The art style is absolutely lovely. So lively looking, so many colors. The vibrance is somewhere in the middle - not too dull, not too vibrant. Has that nice middle ground, at least for me personally.

In settings, I wanted to lower the audio somewhat. Music's kind of dominating. The menu is a little bit finicky. Where do I even need to click in order for it to accept my input properly? I can't really drag the sliders well at the beginning - it's more friendly towards clicking instead. A little bit finicky, but that's alright.

The options for disabling golden numbers and healing numbers in case it gets too visually draining - that's nice. Wish more games had that kind of feature so you can customize it to your liking.

That's a lot of characters available from the get-go. There's different kinds of melee weapons, a pistol ranged character, different kinds of crossbows - I can see three crossbows right here. I wonder if there's gonna be enough distinction between them to warrant the extra class inclusion. That could be a problem with so many characters where some of them just start feeling a little bit too samey with one another. Good luck making them feel somewhat unique with so many classes included.

Nice that you get some explanations around the characters to have a better idea what they are about. I wonder if I'm gonna get an explanation of what the stats do, or if that's left for me to intuit myself by playing.

Compass loading screen there. So WASD to move around, arrow keys for aiming purposes I guess, but why do that when you could do with the mouse? Oh, it detects my controller immediately from the get-go - more of a controller type game here.

On the stat screen, you get the explanations - attack speed, health, patience decreases the cooldowns of skills and relics, crit chance. Good iconography. What's the energy symbol though? Lightning bolt for attack speed - I'm trying to figure out how those two logically fit together. Fast as lightning maybe? The icons on the bottom side are especially nice.

I'm not getting a lot of story tidbits so far. The character is almost a little bit too positive - "we might be on the brink of extinction but hey, I'm gonna be very happy to risk my life."

In the tutorial, what am I cycling through? I don't understand that function. Also, I'm actually forced to read through all this dialogue - I can't skip ahead. Unless I hover around with the mouse - if I hover over nothing, then I'm just locked there. My controls are all disabled - the d-pad and thumbsticks. I can at least accept with nothing selected.

A lot of musical variation already in just this one screen. I like the little wall fade to black that darkens the screen when you're hovering around the icons on the bottom. Does that pause the game as well if you do that mid-combat?

The dash is screaming for some sound effects to be added.

After Layer - looks like it might be quite the grinding game with so many characters that you can level up. If the gameplay is fun, then that's a lot of fun content to go through.

If I remove the controller, is it gonna default to keyboard indicators on the text box? It doesn't change on the text box immediately, but it does on the bottom of the screen. So keep in mind the player randomly disconnecting different hardware.

The skill system seems a lot more intricate than Slay the Spire from first glance. The level up sound effect is nice - choose it up, feels more exciting to level up and get offered new stuff. Skip and re-roll are self-explanatory. Banish can only be used on relics and they won't appear in the perk screens anymore - if you banish something, they get out of the pool.

I feel like the tutorial text went away a little bit too fast before I even read what it said. Something about skill box on the bottom.

I'm really enjoying the fact that the game doesn't seem to be hiding extra information. Stat-wise, you see exactly what is being changed and by how much. I've run into too many games that hide their own information in an obnoxious way where you almost need to open up a wiki to even understand what's being changed.

For the drill ability - holy moly, that's a big drill! Little mini boss encounter, getting locked in. It looks very powerful visually, but damage-wise it seems a little bit lower than the size of the thing indicates. It's got a decent enough AoE though.

On the level up screen, I'm not sure what I would want to skip as of now. I guess that's more for later when you don't wanna ruin your build with the given options.

The skills and relics description viewer shows damage type, style, scale, damage multiplier - nice. And you can also see your auto-attack information. The action music is nice - gets my heart rate going up.

Are there iframes? Nope, not as of yet. I'm guessing that's probably an upgrade you get later. For the "remove all iframes, increase max health" upgrade - as far as I'm aware, I don't have any iframes to begin with, so I don't lose anything by taking this.

For the dilapidated statue - "You have obtained a gift from the goddess" - okay, what is the gift? Not entirely sure what that activates. I don't know what those statues do.

For upgrade comparisons, it would be nice to see what the actual increase is, since I doubt I am boosting my health by a flat 38% amount each time.

The structure with the button - I pressed it and lost my gold, going into the minuses. I can even go into the minuses if I gamble it away. The chest opening sequence is very Vampire Survivors inspired. But it abruptly ended - just suddenly stopped. Didn't feel gradual.

So many upgrades in a short amount of time - this game is very high-paced in that regard. I barely walked five feet ahead and already got another level up.

I almost want a mini-map, a smaller one, to be able to see where these points of interest are.

For the gambling buttons - I keep losing my gold by interacting with them. Maybe I shouldn't click them anymore. Gambling has not really been paying off so far.

There's some story to be explored here about the goddess's powers, her limits, her backstory. This is one of those demos that you can play over and over again since it's got a very good chunk of content. Very well done in that regard - seems very polished and engaging. Almost too engaging with how fast you get bombarded by upgrades in early levels.

The music changing to indicate different NPC personalities is a nice touch. There's an equipment system that stays with you between runs so you can make some builds based on items you have from the beginning. Characters do not share inventory - that's what the storage box is for.

Lots of space around the hub to build something later on with unlocks. This place is gonna look very crowded eventually. I'm guessing all the characters are eventually gonna be sitting around the campfire once you have unlocked them - that's a sight to behold. The devs got their hands full with a lot of dialogue for all of them.

Different kinds of maps - The Dark Void being one of them, Mount of the Abyss. After the first run, I just started clicking on it expecting it to do something. Maybe if I double-clicked it, it would jump into it, or highlight the select button since clearly that's the level I want. No, that's fine - better to click one of the other buttons to lock in the level.

The map is almost so small that you end up getting past teleporter to teleporter by just walking. Feels like there's almost too many teleporters around, especially between certain ones where you end up almost saving time if you don't teleport.

The characters have distinct enough personalities as well, that's nice. Just such a solid base here for the demo already. One thing I'm slightly worried about is that maybe the developers have bitten off a little bit too much to chew with so many characters already being teased.

For the merchant, I would kind of prefer if you just showed me the information without me clicking on items - just change the text when hovering over an item automatically, as it usually is with games, just to get rid of unnecessary button presses.

How do I get out of this menu? Exit button doesn't do anything. If I click escape, that doesn't do anything either. Backspace? Can I exit on the keyboard with a button press? I quickly scanned through some keys but didn't get any response. I guess I'll just click X.

This could be either make it or break it for certain players. The ones that enjoy more story in games are gonna absolutely love this more character-focused, text-heavier approach, while others are gonna bounce off and just want to jump in and play without extra distractions.

This kind of gameplay is quite addicting on its own. It doesn't take too long before it's already getting somewhat crazy with the amount of enemies you're weaving in and out of.

Lesson learned - don't gamble all of your money away at those dice statues.

For equipping items, I don't see why you would not want to open up the chest, so having to press A feels unnecessary.

One small nitpicky detail - on my character portrait on the left side, I get my smiling friendly archer girl, and then I'm looking at my character and there's just this very angry killer walking around willing to murder every single person. Their facial expressions do not match at all.

I wonder how many abilities overlap between the same class characters - since there's multiple archers, how different are the abilities between them?

I'm struggling to put this down. Very addictive.