Recent reviews by bear

This feels awesome to play, complete steal under a CAD dollar

New EA title! Very compact timer-based autobattler rpg.
The gameplay is very simplified, most of the game is exploring a generated map as the days progress until a forced boss encounter.
The game takes essentially no time to get started, which is wonderful for very quick play sessions between other things. This is basically perfect for me, I mostly play online games with longer sessions so it's nice to just pick something up a bit more simple and fast-paced. A run can take about 10-15m at a leisurely pace.
However, with the current state of the game, it's hard to justify putting more than an hour or two in without feeling like you've gone around the block already. There is certainly a depth to the decision-making, but it's mostly lost in the fog of war feeling meaningless due to navigation not having a goal over the timer, and random item generation being very diluted.
There's way more luck involved than skillful thought, losing runs early just ends up feeling like poor odds instead of the actual result of player mistakes, this drains the fun right out of trying to go for another run.
It's a really awful feeling to lose runs to not find items you want to pair to upgrade or matching set items as well. Scaling your damage and upgrading your items across days is done through getting a second copy of the item you want, which is just pure luck between treasure chests and merchants, and then taking those to a golem block. You can reroll merchant pools, but the cost stacks and unless you're actively using gold gain items, you're limited to monsters dropping one gold per kill. There are other buffs for weapons and stats, but they only seem to give up to +1.
I would look into mitigating the effect of RNG as the item pool grows with challenge unlocks, limiting certain clusters of items together per run or something in that thought. Increased chances of specific types of items spawning together, maybe tweaking over time throughout a run depending on which bosses you clear. Most gear is already split into flavor/affix categories. It's not about limiting player choice, but refining the game session experience into something more consistent.
Some items are flat out bad to allow their upgrade path to exist at all, while some don't even need to be upgraded to have a sufficient impact, if you can meet the conditions to make them shine, but the random bosses make it impossible to adjust your build if you build yourself into a niche where you won't survive due to the boss' condition. (ex. Stacking armor then encountering the boss that ignores armor, famously. There are more, this is just the most obvious that came to mind.)
I'd also say bosses seem generally poorly balanced, but it's hard to judge them when the item pool doesn't do any favor in some runs. Most of them are also put in a niche of Health, Speed or Power. Every 'tanky' boss takes forever to go down or just is flat-out impossible on a low damage run. High speed/power attack bosses just drop you if you're not stacking some way to refill health or armor in battle. Stacking health for yourself is generally pointless, as most health items don't have any offensive benefits. Thorn needs to be stacked with some form of self-heal, due to most of them also damaging your health directly. Most armor comes with Frost, which cuts your damage in half for a (generally) limited shield, which is hardly ever worth it and benefits the bosses more than you. Speed is good in low amounts, but you can't pile it on as it doesn't help how much more speed you have over your enemy, as long as you have at least one over them.
Of course, items make some stats more desirable with their own effects. It's not impossibly hard and it's not like you can't assemble a functioning build. It's just unlikely that you'll find enough pairs to push your build to a point where you can actually push through a boss that your build isn't made for. Considering a run can take about 10 minutes, it's kind of a tough sell to have to accept that few runs are actually viable. If some items aren't meant to be viable options, then they probably shouldn't exist, even if they can be upgraded.
It's nearly impossible to die in the overworld, on the flipside. It's not that the roguelike experience can't have weak monsters and strong bosses, but monsters stop being worth anything once you're trying to round out your build if you're not using them to stack gold, making them more inconvenient than interesting. The battle skip toggle is fine, although even on repeat runs I found myself toggling it on even before collecting items. Kind of just a time-saver, although the game is less fun that way IMO.
Otherwise, I wish there were alternate overworld tracks? Sound theme is chiptune, which is nice and fun but it does get repetitive quickly. (YMMV) I did enjoy what I heard, however. More would be wonderful. Sound effects are top tier. No notes. Battle sounds depending on which weapon type/material (wood/iron/vamp etc.) equipped could be interesting.
Visual style is timeless, if a bit overly simple. Most art assets look great, and outside of a few small style mismatches between sprites, I have no real complaints.
I haven't had a chance to try out the multiplayer mode, so I won't comment.
This is overall already a very polished product with a tight visual design and some really cool ideas, I just wish it was more lenient on letting the player correct their build or become more powerful. There are a few things keeping this game from greatness, but I'm sure with careful adjustments and a few more rules for loot, this can be an absolute blast to just pick up and go.
If the goal is to be a more difficult roguelike, this works fine, although being overly reliant on RNG makes it unsatisfying at all levels of play and having few ways to strategize a better situation makes it way less fun as a hard game. Adjusting loot would be the main issue this game has to tackle, in my opinion.
Gem in the rough, I'll definitely be revisiting it.