Overall Gameplay (9 / 13 points)

• Player Experience: 6.5/10
• Mechanical Polish: 2.5/3

Comments: What a fun little dungeon crawler type thing. The use of RNG in this game was very smart - the maps were randomized rather than the damage values of attacks in encounters. This kept the game fresh and kept me engaged for far longer than I otherwise would have been. Even with that design in mind, it still felt like I lived and died by RNG, which was the largest sole detractor from my experience. I played through the game a few times, but it didn't feel like there was much room for strategizing, so I always seemed to die around the same point. You get the cards you get, and you get the encounters you get. How much of the room I explored didn't seem to matter, as I was bound to quickly burn whatever resources I found. This part was a disappointment for me, given the diversity of enemies and attack cards available - I never felt like I got to properly strategize around my attack choices or manage my inventory the way the game was clearly capable of offering. Perhaps this could've been a purpose for coins rather than just as a score ticker - maybe I could find shops and spend coins on cards to beef up my offense against a certain element, for example. Armor was nice to have as an additional layer to the gameplay, but it really felt like armor needed to "wear down" and be destroyed after a certain number of turns - certain armors were vastly better than others, and being able to use them indefinitely didn't feel consistent with how cards worked in combat. I think even simple rebalancing could really enhance gameplay - fewer enemies on maps, and reducing the hitpoints of a few enemies, could prolong or prevent the inevitable moment where you suddenly run into an enemy with a ridiculous amount of hitpoints and you are effectively sentenced to death. One last nitpick - I know that the rest of the game used the mouse for controls, but by the end of my playthrough I was dying to be able to just use WASD or arrows to move. The endless pointing and clicking was getting really tedious.

Theme Inclusion (6 / 6 points)

Comments: "Elements" was the clear and obvious focus of the game, nothing much to comment on here.

Overall Presentation (8.5 / 10 points)

• General Presentation: 3/4
• Quality of Graphics: 4/4
• Quality of Audio: 1.5/2

Comments: The game looked and sounded very good. What I was missing most in terms of graphical presentation was some kind of visual cue that my attack did indeed exploit a type mismatch - I couldn't tell whether I had actually hit a type weakness or if that was just the base damage of the card. Alternatively, telling me the type matchups of a card during an encounter (rather than exclusively when picking armor), or just straight up telling me how much damage each card would deal, would've been really nice. The graphics were very well done and I was surprised by the quantity of different cards and enemies. The two music tracks were nice. While I always like me some BFXR sound effects (is that what they are?), they didn't really match the smoothness of the rest of the audiovisual style.