Nice game.
I have beaten the demo twice now, and I do not get how pressing the bandit works. At the default state, do you just press 'space', and wait? Can you affect the outcome? Maybe time it at the start and then wait? Outside of extra turn tokens or the 'Rusty Cog' artifact, is it only the initial timing that matters, and otherwise you just have to wait for the result? I never tried timing it, until I got the 'Rusty Cog' artifact, and by then all the items I had were one color. Could the time spent waiting for the result be decreased, to one second? But one artifact/item had as an effect "1 second lane". Also, having to wait that long for the spin to complete is annoying and time-consuming. Maybe it is just me that is the issue here for not getting it, but if other players also do not understand, making it clear (and less time-consuming?) how the spinner works would be good. At the start I was deeply in doubt about what kind of game it is - is it a action and reflex skill game, where I have to time things? And I kept being confused for quite a while. But then I realized that it is a deck building game. The Steam description makes that clear, but I stupidly just skipped reading any text. I enjoyed it a lot more once I just skipped any actions and reflexes, but that almost turned each battle into an autobattle, and took a lot of time. I discovered at some point in the settings that you can speed up battles, which helped. I am still confused on this point, for some of the battles give the impression that the player can have agency in the battle, but apart from the initial timing when spinning each turn (and Rusty Cog and Extra Turn tokens), is there any agency, or is it almost autobattle? Even if there is no agency, showing the battles is good for letting the player understand what is going on and what each enemy does and their strengths and weaknesses.
Mini-games were OK, I disliked the Space Invaders mini-game, it is normally a skill game, but can it even be beaten without a lot of luck? The other mini-games I encountered were good enough. However, at some point, I skipped any and all mini-games.
For the deck building, I was in doubt about what to get. I quickly realized that a mono-color deck is really powerful, since it activates many more symbols per turn on average. In particular once I saw that shops offered the ability to remove a symbol. I first tried with a blue deck, but not getting full health between rounds meant that you could get worn down. Red symbols can combine with power and attacks, but they have the major drawback that they can cause retaliation damage. I then went with a green deck due to both poison, regeneration, health gain, maximum health gain, life steal. And after a few tries, that turned out ridiculously powerful. Removing any and all non-green symbols using shops, never picking up non-green symbols no matter how good they were. Items vary greatly in their power, and some are very powerful and also fairly cheap. Shops are therefore priority targets.
Poison is really powerful, since you do not risk getting massive amounts of retaliation damage, and it keeps stacking up on the enemy without going away. Early on, it is also very helpful, since before you get a mono-color deck, you can go several turns without dealing damage. Poison also works even when the enemy has filled your deck with bad symbols (a neat concept).
After I won once, I kept restarting using the menu until I got a start with the Dart symbol, because I wanted a green build again.
I almost did not have to care about which enemy I went up against, in particular once getting powerful and getting to the second and third floor. I did lose one run to one enemy when I did not pay attention, the ghost one that deals 20x3 damage, but I won that easily on later runs after paying attention and using up all the Extra Turn tokens. I always avoided the copy cat enemy, and I do not know what that one is like.
The game is full of atmosphere.