Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 7! My name's Hythrain and I'm one of the hosts and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
So I'm normally into pixelated deckbuilders but the difficulty of this one, combined with a variety of bugs, made this a... well, a not fun experience that I made even less fun by subjecting myself to Flatline hot sauce.
Before I get into what I feel makes this hard mechanically, let's cover the bugs.
First, if the player spends all of their cards but doesn't "end" their turn, the computer will just go automatically and things will reset. If there's going to be a function for the computer to get their turn once the player spends all of their cards, that UI should be pulled down.
Speaking of, several times I started fights where the enemy not only got to go first but it'd do TWO attacks, all while YOUR UI is up for your time. This particular bug made things incredibly difficult because you couldn't, say, speed through your actions to prevent its second turn. No, it still got these two free turns. I suspect this is connected to the previous bug.
Thirdly, if you die with a debuff on you and restart your game (such as the fire damage debuff from the ghosts), it'll still be on you.
Ok, now for the mechanics.
So the game's design is that you spend HP to play your cards, giving everything a risk vs. reward basis. However, it THEN combines this with enemies have a ton of health and taking several turns to beat. Enemies, by the way, that don't have costs to their cards like the player does. A single fight can see you lose half of your HP. You usually level up twice after your first fight, but then you won't level up again and recover your HP for at least 4 more fights. However, by the fourth fight you're so beaten down that you likely won't survive it. Also, due to things like how armor stays throughout the battle and enemies are constantly doing damage to you, there's never incentive to NOT play your armor cards nor most of your attacks.
Therefore I'd like to make the following suggestions:
1. Reduce the health of enemies. Instead of the starting enemies being 50-60, make them around 10-20. This makes each individual fight far less draining but will still whittle you away. If you don't want to do this, then make enemies have health costs to their cards.
2. Make armor not last more than a turn. That way, if a monster builds up a lot of defenses in one turn, it can be a player's choice to NOT attack to preserve their health.
3. Subject enemies to their own decks and hands which the player can see. That way, you can create situations where a monster may have little or a lot of attack cards, making the use of armor more strategic when also including the last idea.
4. Have some cards NOT have HP costs. Rage giving cards that do no damage are perfect for this. You may have some further into the game like this, but get some in that starting deck.