Spellmasons

I really want to like this game, but for now I'm gonna leave it and wait for future updates. There's a healthy collection of good ideas here, but it also feels like there are a lot of things that are far too biased against the player for no clear reason. 1: Most enemies are pretty aggressively overtuned. There are so many ranged threats that have huge sightlines and ignore cover that any tactical consideration for positioning can be thrown out the window. Enemies can two-shot you on the first level and traverse distances multiple times greater than you can in one move. The numbers are totally nonsensical and the game doesn't make it easy to try to catch up. 2: Mana cost increases suck in their current state. Recasting the same spell several times in a turn will increase the cost of the spell, but that increase persists after and will slowly ramp back down to normal after several turns. On paper this system should keep the player dancing between a variety of spell options, but in practice it near-exclusively punishes you unfairly for relying on the few damage tools the game provides in the cases where you get especially bad spell RNG. I feel like it's pretty unfair to try to strongarm players into mixing and matching a large variety of spells when the game can very easily deprive you of that variety on a whim. 3: Spells, combinations, and spell interactions can feel frustratingly limited in some cases. Targeting spells are an incredibly important element of combinations, yet several spells either work in really wonky and unintuitive ways with them or just outright don't work at all. Enemy hitboxes sometimes feel tiny and won't connect with a spell that obviously visually overlaps with their sprite. Some descriptions outright lie about what their respective spell actually does, leading to experimentation being a very confusing experience of wondering whether what I'm encountering is a bug or not. 4: Passive perks should have their own dedicated point system separate from stat points. The unified system of points to allocate to stats and passives is EASILY this game's biggest pain point in my eyes. I shouldn't have to starve myself of stats for the sake of making my build actually function. I shouldn't feel like dedicating points to health is a "waste" when I could just be pumping the pathetic +5 mana stat or gambling for mana gain/upkeep options for more combo potential. SP as it is right now leaves very little realistic freedom when it comes to assembling something that can actually win a run. 5: You cannot access sandbox mode without first beating the game. This type of thing is pretty absurd for a game that has a lot of unclear and obtuse spell interactions and lackluster external documentation. Testing new things in a run will almost always result in the run dying on the spot, which as the only pre-win testing option isn't a fair expectation for the sake of experimentation when runs are so difficult to get off the ground to begin with.