I enjoyed playing this game! Having different effects you can give yourself as you progress by collecting and combining materials seems like an interesting system with a lot of depth. I also like the general pacing of first collecting materials, combining them to make you stronger, and then going to fight when you're ready.
Here's some other feedback if you choose to expand on this game:
- Generally, it took me a bit to figure out what I needed to do. I actually ignored the alchemy component for the first battle (I just went in and fought to see what would happen). I lived, which felt good, but of course it was still a good hint that there was more I needed to during the day since it brought me back. After that I realized what objects I was able to collect, and I went to craft some of them, and I failed my first crafting attempt at the ouroboros. I'm not entirely sure what I did wrong that time, but subsequent crafting in general seemed to go through (I didn't really learn from my mistake).
- I enjoyed the combat for a while, it's fun to 'kite' the enemies around, get them in a big group and start slashing/casting spells. I think at a certain point it started to feel long though, and it didn't really feel like I could really do much to speed up the round. I think not really knowing how long it was/how many enemies I needed to defeat might have made it feel longer. After you use up your mana in a round it also feels like there wasn't really much of a change to how I was playing for a couple minutes. There was also one moment that was really fun where I somehow launched myself off into the air off the terrain with a dash, so more of that could be fun too.
- It wasn't immediately clear to me that things were persistent or that the enemies were progressing. Eventually I figured it was, and this was confirmed when the bigger enemies began to show up. I think it might have been good to know that something was keeping track though beforehand, just because things felt the same when I wake up (outside of the crafting materials spawning differently).
- There seemed to be some minor visual bugs. One of them is that after you upgrade yourself at the ouroboros it seemed like there was some extra text after the effect name (I think it was an underscore and some letters/numbers or something). There was another time it seemed like I had a negative quantity for one of my ingredients when I went to the ouroboros. Also, I had a white box in the bottom left of my screen instead of an element for some reason at some point.
Overall, great job! Lots of ideas here--it's very cool!