Wrath of the Goose King is overall a very solid roguelike, I'd say it's worth at least a couple playthroughs. Definitely worthy of more attention than it's gotten at the time of this review, "profile features limited" is sad to see on a game with fundamentals this solid. Is it the art style? I know it's a bit 2000's flash game, but it still sort of works with the tone of the story, and it's far from the most important thing to get right in this genre.

The animations/text speed can be a bit slow on the default settings, but these are very customizable and the fastest options are virtually instant. Cutscenes auto-skip after the first time you see them, with an option to reset your story progress to replay them all. The writing is pretty decent, vaguely humorous but nothing that will really stick with you. That's perfectly fine for a roguelike though.

The main gameplay loop is balanced around a risk/reward system, where you pick one of 3 encounters per node with the enemy layout and type of reward displayed in advance, and if you win you can either move on or stick around to fight the rest, but each successive fight gives the remaining enemies higher stat bonuses. It's an interesting approach and I think this game makes it work pretty well. The only real flaw is that there's (currently) no reroll feature to help offset poor RNG in either the reward offerings or the reward you're actually given, but it's quite rare for this to break a run - usually when I lose it's because I just got too greedy, and my first successful run also had the most mediocre RNG I've seen so far in this game.

Characters. spells, and relics are varied and interesting, as they should be. A lot of weapons/armor give minor boring stat boosts at lower rarities but higher rarity variants can actually be quite powerful. Jewelry is a bit mixed, some of it is pretty good but most of it has too steep of drawbacks to really be worth using despite the benefits.

Money is less impactful than you might think, it's mostly for shoring up particularly poor RNG since shops have limited stock, only stock 2 of any type of gear at a time, and only sell the lowest rarity of gear. The spell store has a wider selection but also uses a much rarer currency for everything but its potions. The game is definitely balanced around this system though and I never felt screwed over by shop RNG.

There's a little bit of roguelite in the game in that you can buy boosters that carry over between runs. Each character can only equip two of them though, and you can only buy each booster once, so you'll still have to make choices and have a fairly strict cap on how much power you can get in this way.

Once you've beaten the game the first time you unlock several challenge modes for bonus endings, plus another alternate challenge mode that turns one of your starting character's booster slots into dead weight, locks both of their booster slots for the whole run, and replaces the boss fights with entirely new high difficulty ones. So there's plenty of replay value to be had here.

The dev continues to update this game despite the tragically low attention it's gotten, and has confirmed that a jewelry rework and a reroll feature are both planned for future updates. I hope that they can receive the success and attention they deserve, if not with this game then with future projects.