This is a roguelike that makes a game out of inventory Tetris. Not only do you have limited inventory space, but items can affect each other based on their position within the backpack and relative to each other. For instance, helmets boost your defense for every row below them, and arrows gain attack power for every empty space to the right of them. I think this is a very neat idea, but unfortunately the actual game ended up rather half-baked.
The primary failure is that the game gives you too much information, I think. You’re shown exactly what enemies’ next moves will be, and there’s also a “block points” mechanic that allows you to completely negate damage if you accumulate enough; taken together, you can escape almost every battle unscathed. This was very clearly inspired by Slay the Spire, but unlike in StS your available actions are consistent and deterministic, so you can always take the most optimal action to counter the enemy. Outside of the special deckbuilding mode (which I hated), I only actually lost a run once. Battles are almost entirely won based on what items you bring into them, rather than your tactical choices.
This is a shame, because there are a lot of really cool and clever mechanics with certain items, but there’s just no point in using any of them when a simple sword-and-shield combo will win you every battle anyway. It doesn’t help that the mechanics for the more complex builds are rather at odds with one another; for instance, bow builds can end up very powerful, but they require you not only to spend your level ups very precisely to configure your backpack into the optimal shape but to leave most of your backpack empty, which is a big ask even before considering it might all be wasted because it’s completely up to chance whether you’ll find bows and arrows at all. The game really could have used some way to configure your starting items so you could at least hit the ground running with a desired build; instead it just always starts you with a sword-and-shield combo, and you never have reason to branch out from that.
Oh, and the Teddy Bear Sword breaks the game in half. It’s a weapon that doesn’t have the weapon tag, which means it can spawn even in challenge runs that aren’t supposed to give you weapons. It’s a cute idea, but it completely trivializes weapon restriction mechanics in addition to being ludicrously powerful in its own right. That one really needed another QA pass.
You can eventually unlock other characters who kind of function like different game modes, but I found them pretty half-baked too. There’s the aforementioned deckbuilder character, who certainly adds more challenge to the game by preventing you from always taking the optimal option, but also gave me flashbacks to Slay the Spire in how endlessly frustrating it is to get screwed over by bad draws. (She also gets a card that’s basically a trap — it creates copies of itself when used, but those copies get permanently added to the deck, so if you use it it pollutes the deck to the point where you’ll never draw anything else.)
Satchel was more interesting: He can create multiple disconnected “pockets” of inventory space, in addition to a “charm” mechanic where he can mind control “convince” enemies to fight for him. He, too, felt half-baked, though — he’s the only character who can get weaker by leveling up, because you will eventually run out of empty space and be forced to fuse pockets together, which is bad for him because most of his items have their power tied to his total number of pockets. His charm mechanic is also pretty gamebreaking because it bypasses both block and on-hit effects, which I feel implies he was added late in development and they didn’t have time to properly integrate his mechanics with the base game. The other two characters I never tried out, because they rely on absurd RNG to unlock and the dice never rolled in my favor.
I think what the game really needed was more attrition — it’s just too easy to win battles without losing or spending anything. If all items had limited uses, maybe, or if enemies got stronger over time so you couldn’t just repeat the same actions indefinitely… It might have also been interesting to ditch the energy mechanic entirely and double down on entirely fighting through items. (This would have also helped avoid hoarding, as currently you’re given way, way more items than you can ever use — I frequently ignored treasure chests entirely because my bag was constantly full anyway.)
This is also one roguelike where I think the metagame elements work against it. The fun of the game is in figuring out the synergies between items, but so many items are locked behind the tech tree and it takes an unreasonably long time to progress through it. Cleavers are probably the worst example of this: The items that form the crux of a cleaver build (cleavers that activate other cleavers) all need to be unlocked by bringing cleavers back to your base, which is really unintuitive; cleavers can’t become useful until you lug them around for a while and invest a ton of resources into these seemingly useless items.
The plot is also really weirdly paced. It’s incredibly frontloaded and you can plow through pretty much the entire thing long before you run out of missions to do, which creates this weird tailing section where you just screw around for ages and nobody reacts despite previously insisting this is a super tense situation. Oh, and it’s riddled with grammar errors, too. Hire an editor, gamedevs.
It appears that the developers quietly abandoned this game; it’s had no updates in two years, despite still having a lot of bugs, balancing issues, and apparently undelivered Kickstarter promises. Which sucks, because it does have potential, but it just feels so half-finished. Despite revolving around a central “home” area you return to after every run, character dialogues are exhausted almost immediately after they’re introduced and you have no reason to interact with them again, and despite there being a base-building aspect, you only need to use about a third of the available area to build every building. It’s all so sadly disappointing.