u/ResponsibilityIcy927

I played the game for about 100 hours and really love it. I beat the jungle on desolate after 7 or 8 tries. The game is very fun in it's current state, and I fully expect it will be completely amazing if the devs continue on their current trajectory.

Good things:

-The time limit. The feeling of pressure from the time limit is amazing. Being constantly pushed to deeper and more dangerous areas is thrilling and exhilarating.

-The challenge: I like the difficulty. I'm normally not even a fan of rouge likes, but it feels good in this game.

-The traps: They reward caution and game knowledge, and punish recklessness.

-The crafting and medical system: These feel amazingly fleshed out and very fun to interact with, and carry the joy of the game. bravo.

Medium things:

-The leveling system is okay. It does what it needs to at this point.

-Thornback's digging abilities might be a little to easy to exploit. You can use them to tunnel straight through the bottom of the map when they are running away from you.

-Having fluids weigh different amounts based on the container they are stored in feels very strange and unintuitive. I won't say it is strictly bad though.

-On desolate, I feel really limited by storage space/weight because I have no way of reliably getting fanny packs/ thigh pouches/pouches. I can craft everything else I need, but am limited to backpack+material pouch+foilage bag for carry capacity. This made me decide to forego guns completely and just use the pickaxe as a weapon due to weight. It also means I can carry less emergency food/water for when things go bad. The difficulty of the run feels really luck based: It is disproportionately easier if I find a leg pouch. If I don't find a leg pouch, I can't pick up rifles or jetpacks do to the weight limit.

-Severe hypertension in the jungle just for being anywhere near an elder thornback while exerted feels a little strange of a balance decision. doesn't it put me at risk of a stroke?

-The player can be completely stacked with loot at around layer 3/4. Right now, that feels fine, but the final layers will feel boring if they don't unlock new mechanics/gear/parts that are not available in the early layers, as well as new challenges. I know there are 12 planned layers. Maybe some loot like the LRD and mini lasar needs to be limited to later layers?

-Getting ragdolled feels too luck based on occasion. Many things can ragdoll the character. Getting ragdolled is sometimes completely harmless, and sometimes instantly ends your run to falling of a cliff and landing on a trap. Having some minor form of control while ragdolled might help this. Having the difficulty be from things the player can control rather than uncontrollable things might be better game design for a rouglike.

-Plasma cutter and drill feel too heavy to be practical. IDK if this is intentional. the plasma cutter wieghs 3u, and the materials to craft a stick of dynamite only weigh .5u (less even because they go in the material pouch). Laser cutter+dynamite feels way better than plasma cutter or drill. Dynamite can bust through steel easy enough.

Crafting issues :

-many crafted items should go to the materials pouch by default, rather than spawning in my hands.

-Default ingredient priorities for crafting are just painful and force boring micromanagement with favoriting. examples:

-My canteen with painkillers in it was used to craft a syringe instead of my empty canteen, deleting the painkillers. Very bad!

\-Wooden panels are not properly prioritized for campfires over wooden cubes/scraps

-the makeshift digging tool for some reason gets prioritized as a cutting tool over the crude cleaver. Literally the ONLY use of the crude cleaver is as a lightweight cutting tool: it's lighter than the machete, but it's useless for digging and combat. I almost never want to use my digging tool for cutting..

-wound glue sometimes gets used as antiseptic over other sources. Wound glue is very valuable and can't be crafted manually.

-Maybe it would be nice to be able to anti-favorite an item, so that it is preferred for use in crafting? this would solve the above issue. Favoriting a bag should make crafted items spawn in that bag too.

-Crafting is often painful and takes to many clicks: the crafting menu often feels like it uses a whole bunch of screen space to display very little actual useful information or buttons.

Bad things:

-Guns feel too weak and unreliable compared to their weight/work to make ammo. The makeshift rifle feels worse than the pickaxe for example, while taking extra weight and crafting cost. Unlike the pickaxe, the gun slowly aims to the mouse location rather than quickly snapping.

-Crafting LRD fluid in early layers feels a little too strong. it literally just costs meat, water, biochem, and painkillers. Having half an IV bag of LRD fluid makes many enemies and traps feel completely nonthreatening. This helps with the ragdoll RNG though, so IDK how I feel about this.

-Pain feels perhaps too minor and ignorable? Even when my character is in severe pain, I hardly feel like it is worth the extra clicks to administer painkillers. Perhaps it should have a refuse-to-click mechanic like with depression? or a refuse to swing weapon mechanic maybe? Maybe pain should decay significantly slower without painkillers?

-Sometimes last stand does not actually save me, because I am still in the horrible situation that caused my death originally. Maybe it should delete traps and enemies in a close radius?

-Temperature feels weird on desolate. It's almost impossible to overheat, and very easy to freeze to death. It feels like you can't touch the water at all in the gravel lands unless you have a campfire to warm yourself back up.

-Foggy modifier needs to be removed. The entire point of the game is carefully observing your environment and avoiding dangerous obstacles. not being able to see said obstacles is a bad choice.

-Being able to save and quit mid layer would be nice in my opinion. For the love of god, don't listen to the neckbeards who want you to remove the pause button. Just because I have a life and family does not mean I should be banned from playing this game.