I stuck it out the whole way this time and wish I hadn't.
And incredibly interesting premise and lovely looking game that's so full of small baffling design decisions it just breaks the whole thing apart.

It's a Shmup Metroidvania Deckbuilder. Except it's a bad at all of those things.

As a Shmup, your character has a huge hitbox and there's often so many particles on screen there's no way you can dodge them, so you have to rely heavily on bullet clearing cards. Even when you see the bullets coming, you'll often clip one because of your massive hit box.

As a 'vania, it's mostly linear with some very tedious backtracking on account of your slow movement speed. Most of the exploration mechanics you get are used a handful of times and don't really round out your arsenal.

As a deckbuilder, it could have improved the shmup combat, but in practice you get SO many bad cards that there's not much point in exploring. The fact that the cards are randomly assigned to buttons means you're usually best to just spam them.

Enemies are bullet sponges with bullet patterns that often punish dodging (again, pushing you toward bullet clearing spells).

All armor is temporary, except one broke-as-hell late game card that lets you restore a heart.

The writing is groan inducing and reads like a dream conversation with all your pals (and you cannot skip it).

Checkpoints are often terrible.

Difficulty spikes are often.

There's a bad submarine section, which is not as bad as a lot of people seem to make out.

I was so up for this game, and I feel like it's not a million miles away from being good! Building a good deck (eventually) feels great!

But the execution is not there and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.