Nice title art and opening scene, I like the custom show picture event sequencing. It's a simple beginning that I can appreciate. Very interesting gameplay, you get to decide how to interact based on your gameplay preferences. If you like combat you can choose to go in guns blazing, however if you want to adventure through a map and maybe engage in dialog, you can go that route.
The idea of dying over and over but losing nothing is better than dying over and over and having to load the game, but still, dying over and over isn't a ton of fun. I do like the gameplay but it seems like every story fight that I encounter I just immediately die.
Pretty much every single random world event that I get turns out negative. -50% exp until your next rest being the worst. I seem to get this every time, usually three steps from the campsite. Then shortly after, I get the trap sprung which starts the bleeding that never stops until you die, along with some damage. This game is so trolly. Nearly every random event is a negative one. Like I totally get that there has to be some negative world events, but why do 80-90% of the events have to be negative?
The "Mighty Mace" skill is bullshit. This NPC straight up stun locked the party for like 15 rounds. Reduce the chance of it landing the stun?
Money is too hard to come by. I encounter the wandering merchant but he won't buy anything and I can never even afford a single item.
The "Don't forget to learn new abilities with your AP" reminders are good. I actually forgot about the system, (even though I didn't have enough AP to learn anything new) it was good to remember it's there.
The dark slime dealt 11,355 damage of my 375 max hp. There's something wrong here...
The random encounters seem alright with a few exceptions. The Gas Cloud move is an AOE Poison and Blind. It just seems unfair, especially since these debuffs persist after combat... I would have all the debuffs with only a few exceptions be removed at the end of combat.
All the healing items are just too weak. They don't give enough. 15% is mighty stingy. In fact the game is stingy in many departments. It's too oppressive for a game jam game.
Every now and then an enemy will just deal like thousands of damage. I'm not sure if this is a super critical strike or what causes it, but there's some odd math happening every now and then. Max hps are in the 300-500s and some hits are dealing 5-digits in damage.
I couldn't get too far in my first hour everything just kept beating me down. I did like it when I got another party member as that helped with the difficulty level quite a bit. Maybe in a future version you can start the player with a party of three or four. I feel like it would improve the gameplay.
Overall, I appreciate what you've tried to do with this project, it was very unique and it kind of reminds me of a D&D adventure on some level. I do like this style of game, but this one needs some more attention. You've done a good job of putting out a project in a short period of time so congratulations. I look forward to your next game, best of luck in the future! :)