i spent like 10 minutes playing up to level 20 with no noticeable increase in difficulty until i stopped. for a long time i had assumed you were supposed to get to floor 100, so i was taking a lot of paths and getting nowhere. early on i had assumed experience was needed because later enemies would appear more often and would get more hits on you if you weren't leveled up
i think paths make death less likely to spawn? i remember something like that from an older version, but i would have assumed they did nothing if i hadn't seen something like that in an earlier version
i assume the idea is that the player has to manage their health with herbs so they can attack enemies to get experience, while keeping death away with paths, while keeping their lantern from going low, while keeping a spirit so they can reroll a difficult situation
the problem, in my limited experience, is that i managed to do that just by tediously grinding on scrolls and presumably could have continued to if i so wished. i also think that it would be a very flat difficulty curve where you manage your variables in the same way and avoiding touching death ad infinitum
delete didn't seem to work as a cancel button for me, i had to use escape