This is a small collection of thoughts I've had about the game. I've played through (and won about 8 times now out of about 12) and watched several let's plays about the game as well.



1) Crystal Smasher enemies on the first door are not cool. Losing 2-4 dust at the start of a floor just because you randomly have characters with less DPS and messed up targeting priority can kill an entire run.



2) More consistent dust generation options would be nice. Even if this were 1 or 2 dust per door and it never increases. The reason I bring this up is not to lower the "challenge" of finding dust to keep things going, but because dust generation seems to be far too random. I have had some floors where the first 15+ doors I open give me 0-5 dust total, and that includes random monster spawns. As the "dark" section of the facility keeps growing and I start seeing 8+ spawns while I can only afford to light 2 or 3 rooms total, I feel the game goes from fun to frustrating (especially when the layout provides a ton of MOD rooms but you can never power them).



3) Merchants! I have two conflicting opinions on merchants. In certain circumstances they can make the game completely trivial (easy), and in others they are completely worthless. So far I have yet to find a merchant that wasn't one of these two extremes. It all comes down to placement and what items they offer. I would argue that most items are a bit overpriced, and the return for selling items is garbage in general, but at the same time I make that argument I feel I must bring up "the OP merchant strategy" which I have so far not seen anyone in let's plays taking advantage.



The "OP Strategy"

If you find a merchant after mostly clearing a floor OR you keep one alive in a safe zone until you find the exit you can make a more difficult (not really) run to the exit in exchange for all of their items. At the end of say floor 2 or 3 it is likely that on a given run you have quite a bit of dust, and if you have a short run to the door, or sara (soooo fasttttt), you can simply use all your "light" to purchase items for your heroes right before you make the run for the exit. In my last playthrough I managed to score the "other t-shirt (+29 def)" and the purple "some field armor (+41 def)" by trashing all my light and running away in the dark. The idea that you can't take dust with you in the first place makes this a very viable option for making subsequent floors much much easier.



4) Hero Hiring could use a slight tweak. In general I guess you could say "keep a food reserve at all times in case you run into a hero". And so far that is exactly what I do when I play the game. But I do feel it is a little bit awkward to have them standing around in the dark after they find some nice folks with power, and food, and defenses to hide behind. I think it would be a nice idea to have them move to the power room or something, just so a player has the option to hire them at some point after they are discovered (a lot of the time they are deep in the dark sectors and if you don't hire them immediately they are monster food). Now I'm not saying they should help out on the defense for free or anything, just that they kind of feel like "impulse buys" at the supermarket, you only get 1 shot at them and if you say no they die.

This first thing never happened to me. Weird.



I use merchants and heroes for hire as meatshields. Or if I want to hire the guy ill stick with him and try to keep him alive.

dorobo wrote:
This first thing never happened to me. Weird.

Happened to me quite a bit. 1 in the first room and 2 in the second. Pretty much kills the run.