Finished the demo.
Combat did indeed feel a lot cleaner, escaping from a grapple was much easier and i wasn't grappled nearly as often as before the overhaul. I also noticed that i could grab Sally without having the guards block the way to the basement, which was nice to see. While slimes and spiders weren't easy to see in the grass, i'll consider this a deliberate design choice since, unlike soldiers, those you can actually beat without much prep work.
I did encounter a few small bugs though:
- Items still mention it fills your 'food', when the bar itself is called Vit, so that may still cause some confusion.
- Killing the spider in Reservoir CXII on the bridge causes the game to prioritize the "Gruuh..." (with a slime portrait btw) text to appear over opening the chest, though the corpse position can be reset by leaving and reentering the room, which fixes it.
- With the elemental, when i answered "It wasn't me, it was the soldiers" and got attacked, after beating it and trying to walk out i triggered the "So you would try to outrun the wind..." which caused a second fight against said elemental. The 'bad' choices after "You're a wind spirit" do correctly flag the spirit as defeated as it allows you to walk to the town without a second encounter.
- Also with the elemental, when i took it out in the same round i got killed by bleed damage, i got the 15 XP and 5 gold for beating it, and the H-scene showed, though it didn't register as penetration in the stats.
- Some minor inconsistency in the CGs (getting knocked down by the slime has you appear naked, but in the post-defeat CG you're wearing scraps of clothing)
Overall, nice progress. Also, the Huntsman was still missing a defeat CG, though i suppose that is something for later as you'd have to specifically fight your way to him to have him aggro?
Lastly, a question: What exactly do you have planned for XPs? I noticed i leveled up once or twice but the only thing gained was +1 HP. Are you planning to have skills and abilities unlock or is this more of a 'survival RPG' theme where you need to avoid most combat encounters through stealth because they're better trained and equipped than you are?