Thank you so much for this insightful review! Consistency and clarity in combat and stealth rules is definitely something we want to hammer out in the future, and your points about stagger rules and AP management are especially noted.
Right now the future intent is to make the prisoner strong in small encounters but weak vs large groups to create a combat system where positioning and choosing whether to act aggressive or not is key to being successful. This means more prisoner abilities that focus on traversal and disruption as opposed to crowd control AOE abilities that are more suitable for monster gameplay; the final concept being that you spend prisoner form playing as a guerilla fighter, building up strength to transform into monster form where you can finally confront armies of enemies face-to-face. We have a bunch of ideas for future abilities to add to the game so hopefully these will address some concerns about combat.
Stealth is still very much a work in progress. A lot of the hicupps we run into right now are from AI and level navigation in general, a goal for us moving forward is to make enemy behavior slightly more predictable in regards to how they react to certain events. Your suggestions of better stealth visualization and indicators for alarmed guards is great.
Overall a very detailed and informed review, and we greatly appreciate it! I would love if you stuck around and provided us with feedback on future iterations of our game, it would help us out tremendously. Thanks!