This is a pretty good game for a "first time" player that has some strategic know how. Still decently enjoyable even to veterans that don't mind the easy difficulty. It is very simply to see how everything works and fairly well polished with only a few bugs such as text cutting off on a few powers and some minor glitches. The fact that it is quite easy and short - especially for the rogue-lite genre, will be a bonus even. Most people will probably win over half of their games. The two major issues are that A) it is often the best strategy to make one of your pieces overpowered and mostly ignore the other two, besides as meatshields. B) one of the three pieces, the "mage", is almost always going to be left behind as it almost always has to wait for enemies to come to it, which is slower. more dangerous and later on, can get outranged.
And as a pegged legged thief at that. I was going to say its methodical often reactionary gameplay is closer to Souls, but those games generally had speed with its momentum. Here, you move like a snail, compounded with the sneaking they encourage you to do. Both as a mechanic and that attacking a group is not a good idea. Your most useful attack for a good deal of the game is.... throwing a pot as with that you at least have some control and it deals decent damage compared to your toothpick. Plus you don't have to wait forever for them to attack. I am also not a fan of how it limits your vision. I understand its very inline with the sneaking, but its just not good being surprised by things right next to you. I've ran into traps when moving forward. And not like hidden traps, but things that are bigger than my avatar on screen when they are revealed. You definitely can get used to the controls. but it never feels great and fighting groups remains tricky but something you keep needing to do.
It's one thing to die by a challenging battle or being unprepared. It's another to starve to death when you didn't even realize hunger was a thing. It's not just a tutorial issue. Simply having better UI and tooltips could streamline so much of the initial confusion. This is NOT such a complex game that you should be looking through video guides and outside tutorials, but frankly you should even at the risk of ruining the discover part as the "learning" phase is not so much harsh as just annoying.
TLDR - Strategy-wise like Slay the Spire but requires more meta-knowledge of the game and strategies. Like a lot of roguelikes, a lot of the early part is discovering new things. Then pain. And this game tends to revel in it. For example, it has a lot of sublevels that are literally labeled as ? when you first see them. And may very well kill you if you aren't ready. This isn't just being careful; you'll need to know what you need to do almost immediately. This is actively triggering traps to learn what they are, and in later lives, using them to get easy arrows and spikes. Though you can progress mostly just stumbling through and learning, to actually win without absurd luck, you'll need to have some strats in mind and depending on what RNG items you get, focus on them from pretty early. This is less intuitive and involves more meta-knowledge than Slay the Spire, as rather than just RNG and synergies, two of the base gameplay concepts are re-rolling items and sacrificing some stats to increase another. You can't exactly do either very well without knowing what items you can get, or what your stats should be for the strategy you want. This is not including the fact like a third of the items need to be unlocked through achievements. The bosses especially are not something you are likely to be ready for your first time reaching there, either needing specific strategies or much higher stats than everything else. To illustrate To beat the basic mode I took about 6 hours with ~20 runs. From a glance at howlongtobeat, this is on the short end. To beat the next highest difficulty, I took 2 hours with 3 runs. Note I choose a slow (but more reliable) strat.
