itch.io

Yes the curse pause thing would be really nice :-) in the same way, it would be cool to have a "skill reveal" screen when picking a skill affected by the memory loss curse. (there is no need to penalize the player twice for that either)

I guess the "early game" definition is indeed subjective. I usually die soon after the cockatrice spawn in my recent attempts. (The definition of "soon" is quite subjective too though :-p)

The flood chance nerf did make it slightly better :-)

The game already became much more difficult because of the locked tiles, run-killer enemies, curses, etc... but I figured the main "issue" is that since you added even more skills such as the bows, ESP, etc... that are interesting on the long run but not nearly as necessary the probability to get vital skills was lowered a lot and the RNG part became much more apparent and frustrating. In short, I feel like it is important to balance that back to make the game more fair and appealing again. I honestly don't know what the best solution would be, but I have a few ideas that could help :

- Have more choices when picking skills

- Increase the probability to get vital skills

- Being able to reroll skills once every level by default (just like the gambler's skill)

- Having some other skill by default (a teleport skill or inner demon for example)

- Leveling up faster in the beginning

- introduce the locked tiles with a curse instead of by default (will help a little with the board RNG instead of the skill RNG)

- introduce one of the colors with a curse (same principle, improve the match chance in the beginning to make early game more forgiving)

...

Have a nice day :-D