems to be the standard, even osu technically uses them, with it being ranked in stars of difficulty, and, it isn't like you couldn't at least add a number beside the words,
and back to the diversity of difficulty, aside from the tutorial, which in my opinion isn't very good since it doesn't even show you the special notes, the easiest difficulty is normal, and it's pretty unfair to anyone that isn't some sort of greaseball that has an AP on every song in whatever their favorite rhythm game is and a ranking on osu,
now, skill levels and what some people find hard aren't something easy to cater to because they're all different, but i feel like this is one of those things where throwing in a few easy maps for the slower songs isn't something that would kill you.
also, i find turning vfx and spinning off in the misc mods insteaed of settings, and getting a score reduction, to be irritating, some of these maps literally only get difficulty because of the fact that you can't see the notes at all, let alone actually know when to click them because the audio doesn't even match up that well to the timing of the map.
the game has potential, the arrangement of songs for the demo is pretyy okay, even if it's just a similar roster to every other rhythm game on the planet(minus maybe mobile rhythm games since they cater more to japanese and vocaloid style music) and the inclusion of linking artists is a nice touch to show that you care, i just feel like it isn't too friendly to people that don't dedicate rhythm games as their top1 favorite, if that makes any sense.
and maybe my gripe with the audio sync is just a browser thing, but i play plenty of browser rhythm games with little issue, maybe adding something to actually "feel out" the right audio offset(similar to a dance of ice and fire, since you seem to be familiar with it regarding the speed notes) would fix it, since i usually don't manually set those things. it also just might be the cursor size, it's too small compared to the other notes imo, so it ends up easily lost in the crowd of "approach rings" and vfx. a size slider and a vector image for the cursor would easily fix that.
will i download the demo? eh, probably not unless there's comminuty maps planned for it, which i doubt because it's a demo, i also just don't have hope for readable maps when most of these seem to be "spam single note and vfx to hope trick people into thinking there's difficulty" for the official mapping, and community maps are already victims of that enough for games with good base maps(sonulos? i think, the project sekai one, that's a good example),
good luck with it though, this looks promising for more hardcore rhythm fans, sorry about the text wall, and don't take it personal.
