I think, maybe, if the enemy curve remained the same throughout the rising difficulty levels, or if the bonuses to your base stats remained as you did other modes, this could stand to still genuinely hold up the more modern generation of roguelites. The game mostly takes the veneer of a dungeon crawler — say, like, a Mystery Dungeon — tasking the player to descend the depths of a procedurally generated dungeon, collecting items and facing foes in order to fulfil one of four goals: slaying monsters, collecting gold, collecting orbs, or freeing fairies. I like how combat here is a give-and-take thing: sometimes you’re better off drawing your sword and whacking the monster in the way, but most of the time you’re better off either using one of your items to either kill it before it can touch you or avoid the encounter entirely — the abundance of treasure chests encouraging the player not only just to freely use their resources, but to do so creatively: baiting enemies one way before teleporting to the other side of the room, building bridges across gaps, taking aggro off you to make enough distance to pick up an item.
While it starts off easy, subsequent levels ask you to do more, go deeper into the dungeon, and fight tougher enemies earlier on, and… this is where I started getting turned off. There are ten levels (per goal type: 40 in total) and from level 5 onwards it starts getting rather unreasonable, less because the game makes you do more (I liked going further and further down each time!) the presence of later enemies in earlier floors turns the game into a test of luck: how many times you have to kill an enemy to proceed vs. how many items the game gives you to actually stand up to them. This is especially rough because, unlike the levels themselves, item pools are fixed: if you got something functionally or literally useless on one floor, you’ll know you’ll get that exact same thing the next run, and the run after that, so on and so on until you can finally move on. There are items that increase your stats (and clearing enough levels will also increase your max HP) to theoretically make combat more of a possibility, but they’re staggered in a way that you can never get enough of them for it to matter — even with defence upgrades certain enemies could still kill me from full health in one or two hits, which pairs even worse with how the simple act of moving next to an enemy will vortex you into hitting it with your sword: even if you have an item that’ll let you escape, or kill it in one hit, or even if you’re standing on the stairs you’ll be forced to attack it, and through that get hit much harder in retaliation. I oftentimes went through the first four or five levels of a goal type fairly easily then got absolutely walled once I hit level 6. It, uh, did not make me feel like doing more than I had to.
There is, however, one goal type that removes a lot of the chaff from item pools, giving the player more things they can actually use if you have to kill an enemy to get past — and even if it does get kinda rough later the earlier stages are tuned to a point which felt good to play, even long after I’d done enough to clear the level (I was stupid and initially thought the HP upgrades I was picking up were what were permanently upping my stats). As a whole, this was pretty solid for the time I gave it, but having seen where the game starts going, knowing that it somehow gets even more difficult… I think we’re both better off not giving it more.
While it starts off easy, subsequent levels ask you to do more, go deeper into the dungeon, and fight tougher enemies earlier on, and… this is where I started getting turned off. There are ten levels (per goal type: 40 in total) and from level 5 onwards it starts getting rather unreasonable, less because the game makes you do more (I liked going further and further down each time!) the presence of later enemies in earlier floors turns the game into a test of luck: how many times you have to kill an enemy to proceed vs. how many items the game gives you to actually stand up to them. This is especially rough because, unlike the levels themselves, item pools are fixed: if you got something functionally or literally useless on one floor, you’ll know you’ll get that exact same thing the next run, and the run after that, so on and so on until you can finally move on. There are items that increase your stats (and clearing enough levels will also increase your max HP) to theoretically make combat more of a possibility, but they’re staggered in a way that you can never get enough of them for it to matter — even with defence upgrades certain enemies could still kill me from full health in one or two hits, which pairs even worse with how the simple act of moving next to an enemy will vortex you into hitting it with your sword: even if you have an item that’ll let you escape, or kill it in one hit, or even if you’re standing on the stairs you’ll be forced to attack it, and through that get hit much harder in retaliation. I oftentimes went through the first four or five levels of a goal type fairly easily then got absolutely walled once I hit level 6. It, uh, did not make me feel like doing more than I had to.
There is, however, one goal type that removes a lot of the chaff from item pools, giving the player more things they can actually use if you have to kill an enemy to get past — and even if it does get kinda rough later the earlier stages are tuned to a point which felt good to play, even long after I’d done enough to clear the level (I was stupid and initially thought the HP upgrades I was picking up were what were permanently upping my stats). As a whole, this was pretty solid for the time I gave it, but having seen where the game starts going, knowing that it somehow gets even more difficult… I think we’re both better off not giving it more.