The game looks nice, and it has some interesting features. I do like the graphics! Unfortunately I had a very hard time playing it. Especially the combat.

My first issue was having the characters organized horizontally while the key mapping was done vertically made it unnecessary hard to remember which key was for who. The progression of showing when the would be ready also didn’t really work on the character portrait(s) with dark background. I think the “I’m ready to do an action” state must be much clearer and the buttons when ready shine and sparkle some. The one button that seems to say you can always and should always press as much as possible is rest. But I guess it also is disabled when the character is disabled? It’d be good if that was illustrated on the button. And the button might also be a bit duller in general until the player actually needs to heal and then shine up to let them know they are about to die. On that note, the word “Rest” sounds like something one does between fights and not during fights, so I kind of disregarded it until the very end of my last attempt.

In part fighting might have been made more working for me if it was a bit slower. And as it was now I was just looking at the lower part of the screen watching the bars and spamming buttons. So I didn’t even notice when one of the enemies died.

At one point I got to level up, and there appeared buttons but then the fighting scene ended before I could do anything.

I also felt like the healing potion refused to heal me when I had characters hurt from previous fight. But the portraits were full health, so perhaps I was mistaken. It did resurrect one of my characters though when I finally got it working. Not sure it was supposed to do that.

The font was neat, but a bit hard to read, so I didn’t get all that it said in the intro. It should probably not auto-progress.

Playing through, I’m guessing the crystals did something. Might be connected to the looping time? But I’m not sure. I’m uncertain what made the time get longer. And since it’s a central mechanic it would probably be good if the player couldn’t miss that. Or if it’s supposed to be a mystery, it could be made clearer that it should be that too.

The looping was… well I didn’t really get the point of it. It caused a lot of repeated traversal akin to backtracking. And that might have been cool if there was some foreshadowing. Like if you through a window could see a crystal in a neighboring room and you could set that as a quest for yourself to reach it but your steps run out so you have to find a way to open short-cuts and prolong your loop time. And there needs to be exciting things happening on the way that you have to repeat.

First time I tried to <TAB> out your game to start recording my playthrough the game just exited. Second time, the game survived but when I tried to get back to it, I got no mouse pointer so I couldn’t start it… so there won’t be any recording unfortunately.

Hope this doesn’t come across as overly critic. I’m not. I think it could be a really neat game that I would enjoy playing very much, I’m just struggling right now.

I think except the enemies all art is AI generated but that's fine, they look good. I like the old school art and feeling of the game. Movement controls are unresponsive, you need to  hit w at leas two times for the player to move and it moves with a slight delay. The enemy sprites on the map an battlescreen are different, i don't like that. Their artstyle is different too.  The enemy art is not consistent with overall artstyle and it's sticking out too much. You could have make the battles random like JRPGs. Battle system is fine. But characters like cleric earned  the healing ability later on after i did some fights. Is there a levelling mechanic in the game bcs there is no sign of it in anywhere on UI. 

Time loop mechanic is interesting but i think unncecessary, it could be incorporated in a better way. Also it makes the game more repetetive and tiresome.

Overall it's basicly a working  and good looking Dungeon Crawler game which needs some fixes and improvements. Ah some other posters mentioned it too, closing the entire game when pressing escape is very annoying. You should fix that too. Imagine players hit escape by mistake and their entire progress gone :)

Loved the combat, and the old school vibe. Was easy to move around, the monsters were all great.

Only thing that got me was that pressing ESC exited the game outright. I found myself having to restart a few times but I kept hitting esc out of habit. 

I defeated both Flubb and Yibb-Tstll.

I have to say movement did not feel that great in this one because you have to wait after you step on a new tile.

However overall the game was super cool anyway. In practice combat consists in mashing the 3 last buttons but when using only the keyboard it controls well, I like that it does not take long and party assembling (now that's my thing), character progression  and ridiculing stronger and stronger enemies is fun. Maybe art is not as coherent as it could be (it's far from terrible) but what's certain is that every part of the game looks great, the big intro image, the character portraits, the enemies, the walls (some of the walls like the ones in the Yibb-Tstll area are really cool). Finally as you unlock navigation though gaining new powers I want to say the dungeon is specially good.

Very cool entry, thanks for sharing.