A qualified recommendation. It's undoubtedly worth a purchase and a play, and is very good value for the asking price.

The "difficulty" is about 90% "random". Yes, I know that's a roguelike. I like roguelikes! But there's very little you can do until peg powerups come up to sway your luck. You can use the cards and challenges to start forming a strategy early, but you're 100% at the mercy of coinflips down the board, even if you have a solid foundation of cards.

Balancing is much better than the early betas and so I'm confident that if the dev sticks with it in regards to tuning, it could be more strategic than it is.

Finally -- as of writing, there is NO SAVING at all mid run. I found out after investing a few hours into an endless run. That's kinda unforgivable for a mode that wants to be endless, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt as the game still feels early.

Anyways, it's fun. Roguelike plinko. It's cool.

If you like old school point and click adventure games, Myst, Blue Prince, and the Golden Idol series you'll find a lot to like here. This is a bit noir, a bit murder mystery, and a heaping of mysticism sprinkled over the top. The setup and vibes are on point, and the cast diverse with different motivations for their presence.

The time mechanic I was worried about but once you understand how it works an hour or two in served as a nice plot device to keep the story moving and there was plenty of time to figure out all the threads. Note there is a lot of pixel-hunting style gameplay so if that's not your thing it might be a bit cumbersome to play through. There's a lot of nudges and a system for identifying items to review, so that with your intuition should carry you far.

The ending wasn't my favorite but everything up to the epilogue kept me really invested. Fantastic ~15-20h run.

Really wish there was a "middle" rating. The game is worth checking out, you'll be done in a few hours and there's not a ton to go back to once you're done.

The core gameplay is pseudorandom with some really neat "skill" mechanics.
Beats are chill.
Clicking is fun. Wheels are fun. Gambling is fun.

There's very little replayability as of now (will be interesting to see what comes in future updates).
There's one pretty OP path to completing the game and some other paths only really materialize if you have unlocked points in other things.
Enemies and strategy being linear, it makes it hard to recommend. But if you go in with "can I get 6-7 bucks of entertainment in 4 hours" -- yeah, you sure can.

hope the dev expands on the idea (even in a sequel).

The game/story/mechanic didn't land for me, and that's okay. It may land for you. The art is well crafted and the voice over work is fantastic. The save system and control available through the narration are well considered and well done. If the story or what you know seems interesting to you, sure, worth a try. There's a lot of narrative here for the time and money.

I didn't find it engaging, and didn't feel the need to return back after to explore other paths and endings.

Call it a reserved thumbs up. This is mechanically a fun game in an interesting universe, the framing of the plot is interesting and -- if you like games where you have to dig a bit to get your story elements, you'll enjoy this. It's a hard recommend because all of the framing is fairly paper thin -- there's not a lot of opportunity to go outside of the lines and explore the universe or cases or anything else happening at the FDI.

The game has a few fun mechanics that it throws at you as you go, so the gameplay for the genre has some variances, but in the end it's too little and too thin overall. The ending of the game is going to be polarizing a bit ... It missed for me. I'm extremely excited to see what this dev does in the future, as what's here is great and engaging while the ride is in motion.

Still searching for a better feeling than pumping up pair to be worth more than a straight flush.

Gameplay itself is fine. Spending $70 and the only multiplayer maps in the game are remastered ones from the original Modern Warfare 2 is not.