This game sounded amazing. You are a healer, and you and a warrior have to make it through hordes of monsters to escape a dungeon. Your job is to keep the warrior alive, and the warrior's job is to hit things. You can choose who the warrior targets, but that's about all you can directly contribute to combat.
At the start of the game, you can only cast Discipline (which increases the rate at which you get EXP), or Mercy (where you can heal a target limb for a certain amount of HP). You can also craft things with items you pick up along the way - though I really found the crafting menu to be clunky, so I often forget to craft things, which is bad! Combat is fairly simple. Monsters will display what action they're going to do above their head (either attack one of the five limbs, or cast their special ability). Starting from the monster on the left, each one takes a turn to attack, and then the warrior will attack whichever column he's targetting.
If there's nothing in that column, he'll just attack nothing, so you have to keep an eye on what he's targetting. If the warrior loses all HP for a limb, it gets a "serious wound", meaning you can't heal it, and depending on which limb, he loses some stats. You either have to use a bandage on it, or heal it with a spell to cure serious wounds to recover it during a round, otherwise it'll return to 1 HP at the end of a level.
Head: No bravery (your bravery bar doesn't fill)
Left arm: ATK down
Torso: Health down
Right arm: DEF down
Legs: target speed down (takes you longer to shift between targets)
As you level-up, you unlock other spells:
Piety (25 mana): an "AOE" heal that heals all limbs after 10 seconds
Courage (35): a spell that boosts the warrior's attack damage (if you cast it multiple times in a row, he gains "pierce" and will hit multiple enemies in a column)
Faith (40): a spell that crafts an item out of mana
Protection (20): a temporary shield on one limb
Loyalty (50): a "serious wounds" heal, at level 3, it also casts protection on the healed limb
Virtue (30): grants double strike, increases ATK, lowers DEF for 10 seconds
Devotion (5): and a spell that allows you to exchange the HP of one limb for mana.
The game also has a day-night cycle: during the day, the warrior's limbs will heal slowly. During night time, you have much faster mana regen. There's an item that allows you to temporarily change day to night or vice versa.
I wrote that the game sounded amazing, and the disappointing part of the game is the torches. In the bottom left of the screenshots, you can see how many torches you have, and how long the current one has left to burn. Regardless of how healthy the warrior is, you lose if the torches all fizzle out. I haven't once lost due to my warrior dying - every single time I've lost, it's because my torches have fizzled out. So rather than the focus of the game being on healing the warrior and managing mana and attack priorities, I feel like the main focus of the game is trying your best to keep the torches lit.
In each round, you pick up one torch and one red orb. The red orb kills all the monsters for the remaining round, but also destroys any items left on the ground, and you don't get EXP for those monsters. Both the orb and the torch spawn randomly, so you can luck out and have both spawn near the start, or you might find the torch spawns right at the end of every round. There are crafting materials you can pick up which you can use to craft various things, and also a spell for creating an item. Those items can be burned as fuel for your torch, keeping it lit for a bit longer.
So really, the entire game is mostly spent crafting items to burn and spamming the discipline spell to level up faster. Every now and again, you chuck out an AOE heal, or you sacrifice some limb HP to get more mana so you can spam discipline a bit more.
Oh, and every time you win or lose, you gain points which you can spend on upgrades.
This means your spells become more efficient, or you can get crafting materials back when you craft, or various other effects. I feel like it's a bit of a grind to constantly play the same levels over and over again to grind out points to upgrade things.
Overall, the premise was good, the execution didn't quite pull it off. The game feels like a less-mindless clicker game. It's something easy to do while watching a show on Netflix, but not really a game that requires 100% of your focus. I can kinda see why it was done this way, because the game wants to avoid someone just spamming heal and discipline at the start of the game without killing anything to max out the +EXP bonus and become massively overlevelled by the time they've hit tier 2 of monsters. However, with the way it is now, the torch mechanic is too dominant over the entire game. And with all the upgrades I had (probably about 15% at the time I started this last run), I ended up massively overlevelled anyway. I don't think I had to heal at all for a few levels, and was just spamming +attack, discipline and that craft item spell. The warrior's passive regen during the day was enough.
Oh, and because the game doesn't really explain the controls very well:
Hold right-click to speed up the game (during a level, it makes the combat speed up, between levels, you walk to the next level faster - which you might as well do, since there's nothing to do between levels).
Scroll wheel to change the warrior's target.
To burn an item as fuel, mouse-over the bottom right corner of where the item is until an X appears and click the X. Burning an item also allows you to see further, which makes it easier to plan which monsters to kill.
When you click the heal, you click on the limb you want to heal. Right click to exit out of healing mode.
To level-up a spell, click the lock icon in the top left after you've levelled up. If it isn't working, you might be stuck in healing mode.
Left click the crafting button to open the crafting menu. There are 4 pages of items to craft things. Right click to exit out of the crafting menu. Crafting list:
Page 1:
Minor Health Potion: 1 x leaf
Medium Health Potion: 2 x leaf
Major Health Potion: 3 x leaf
Minor Mana Potion: 1 x mushroom (looks like an umbrella)
Medium Mana Potion: 2 x mushroom
Page 2:
Major Mana Potion: 3 x mushroom
Potion of Bravery (fills your bravery bar): 1 x oil, 2 x leaf, 2 x mushroom
Bulwark (puts a temporary shield on a limb): 2 x wood
Bandages (cures serious wounds): 2 x cloth
Astrolabe (temporary switch night / day): 1 x stone, 1 x oil
Page 3:
Torch: 5 x wood, 5 x stone, 5 x oil
Whetstone (permanently increase ATK by 2): 1 x stone
Wheststone +1 (p. increase attack by 6): 2 x stone
Whetstone +2 (p. increase attack by 12): 3 x stone
Heater Panel (p. increase DEF by 2): 1 x wood, 1 x stone
Page 4:
Heater Panel +1 (p. increase DEF by 6): 1 x wood, 2 x stone
Heater Panel + 2 (p. increase DEF by 12): 1 x wood, 3 x stone
One of the enemies makes it rain. Your torches burn faster when it's raining.
I couldn't get the game working with my Steam controller, but to be honest, I didn't try for very long. I'm a keyboard + mouse healer anyway.
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