At the start the game is honestly good, it's fair with letting you grind to lessen the debuffs or sometimes even invert them to be positive, but the further you get into the game it gets way too brutal, I only got through haigure and mummification by sheer luck and standing still until the enemies all looked away in perfect sync.
My breaking point was the addiction level. It has way too many forced encounters which raises your addiction stat very quickly. Addiction boosts your stats but only if you have alcohol and nicotine stats and then even if do, they start replacing your attacks with useless garbage that does no damage and instead makes decreases the stats causing withdrawal.
The boss has way too much health (over 900) and the ability to reset your alcohol and nicotine stats causing you massive stat losses from withdrawal and you can do a fixed 40 damage at best while all of your character get 2 shot, there are only three items in the level which prevents addiction stat from increasing but they also lower your SDF and SAT by two levels. And two of the items are inside the boss room making them practically useless unless you feel like grinding you addiction stat down which feels like it takes literal hours.
You can't even skip to the boss room after getting there once like in the early levels forcing you to fight through ATLEAST three mandatory fight if you have perfect timing and A LOT of patience. And you will most likely be extremely debuffed in the fights making it very likely for you to lose characters before the boss fight.
Tldr; Difficulty creep is bullshit
Makes you think if the dev ever bothered to test the levels