First of all, congratulations on finishing a game, and you did a great job on what you have accomplished! I really like the dark/gothic fantasy atmosphere and style of your game. Also, claw wizard - brilliant!

I had a few runs and here's what I thought of gameplay and balance. 

The first run I tried to explore everywhere and bought the first upgrades that were presented to me. I found I ran out of gold very quickly and so many rooms presented upgrades I was unable to obtain. This was a little bit frustrating as not many rooms contained gold. I died about half way up when the difficulty of the monsters increased and I didn't know the best way to beat them. 

The second run I also explored everywhere but this time was more selective in the upgrades I chose, which helped, but I still struggled when the claw wizard absolutely destroyed me. It seemed to do quite a lot of damage, however, maybe I wasn't paying attention to my hp as I was focusing on trying to sap it's mana. 

The last run I mainly headed up the tower as quickly as possible only stopping the at rooms on the way or visible from the stairs. This time I got all the way to the top to face the tyrant but struggled to defeat him before dying as I had no way to heal myself. 

Hopefully that will give you some insight into how a player might approach the game. I wouldn't want to comment that the game was too hard as I feel like this is probably intentional, and to make the player make conscious choices about which skills to increase and which resources to use including mana. 

One suggestion I would make is to make items available in combat, as this would allow a player to have at least 1 way of healing during battle. I think on one of my earlier runs I had a hp sap type spell but this was offset easily by the damage the enemy would inflict on that turn, making it less effective as a healing tool. 

Some of the skills had more obvious uses that others, for example, strength, toughness and arcana have obvious benefits to combats and traps. I felt dexterity only had a use for traps, which I could use something else to overcome. I didn't see any use for faith so it was unclear what this would affect. Other than more damage, I think having some more feedback that the elemental spells were more effective would be helpful. 

All in all I think you have a very good base, and I'm really impressed with the progress you've made in the bootcamp with this. I think there's a lot of room to build upon what you have already to make this even more great! 

This feels like a good mix of influences. It makes me think of Dark Souls, a roguelite, and dungeon crawling. I find it very enticing to keep playing to get to the top of the tower, but also find the difficulty keeps me trying to figure out the best play.

Resources seem scarce and their appearance is spread out enough that it seems unbalanced. After a certain amount of time playing, I find that I get to this point where I can no longer survive encounters because the ability to increase my stats or heal myself is too little to offset the amount of damage or drain the enemies can inflict. It basically becomes a damage race that gets skewed in favor of the enemies over time. 

In Dark Souls, you can account for the difficulty of bosses and enemies by way of skill, using items at the right time, and getting stronger and getting better equipment over time. Here, skill isn't as much an issue because of the turn-based nature of the game, so it comes down to just attacking and knowing when to use the right magic type against the right enemy. Getting more powerful seems to come down to encounters, and the randomisation needs some more work because sometimes you'll get the same encounter 2 to 3 times on the same floor. And with the lack of gold, it's hard to get anything. I do have to choose wisely what I get because of the low gold amount.

I find I want to run across the hall but the movement seems limited to nodes or a grid, is there a way to keep the player moving seamlessly but still taking the grid into account?

The game is pretty great overall, and I enjoyed playing it so much that I want to keep playing. Great world building as well! So great job!!! Some more polish, in terms of effects when attacking, hitting, using magic - like screenshake perhaps, screen flashes, etc - could go a long way of pushing the game even more, as well as more art polish. And then playing some more with the randomisation, and maybe giving the player more gold, could help equip the player better to handle the difficulties of the tower.

Dude, I LOVE the vibe you're going for! Had a lot of fun exploring the strange tower. Thought I had it, but got killed by a damn claw wizard midway across my ascent 😅

You tackled a pretty ambitious design with this project - both in terms of game design, content and graphic style. What you managed to build in such a short time is amazing - congrats! I particularly liked the world building - the themes, the texts, the encounters. I also really appreciated how, despite conveying a great atmosphere, the text is not verbose. Just a few lines of text to get the point and vibe across and it's done - which is cool because it also leaves room for imagination. Another super cool concept is navigating through a sidescroller view in a corridor, and most encounters being a room. Really makes you feel like exploring some sort of dark monastery.

The hiccups I had were all minor, and definitely the kind of stuff you could easily improve upon with some more time. Particularly, I wish there were navigation choices (like in Isaac, where you choose whether or not to enter a room making some sort of risk / reward calculation, etc). It would also feel more satisfying to control with more instant input recognition and faster travel time between cells.

I really like the idea and vibe. The darker tone and game genre is well aligned with Steam, if you keep improving on it. I would love to see this game keep evolving through the bootcamp! ❤️

Congrats, and thanks for the fun!