The scrolling was as good as I could get in a limited time. I had it set to twice the speed it is in this version originally, but it was too fast and made it feel like the screen was "snapping" to the player. I use gamemaker which (as far as I know) doesn't offer a "smooth" follow camera natively meaning I would have had to code it myself.

Fights actually can take multiple turns if you are under-powered enough. If you don't collect the weapon in the level, every "boss" character should always take two or more hits. It might be hard to notice if you're playing fast though, since it's doing a check every frame. I'm sort of torn on making the enemies health visible. I sort of like requiring players to encounter an enemy before they know for sure what its attack power and hp is because it makes fights more risky. I can understand why someone might find it frustrating though. If you have any suggestions for a middle-ground I'd love to hear them!

Pretty much the gold is there as a high score mechanic. If I had more time I would have included a tracker of your max level reached/max gold. I'm glad that you found the game balanced, I tried to come up with enemy strength and armor values that would put the player in danger, but not be too much. So long as you are able to find one or two pieces of armor in a level, you should survive most encounters and the way the maze is built, the "boss" is guaranteed to be far away from the player at the beginning.

Thank you! This is only my third Jam. I'm just a hobbyist so making something enjoyable with solid gameplay is exactly what I'm aiming for.

See my reply to YDenker

The view is limited in that you can only see 1/4 of the maze at a time, meaning you can't head straight for the exit. I had planned on implementing something that would restrict your view to just the corridors the character would be able to see down but ran out of time. Toward the end it became more important to bugfix.