If you're gonna do pixel art - DON'T make enemies that are a couple pixels big that blend into the background animation. I can't count the number of times I ran around and suddenly took damage because those hopping blobs weren't part of the background. When changing screens, make sure enemies aren't right next to you so that you automatically take damage before being able to do anything - this is fairly fatal with some enemies and generally means permadeath is useless at this point, you can easily die through no fault of your own regardless how much skill you have. The dungeons should have been handcrafted. The first dungeon I entered the boss was three screens away from the entrance - there were locked doors and keys but I didn't even use one. Rougelike and Zelda don't mix unless you can somehow create similarly intricate dungeons with procedural generation. It's fun and there's a lot of potential but the medium and graphics the developers chose to use don't really works as is. I'm not sure if patches can fix any of this either.
