Thank you for the feedback! I actually just pushed an update that addresses a couple of the issues you mentioned - the starting text is more up to date and the difficulty has been tuned down in general.
It was mostly inspired by games like Slay the Spire and Monster Train, but the timeline structure was actually largely inspired by Dark Souls and Elden Ring - I liked the way those games required you to time you attacks and dodges, and I was curious if I could do a similar thing in a board game! This grew out of the prototype board game I made.