There's A LOT of randomness in this game. Not just the typical games of chance like blackjack and coin flips, but nearly every game has a feeling of the house being stacked against you with arbitrary gotchas.
This almost hostile randomness is turned up to 11 with the secrets in this game. If I had not sought out the walkthru on the discord channel, there's no way I would have figured out any of the secrets. This is firstly because triggering some of the pieces to unlock the secrets is gated behind multiple layers of random chance. But then what's most egrigous is that there's next to no feedback that the interactables for the secrets are indeed interactable. No sounds, no sprite changes, nothing. I have no idea how these secrets are intended to be discovered beyond random chance.
The reliance on randomness and generally high skill floor of much of the minigames indicates that save scumming is expected. It's actively disincentivized by the fact that saving costs height after game 7. Which is fine, thoughtful choices and all that. But what's frustrating is that there is no load save function in any of the menus. I have to close the game entirely to reload a save. Needlessly frustrating.
Since the game relies so heavily on directional input for many of it's games (diagonal movement is faster and can't reliably be done by mouse input; qte sequences require directional input), it'd be a huge accessibility impovement to allow WASD for directional movement. I don't enjoy switching my right hand back and forth from mouse and keyboard.
An option for battle animation speed would be really appreciated since Determination is practically necessary to win most fights and it's animation is obnoxiously long.
The story and character design is quite well done. The consistency of the AI generated assets is impressive.