Unfortunately it's a let down..
Amazing game in more perspectives than not but quite unpolished in balancing and progression that it completely ruins the fun out of the game. So blatantly that it makes you question if they played their game in this version before deciding on full release?
It's more difficult to lose in default difficulty and because it's Auto Battler game you are just sitting and watching unamused by the lack of challenge, what's worse is it takes several runs for you to face with this reality and see the indifference of your actions and seeing that it wasn't you finding that great combination that made you super strong, feels quite close to the narcissistic injury Gabe is talking about..
To give more examples, you are often given choices out of three to select a relic and majority of the time all three of them are amazing and it really isn't important which one you are selecting for the outcome of the game. To give them a credit, this is less of a case for selecting which characters to give food or equipped items to but also you can just click random buttons and win the default difficulty it more so matters for the rest.
All this might have raise the question of, then why not play the highest difficulty? That's where my annoyance to progression comes from. To use any character in the next difficulty you need to beat the game with it in the current one, but obviously you wouldn't wanna play with same 5 characters you've just used and you want to experience the other characters, which forces you to play in a same unchallenging difficulty to see more the game offers. After experiencing most of the characters I tried playing the higher difficulty, same situation, it wasn't challenging, and same situation again, I can't go to highest difficulty because characters aren't unlocked in that and I obviously don't wanna play again with the same composition, same characters and so on.. Game doesn't even offer wrong options to you, everything synergizes amazingly well, all character upgrades are amazing, there's no wrong buttons to click.
If you played Brotato you know game is all about rerolling your options and finding the sacrifice you can make and trying to build the synergy you can throughout the run based on expansive options (that's literally what this genre is all about) but in this game it's as if all options you are being offered are always perfect and adjusted for your character with no downsides and there's actually so little option that you usually get almost all of them until the end of the run anyways.
Lastly you always get into a state in which you had a big power spike and you are much stronger than all the challenge options you are being offered, and it doesn't really give you anything to take more risk and keep the game in flow state. It's not like they don't know about game design, they had several implementation that tried to address this like putting investments and selecting from two different fights with more difficult one with slightly bigger payout but.. it just feels like they made these as a proof of concept and vertical slice to show how they could address it and then they forget about making it actually balanced and polished part of the game, as is you don't need to think, just click on the higher risk.
Don't get me wrong, one number guy in the company could have read these in gameplay stats and solve many of these issues in couple of days, what frustrates me is for it to get to full release without that guy.
