Hello,
At the dev's request, I streamed this game and reviewed it. Overall, I felt the game was rather casual, but that isn't necessarily a knock against it as it seems quite confident in it's casual design, which I think is an admirable quality for an indie dev to be able to recognize that and make it happen.
The game's intro is quite long, which is rather unfortunate due to the format of my streams limiting games to just 45 minutes, resulting in most of my game time being relegated to dialogue, rather than experiencing what the game has to offer. However, the game doesn't necessarily seem to fall into a common pitfall I see with a lot of indie games, and that is having a complex world lore they have built but then chose to not give their player any explanation on the world and instead they just hope their player will figure it out themselves. I was glad to see that the story and world seems easy to follow. I don't know if I would necessarily say it's well written as often the dialogue doesn't feel like it's coming from a medieval world, but instead just feels like it's 2 high school girls gossiping in the hall, however, I can say that it's ability to introduce the player into the world of the Oni Sellsword is approachable.
The one unfortunate thing about this game, however, is it's frequency to tutorialize some of the absolute basic info (basic movement controls and interact keys) but the game never takes any time to tutorialize deeper and arguably more important functions of the game, such as the combat. Fortunately, the difficulty of the game - I suppose - doesn't necessitate a deep tutorial. You can easily recover most of your health any turn, with no MP requirements to do so. In addition, chests not only often contain new gear to equip but also contain 2 or more usable items alongside the gear, quickly filling your inventory with consumables to keep your health up. And lastly, nearly every combat encounter is very easy to avoid. Enemies are not random encounters but instead wander the map and they do not pursue the player. Combat is only activated if you bump into the walking encounter sprites. Don't take this as an excuse for the lacking tutorial, as I believe regardless of my opinion on the low difficulty of the combat, there should still be a tutorial.
I think something that would greatly benefit this game would be to add customizeable difficulty to the game. Many AAA games have begun moving this direction by allowing player's to adjust a slew of sliders to cater the difficulty of the game in all aspects (puzzle, story, and combat) to the way the player prefers to play. At the least an easy, medium, hard slider would go a long way in improving the game, but having individual sliders for different aspects of the game would make this game standout amongst the thousands of other indie games.
If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.
https://youtu.be/G0W9fMrcVt8
