as somebody who has put an embarrassing number of hours in vampire survivors and other bullet heaven games, this hits all the right spots for me! instead of living out a power fantasy of seeing your little guy plow through waves of enemies, this game turns into a desperate struggle of surviving with what little you already have, and thats really cool! i like how this mechanic changes the way with how you interact with enemies. i constantly found myself considering my positioning and how my weapon debuff choice would affect my overall attack coverage, which was very engaging!
also very surprised with the variation of different simians there are in the game. i thought i already saw it all after defeating the supreme simian, but then new ones kept showing up! not sure if i missed any though since the longest survived was around 10:11? but yeah, impressive stuff on having a good variety in the game, and they all look really nice too!
one thing i would have appreciated in the game was if the mass of the enemies in general wasn't the same as the player (or i assume it is?). im not sure if vampire survivors does this (its been a while since i played), but some bullet heaven games either allow the mass of the enemies be pretty low so that players can easily push enemies out of the way or just not have enemy collision be active on the player. especially in a game where you're leveling down and are weaker, if one enemy slightly touches you for a second, they will slow you down due to them pushing against your movement direction, which can quickly result in other enemies to be in a formation where it will be impossible to escape and breakthrough. this happened to me quite often while i was at full health and found myself dead afterwards which could feel frustrating. i think it'd be nice to offer this level of leniency to a game that makes it harder play as time goes on, but if this design intentional then its fine, more power to you!
all in all, this was really fun! had a great strategizing and figuring which weapons i was more comfortable with using and which ones i should level down first. great game!