Hi! Thanks for your feedback!
The inspirations were clear it seems, :D! We thought on Magicka and as a player of Dota 2, Invoker inmediately came to mind! Another source of inspiration was "Papers, please!" (hence the name).
Yep, text can be a bit hard to read on the curses diary, maybe some more contrast between background and text could have helped. Finally for the keyboard shortcuts, I vouched for giving both control schemes, but the team decided on a single one to get kind of a sense of urgency, which ultimately failed but for other reasons. More players feel that the game is really lenient with how much time you get for aiding villagers. Time to cure each gets reduced every 2 rounds and first and second level serve kind of as a tutorial with a reaaaaaaaaaally forgiving timeout counter (around 40s or something like that).
Will add the keyboard shortcuts to the list of things to consider if we give the game a second spin, :D!
Thanks again for your thoughtful review and for checking out our game, <3!!
Cheers!