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I completed ng+ and the descent now, and I really enjoyed it! sorry if I seemed overly negative, I probably wouldn't have written so much on the negative points if I had completed ng+ first, the range and power that aether gives you let you fight much more safely and makes the descent extremely doable, and the ascended virtue probably makes it doable with some of the other mantras.

Making ng+ and the descent put more pressure with corruption and tying its progress to how well you completed fights was a really cool idea, a great way to incentivize exploring combat more and playing quickly, like a speedrun mode but that gives more direct feedback to how well you're doing and a short term goal of lowering corruption.

thank you for making such an interesting game!

This is a really good game! The combat system is fairly simple, different combat styles (mantras) differ in range, timing, and damage, but it works well and being able to combine a perk of a style with the secondary slot adds a bit of nuance to what you choose. Enemy variety though I think is what makes the game interesting and varied in its whole length, enemies are really well differentiated and they combine to create cool and unique encounters.

The combat mantras before thanatos do kinda feel unviable for the harder parts of the game, in particular the Descent, which actually I'm not sure was intended to be completable in a normal new game? There are a few issues in the game which don't become noticeable until you reach the most difficult encounters.

There's a big issue with visibility because some details can cover enemies, and you can't see their attack cues, and there's no good way to move them away, specially given the tight time constraint of the descent. Even worse is that in crowded situations enemies can obscure each other, which is not something that would crop up often in the normal game, but in the descent happens a few times, and it's all the more frustrating given that there you're pushed to play aggressively. Some combinations that appear, like the harbinger with small enemies, the harbinger can completely block other enemies from view. Also enemies attacking from offscreen is quite annoying, close to unfair given that projectiles are mostly fast, and the thing of moving the screen towards the enemy that shot the projectile that hit you wasn't a good idea, because it obscures the most important threats around you and disorients you.

Also enemies can attack you instantly when they teleport next to you, which can be a bit unfair. They can also attack instantly when you use a rewind, and attacks from before remain after a rewind, so you can get hit instantly upon rewinding, it kinda seems like enemies should wait after teleport or rewind, and previous attacks be wiped off.

Another thing that sticks out mostly in crowded combat is the soft lock on, which I think is the worst issue of the combat in this game, because it takes a lot of control away from you, and is sometimes finicky and targets unintuitive targets. It can cause things like stop you from capitalizing on a break or parry because suddenly the lock on decided to target another enemy, it really feels awful.

Some attacks seem to respond inconsistently to dodging them, you dodge right through the attack, but there's no slight slowdown in response to dodging, or big slowdown if you have the virtue that does that, and if the enemy does two consecutive attacks quickly, it catches you with the followup during your dodge recovery. It feels a bit buggy.

Something that I'm pretty sure is a bug is that the prototype enemy, that red kid that teleports, when you break them, they become completely intangible to your attacks. That same enemy, and the other kid enemy that appears in the descent, kinda seems to attack unreactably fast? I'm pretty sure I'm not just old and slow, because even pressing space anticipating the attack I've gotten hit, maybe something with input lag? I'm playing on speed 1.1 and didn't try slower, not sure it's related to that anyway, but if speeding up the game makes it not work very well maybe the option shouldn't be there?

Those fast attacks wouldn't be a problem, they just make you play conservatively, but that's not something you can do in the descent, and coupled with the ocasional visibility problem, makes fighting fast unreliable, so overall the descent on new game, specially the later parts with lots of fast kid enemies and lots of bosses, feel like gambling, sometimes you get lucky and break them enough to kill fast, but you don't have means to kill really fast and reliably in new game. Maybe the tools you get on ng+ make it doable, I'll try that now, but it really doesn't seem made for normal new game.

After I completed I had seen that challenge difficulty should be unlocked, but it didn't appear for me, not sure if it appears later or it was an error.

Anyway, the descent frustrated me a bit because it exacerbated those issues, but the entire rest of the game is really good, when you get used to it the combat can get really fast, and challenges are varied and interesting. It was a really interesting game to play!

yeah, it's fixed now.

I just updated the itch app on windows 7 after not updating for like two years, and as soon as it starts it shows the following error:

"

Certificate Error: net::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID

There was an error with the certificate for img.itch.zone issued by Let's Encrypt Authority X3.

Please check your proxy configuration and try again.

If you ignore this error, the rest of the app might not work correctly.

"

It gives the options of ignoring and continuing, and quitting, but the ignore and continue button does nothing, I can only quit, and can't access the app at all.  I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, which itself was sort of confusing because the itch app doesn't add an uninstall option to the all programs folder, nor does it have an uninstall program in the installation folder, so I just deleted the folder from where it was in AppData\Local, then reinstalled, but it didn't do anything to fix the problem.

Really cool game! your waves are out of sync though, the goal waveform (and the way the waves you have interact) changes as time passes, I was going to add two screenshots I took to show this, but for some reason the add image thing wouldn't load, but if you wait a bit in a level it's easy to see the change. it makes it harder to visualize when your goal is moving. Also, if you plan to keep working on this, it might be a good idea to add the option to see the waves standing still, the movement makes it a bit harder to visualize how they add and multiply, and maybe always have the zero line, to more easily identify when the wave is negative and when it is positive.

It's also cool that this concept allows you to think in two different ways to solve a puzzle, because you can also think about it as the intervals formed to solve it, which is what I did occasionally to bypass the phase desync problem, since the frequencies don't change so you hear the same result, though it's a bit hard, since you can have three waves at octave intervals, and in the result you hear a third, but it's because modulation changes how they relate differently than addition. It might be a good idea to exploit the possibility of solving the puzzles musically, by adding a way to visualize how frequencies interact, or teaching how they interact in terms of intervals, so there's two paths to solve each puzzle, by visualization or by hearing.

Is having a timer a good idea for a puzzle game? It's kind of stressful, specially if the game doesn't tell you what the timer is for, and it made me want to pause the game while I pondered the solution.