I really wanted to like this game. The studio is from my city, I love roguelikes and pixel art and I've played nearly all in this genre that I could get my hands on, in the last two years. The title of this review is because for the first hour or so of gameplay, things look promising, you get invested, die and go again and so on, just as every good roguelike out there, and I was happy with that. Until I realized that checkpoints were sadistic - not in a soulslike way, but as plain artificial difficulty - I got lucky in one build and was able to get past the dragon *, which was already far away from the last checkpoint, only to realize that there was none in the next floor, and none in the two others following. By then the difficulty had spiked so much that I was alive only by a really fortunate combination of powerups - there is simply no way for a regular player to be able to get that far based on skill alone. Not mentioning that it would be boring because enemies have so much more health and your damage doesn't scale properly. In its current stage this game is bad precisely because it's promising in the beginning. * BTW, good luck if you got pets by then. They will hit the dragon immediately on its way out of the hole, making it go back in before you can land more than one hit and another stupid fire cycle begins again, resulting in half an hour of tedious fight praying to not fall asleep in the middle. The funny detail is that pets are fairly common (one of the PC even starts the game with one) - makes one wonder if anyone even played this before releasing.
