Please, for the love of God and the poor blobfish, add more shop options. Like, double them. Or add a weapon-specific row and an item specific row. Or something. Just, more.

Some items are so wonderful to have and make the runs so fun but are so incredibly rare it might as well not exist. I'm almost 200 hours in and I still come across items I've never seen before. Also, It feels bad to have to re-roll a thousand times to hunt for a specific item to refine a build, and unless you get the shop re-roll discount items (which are also few and far between), you're broke by the time you get it because the pool is so inflated. The blobfish would not be happy in this environment. Blobfish is sad.

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This game is simply way too random to give the player any sort of control over the build. Not fun when you actually want to optimize a build, but can't because you're at the mercy of RNG basically the entire game.

A few examples:

1. If you want to try an electrical build and select a weapon that upgrades into electrical abilities - there's a chance you'll see maybe one or two electric relics the entire run, but every single fire and poison relic will come along. No chance to re-roll unless you're in the shop, which gets prohibitively expensive when you have to decide whether to upgrade your stats or buy relics with a relatively low max gold cap (unless you wanna grind the hell out of the game to increase it, once). That's all assuming you get lucky enough to find enough gold in the first place.

2. You have to spend skill points to re-roll specific stats on a weapon when upgrading. Need to boost a specific stat? You could get lucky on the first try, or more likely than not, spend 30 points trying to get that one damage + projectile combo, when there were only 4 total stats to land on in the first place. There is absolutely no semblance of consistency when it comes to weapon builds. There needs to be some sort of system (maybe in the tree) that allows you to lock down stats.

3. There are "Ascension Crystals" that basically give your weapon a special ability. These pretty much can transform your weapons from a worthless stick or pea shooter into a weapon of mass destruction, even at level 1. You can eventually unlock a shrine that guarantees one crystal at the start of the run and upgrade it further to have a small chance for one or two more (very small chance at 1 more and basically a lotto win for 2 more).

It just feels bad knowing you can POSSIBLY start the game with multiple crystals and have much better options for build varieties, but more often than not you get a single one and basically have to go with one choice until you clear a level. Spend 30 minutes restarting the game to get 2 or 3 so you can have more fun, or just suck it up and go with a single one and hope the stars align and you get lucky with relics and re-rolls? On the harder difficulties, it's basically impossible to even clear even the first stage without two crystals for certain weapons (back to that whole stick vs. WMD thing). You earn a total of two more in the run after each stage before the boss, but good luck getting there.

4. The amount of "freeze you in place and you're now completely defenseless" mechanics in some of the levels cross the line from "that hurt" to "your run is over" is beyond silly and frustrating, especially when the movement in the game already feels sluggish and imprecise. It's not even a skill thing at this point when there is exactly one spot you can go because the boss is zoning you in a circle and suddenly an ice cloud spawns right on top of you, followed by another, and another, with no way to avoid unless you were lucky enough to be positioned on the bottom corner of the ice cloud spawn. GG.

Or when you walk into a trap that didn't exist on screen because of the 543 enemies standing on top of it, and it's "SURPRISE MFER" when you're running in that direction and kill the mobs standing on it right before you step into it. Game over because half a second later everything that was behind you is now on top of you because it feels like you're the slowest object in the game.

Bottom line, if you want a game where the outcome of your run is 80% luck and 20% divine intervention, this game is for you. I really want to love this game, it has so much potential and it is SO FUN when you get that build going, but the luck vs actual decision making you're afforded is way out of whack.

This game completely ruined my weekend and is on track to ruining my life. I was casually browsing Steam to see what games were on sale and this one popped up in my queue. "Cool, $4, why not?" I asked myself. I had lunch plans with my GF in a couple hours and had some time to kill, and most survival games tend to be easy to pick up and put down due to time limited runs. I started my first run around 10am Sunday. I did not go to lunch with my GF.

Fast forward about 30 minutes and it is now 4am Monday. I'm trying to figure out how Blobfish managed to pull off time manipulation because the sun was out when I first started playing, but after blinking like three whole times, the sun disappeared. I just emailed in a sick day to my boss because my alarm clock for work just went off and I'm still trying to put together what even happened in the past 16 hours of my life...

Expect to still be a noob after 1,000 hours.