Thank you. Several hours straight? That's what I like to hear!
I am indeed a fan of souls, particularly the Tomb of the Giants area from DS1 was a big inspiration.
It's nice to hear the praise though I find it humourous you listed "icons" there, I pretty much took a massive shortcut by having monochrome ability and item icons. All other roguelites use coloured icons.
I've also heard from someone else about the difficulty curve being too difficult at the beginning and poor tutorialing. There might be one or two small changes I can make. If players could tell me the most common way they're dying in the central starting zone then I could definitely apply some nerfs.
I tried something like logarithmic progression briefly but I wasn't a fan. Maybe my algorithm was too extreme but the later levels of a stat seemed useless to level up, which encouraged you to be an all-rounder. From my playtesting, linear progression seems to always remain interesting throughout until the end of the game.
The claim about being "turned into a death machine at the 13th level and game becomes a piece of cake" I take with a grain of salt, the central starting zone will quickly become easily conquerable as is intended, but deeper areas will still give you trouble unless you have very high stats. Did you know? This game has an end! Haha.
There is a potential flaw I recognize with the game, where you could grind the central starting zone until you maxed out ALL your stats. I think this is a possibility in a lot of RPGs, but it's probably fine here as long as the player recognizes that they get way more XP (Power) within deeper areas. Maybe I need to communicate that to the player. I was also thinking of removing the Bell from the starting zone (so you have to go North, South, East or West to find a bell) because it seems too easy there to ring it and run back to level up.
I apologize about the escape menu not pausing. I am not trying to imitate dark souls here. This is a problem with the way I have coded the game and Game Maker Studio. Hopefully this is the last video game ever made that is coded without using delta time. I have since learned to use Godot and use delta there.
A pause menu without delta time is possible but it would probably be buggy and abusable. (I would just manually deactivate enemies)
I'll take a look at the pit issue later. The collision on the pits will probably always feel terrible though lol, there's probably a lot of code I need to write in order to treat the pit not as a wall but as something that you can walk closely overlapping.
I thought that heal bug was already fixed, I'll have to look at it again. Luckily you don't lose anything during that softlock.
I guess I'll try sharing it on lame ass social media for version 1.00. Thanks.