The Pit (Earliest Access)

Hey, it's A_Abel from reddit.

I played the game a little to see how it was but i feel kinda stuck.

The concept seems interesting and i like the randomized maps, but how are you supposed to progress? that's the confusing part to me about this game.

After the intro fight you start the game with 1 health and from then on fighting any battle is pretty much impossible.

Most barrels and chests don't have anything in them, i'm not sure if this is just me being unlucky or this is how the game works, but this feels a little annoying as you can open up a bunch of stuff only to be met with nothing.

I guess the only exception to that rule were the claws, but again, with 1 health i can't really do much in terms of combat so i just kept dying.

I did like that after a couple of deaths some new npcs appeared that could've been useful but i didn't progress far enough to interact with them(the only option was to sacrifice the claws for 25 essence, but that's about it).

I feel like the statues could maybe be made a bit more obvious that they are interactable? either some sparkles or the game encouraging you to spend your essence on some stats after you gained enough essence(kinda like a tutorial).

I also noticed that if i dodge the traps i take no damage despite the game telling me i took 30 or maybe it's just that you can't take damage if you are stuck at 1 health. The burning effect did apply however.

The traps could maybe be made a bit more obvious before you step on them as to not be completely unpredictable. Take this suggestion with a grain of salt as i don't understand how this mechanic is supposed to work.

One other thing that makes the game difficult is the enemies being as fast as the player, it doesn't help that the maps are small so it can be a tad bit difficult to dodge them.

There was this attempt i did after managing to escape from an enemy only for my path to be blocked by a pile of rocks that i couldn't even interact with.

 Now for the combat, right off the bat the couple skills i've seen seem pretty basic, some damage, some healing and some defense buff. 

Technically speaking the only thing that bothered me here is that the heavy blow and the sword skill felt pretty similar in what they do, with heavy blow being weaker than the sword skill and even the basic attack(that applies a DoT effect compared to the 2 skills i mentioned).

What i'm trying to say is that it will be cooler if skills had more interactions with one another(one skill bleeds the enemy, another one does something if enemy has bleed debuff or has been debuffed with bleeding 3 times, etc).

And the last thing is that animation seem to take a while to play and that kinda slows down the combat pace.

Despite me having complained about a lot of stuff, the game could be interesting if things get more polished as you keep working on it.

Good luck with your project!

I played this on the downloadable version yesterday, but Itch didn't let me post a comment for some reason. I will say that the web version is more convenient for trial purposes, but generally I strongly prefer to download games.

First, some bugs that are hopefully easy to fix but that detract a great deal from the gameplay experience:

 When I use mend wounds I get this error that likely resulted from an animation that was loaded using a script call or plugin function but not used in one of the engine's designated animation spots, resulting in it not being added to the list of animations included when [Remove unused assets] check is checked (this isn't exact, but should give a good place to start when trying to fix it)

This happened while out of battle:

Second a piece of specific gameplay feedback

In my gameplay, it seemed like whether or not an encounter is (mostly) safe boils down to one thing: Does the enemy deal more damage than mend wounds recovers? If yes, then I have to hope that I can deal enough damage to kill it before it kills me (which usually doesn't work). If no, then the optimal strategy is to spam mend wounds every turn* (with the important detail that it can crit and miss, which means luck is involved so its certainly not an airtight strategy) until I am at full health, and sometimes the gain of Mend Wounds is like 5 health higher than the damage taken so I sit there spamming the same move for a while which is quite boring

For actual feedback on how I feel about the game concept, I must say that I like it a lot! The idea of a rougelite RPG is very compelling, the dark atmosphere and edgy text feels dark-souls esc, and the randomized loot can make for some cool emergent gameplay with trying different strategies and unique setups based on whatever weapon skills I'm stuck with if those ever become more distinct (maybe they already are pretty different, I didn't see more than a few types of weapons since I didn't play too too much) along with some desperation when I get into tight spots. I will be excited to see if this game goes anywhere!