Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• This is fantastic. It's served really well by the constrained space and scope. Love it.
• fun variety of spells kept me interested in crafting them each run through. Manages to capture the enjoyable puzzle aspect of top down dungeon crawlers in a small succinct package. Having the ingredient be randomized each run leads to some interesting decision making where maybe you hold out and take for damage for a better spell later or you make a early weak spell to save health and clear floors. The decision between just leaving and staying for materials is really compelling although I will say once you get a full spell roster the question sort of fades away, its a bit like a deck building game in that aspect. I finished the game with 2 teleports and 2 flash's and just flash banged the monsters and left even then it was fun to solve each room. I could imagine a wide variety of different ways to beat the game. I think the only thing i would change is having some way of distinguishing between multiple of the same creature and some way of telling what a creature is before you've wasted a fireball on a magma golem. Like a game of solitaire its nothing flashy but a fun little brain teaser you can come back to.
• I like the aesthetics a lot-- the colors are nice, the font is clear, and the UI is simple. It's easy to jump into but does still have some additional rules that are not immediately obvious that you have to learn from subsequent runs. I am also a fan of roguelikes that take place on a small board. The game distills what makes roguelikes interesting and replayable and presents only those things without excess. To me, those elements are different monsters in a random grouping, different abilities to handle them, and different dungeon layouts to work in. The monsters having elemental affinities make them just interesting enough, instead of just having different amount s of health. Perhaps the elemental situation could have been expanded slightly to make them a little more different, or rare monsters could have some other ability, but it works the way it is. Since you have perfect information, each time you start a level you have to come up with a plan and then try to enact it, and there are interesting decisions around manipulating monsters to block paths or repositioning yourself to cover your back. Some of the abilities are pretty interesting, like ghost form and befriend. The game is well balanced in that it is not easy, but still winnable with a reasonable amount of effort. The spell creation process adds some nice world-building in a simple way and reinforces the aesthetic. I'm sure that there is some optimal build if you write down the recipes and come up with some OP combo, but I enjoyed just going with the flow and half-remembering recipes. It may be a coincidence, but I had a run where I polymorphed monsters into themselves over and over until I just re-wrote those spells. I would also think that monsters would get hit when they walk into a conjured flame, but I guess that that is not how the turns are resolved. I have very little criticism honestly, I enjoyed this one quite a bit.