Written still at the beginning of the game so maybe it gets better. It has interesting ideas but the balance is horrible (at least at the beginning).
There are games out there with mechanics that synergize off each other, turning what would otherwise be simple things into great combinations. This game does the opposite of that.
0: when an enemy first spots you, a timer starts counting down and once it hits 0 an invincible boss will spawn and chase you throughout the level. This forces you too quickly move through the game without taking your time defeating your enemies, removing any slow strategic or stealthy approach in favor of full on rushing through. This mechanic is the heart of screwing up other mechanics.
1: there is stealth in this game, you break line of sight with enemies and hide in a iron maiden, and enemies will slowly pass you by as they search for you, then you pop out behind them and continue. This would be great except you're supposed to be rushing through the level before the boss spawns and chunks off a quarter of your health every time you see it. This makes hiding quite pointless.
2: There seems to be a beggar mechanics implemented rather maliciously, you are given 1500 gold (souls for anyone who plays FromSoftware games) at the start of the game, and the basic melee weapon costs 2500, meaning you are unable to buy it. You can spend some on attribute points (that aren't explained what they do) but you won't be able to cleanly hit 0. If you DO hit 0 gold though, you can beg the shop keeper for a weapon and they will actually give you a below basic melee weapon, which is still pretty helpful considering all your combat mechanics including blocking require you to be holding one. The game does not tell you this and I spent the first hour running through the dungeon with just my underwear, trying to dodge enemies and opening chests hoping for a weapon so I could actually play the game. After repeatedly dying multiple times and picking more than my weight in ammunition for guns I didn't have, I went back to the shop keeper thinking there must have been something I've missed, and lo and behold at 0 gold because I've gone in and gotten killed, I met the conditions for the shopkeeper to give me my first weapon.
3: There is a souls-like currency system, the same currency is used for both strengthening your character and buying items, if you happen to die you drop all you are carrying and have to run back to it to pick it up. There's no farming to be done in order to slowly gather enough for your first unless you want to do some really annoying cheese of repeatedly regenerating the dungeon and collecting gold before leaving. Each dungeon has 10 levels, and if you die you restart from the FIRST level, making getting past all the enemies without fighting really difficult if you don't have a weapon. It gets harder if you've gone past them once already too (more on that later). I've only managed to collect at most around 1000 gold on a single level, meaning that I'd have to get to level 3 to collect enough gold for the basic axe (2500 gold), and then I'd have to run BACK through all 3 levels to the start without dying in order to get my money out.
4: Map design is primarily narrow corridors and doorways that fit 1 person. This plus collision with enemies makes it very difficult to squeeze past them. On top of that, enemies do not reset to their original positions, which are usually in corners out of the way of choke points, but instead hang around randomly along the path where you died or passed through, which sometimes places them right in a doorway. If you've died once and respawned and then try running back through past the enemies, it becomes a lot harder because there would be periodically enemies that are gatekeeping your path, and now suddenly you're sandwiched between them who you can't pass and all the enemies you pulled when running past them.
5. Enemies respawn like Siren; you can only knock them out temporarily. Tthere is a special ability to remove enemies permanently after knocking them out, but this is based on a time limited resource and is strongly implied that you won't have enough to simply use on every enemy, and it should be instead used on specific key enemies that are really hard to get rid of in your path. Well enemies don't return to their original spot, so really every enemy ends up blocking your path after you pass through it the first time. All weapons also have a durability, plus fighting takes a rather long time that will result in the boss eventually spawning and hunting you down, so this combination strongly incentivizes not actually fighting enemies and simply running past them, letting you hit the problem of the map design resulting in enemies sitting in choke points and preventing you from doing that. I did try to fight an enemy with the shiv and it took me a full minute of slashing at them before another enemy ended up finding me somehow and killing me from behind.
6. Save points do not exist inside dungeons, combined with the length of each dungeon means that you have to clear it in one long sitting or you lose all your progress. Make sure you have enough time when sitting down to play!
7. Sanity resource that drops after each death, I suppose to punish the player for dying? It seems the creator decided being sent back 10 floors, losing all your money, an irrecoverable decrease in the invincible hunting boss timer, and enemies now being scattered directly on your path instead of around it wasn't enough punishment. I don't quite know what low sanity does specifically, but it seems to have annoying visual effects that make it harder to parse what's going on, and you can only recover it through items (particularly devastating in the early game when I can't even afford a weapon) or by leaving and completely resetting the dungeon and any progress on mapping it out.
