Without cheating, how are you supposed to get yourself "established" early on? The game expects you to look for chests but in doing so you get spotted which starts that timer in which case you can't really do much but go for the other floor. You can attempt to bypass all enemies and just grab all the chests but they eventually bunch up and trying to kill anything beyond the lowest level enemy takes too long and takes too much durability. I found an axe and killed the chick with the bag on her head, it took almost ALL the durability of the axe, the double leg creature is also a huge pain to parry but if she spots you early on it's GG because even if you get her timing down she still takes a ton of hits.
So I gotta assume it's my baby stats, other than doing quick chest runs on the first floor and hoping you get a 1k jackpot what else can you do?
Just do early on speed runs to the exits. use your first crystal on purify and earn some money that way if the weaker enemies have their back to you and you have a decent weapon like an axe or katana. You can usually backshot the legs, floating head (extremely rare on first dungeon), maid and basic zombie chick and purify them without the timer starting. You can also backtrack out the previous door to stop the timer if you get bad rng with a mob spotting you the moment you load into a floor after you take them out.
Your main goal is to find a katana and the double barrel shotgun, those are currently the two best weapons for melee and ranged, all other weapons are very subpar in damage. Just make sure you maintain repair kits via finding them or using extra gold to purchase from the vendor lady. If you let it fully reach zero, the weapon will be destroyed. Second unlock with a crystal should be the losing half if you fail a run so you don't lose all your money.
It gets much easier when you get used to it and you can also get lucky and find additional green shards inside of chests in both dungeons. The game play actually becomes incredibly easy and borderline boring once you get the shotgun and get a firm grasp on the predictability of the mob spawns and map layouts.
Be making thousands a run, and if you can start farming the first boss, she drops a shard every time and a large sum of gold, but it is not intended and will be fixed int he next update as confirmed by the dev. Some of us have mentioned to them to add a way to revisit the first boss fight since that wasn't even on their radar at first. I don't know if the next update will make our current saves incompatible, so if you wanna test all that is available in this version, a few boss kills will make you strong enough to see it all easily.
Can we have sex with the merchant if we pick the right dialogue options or did I metaphorically fuck myself?
The dialogue is there, but the dev hasn't added in the sex yet. However, it is confirmed.
That's... a real shame.
Lewd-themed enemy designs you do nothing with are always kind of boring imo. What's the point of having all these tantalizing designs that you don't have ANY content with? Eye candy is a sore tease with how few games we have out there that have a male MC dealing with monster girls with actual sex/defeat sex.
This is pretty early on in his development, the first title he put out with little dev time had scenes with the enemy riding you after defeat, so don't count it out. He has confirmed that each enemy will have at least a couple of animations. It is possible there could be defeat animations added after the ones that are planned, or maybe it could just be the stalkers that get those. I'm sure we will know more in a few months as the game fleshes out more.
I tossed money at the dude the moment he dropped the first test build of this, gonna be an easy day one purchase on steam. A solo dev that can actually churn out quality content (in terms of the art style) in a reasonable time frame. The step up in quality and game play alone from halls of the pale widow to this is pretty nuts. Hopefully he will be around for a good while and we will get many cool titles for a genre that is limited in terms of actual good games.