I’m at 7.6, and it tells me to share more about myself with Nel. … How?
[edit] I updated the game and kept playing a while longer - I think I got unstuck, her relationship meter is finally moving upwards again and I managed to at least see the form change event.
On a sidenote, if you wear Violet through the portal that strips you naked the game gets a bit confused when you go back through to the normal world. I had normal clothes with purple sleeves, and violet reset to staying at the well.
I’m actually stuck at the point where I’m trying to unlock the transformation and my only way forward is to increase my relationship with Nel – but nothing I do seems to have any effect on that relationship. So all I can do in the game is watch Nel do random dungeon delves and manipulate Evie, with zero input or say from me. Pretty frustrating.
I wish Nel was optional, or there was a way to progress while being hostile to her - or to at least skip the times she takes control of the player. It’s essentially frequent, repeating, unskippable cutscenes.
It’s a good game, though, and still worth playing to me. It just prioritises concept over everything else sometimes - like gameplay, or player agency.
So far the only way I can survive is through getting some distance and throwing fire potions, so once creatures get too close to me I'm ruined unless I can lose them. I gained access to shock/stun potions once via plot progression, but was saving them for the quest. I haven't managed to unlock anything on the technology tree aside from torches and fire potions. I suspect armor or access to more tools would help, but I keep not getting that far.
It is nice that massive forest fires produce plentiful resources for more fire potions.
Really enjoying this game, but think it would be less frustrating if there was an option to lighten the consequences of death a bit. I keep exhaustively clearing out the missions one by one, but then one bad encounter makes me lose the dozens or hundreds of stockpiled ingredients. So far my record is managing to die near the end of the third mission.
It would be super nice to be able to make consistant/permanent saves when I'm back at the basement between missions, so I only have to repeat the most recent one if I die. Or, if permadeath is important, maybe adding some roguelite new-game-plus features -- like starting with an amount of each raw ingredient based on 10% of your highest previous total. It could be leftovers salvaged from your previous shop.
It's not a perfect solution, but -- there are programs out there that let you remap your controls manually, I think. More accessibly, if you temporarily swap your keyboard's language settings over to US English, Z and X will be the two keys just to the right of left shift. I have my keyboard set up to be able to swap between entering English and Spanish, and in Spanish mode some of my punctuation turns into a quick way to add accents onto letters.
One way that windows tries to tell dangerous programs apart from safe ones, is it automatically flags anything that hasn't been run by a large number of people as "dangerous". This means that programs by large companies often skate through with no problems, while anything programmed by individuals or small companies get caught in the filter. There should be a way to click through the warning and run it anyway, for situations where you're sure that it's overreacting.
Seconding the removal / alteration request... They spontaneously attack me, I died twice while trying to mind my own business, and the debuff that makes my screen hard to read made it so I effectively could only play the game around half the time with very little benefit. It significantly disrupts the crafting / exploring angle of the game, and got me to uninstall rather than fight with it.
Maybe the tutorial could have more specific hints about how to deal with them, so people don't just grab an axe? Or, maybe I'm not the target demographic...
You could probably fit the moon logic and one-pixel-clickables into an optional hard difficulty setting -- introducing a few additional puzzles that only come up for people who are actively going for the Full Experience. Maybe one of the keycards is broken, so you have to glue the two pieces together with partially-chewed gum that's stuck to the bottom of one of the magboots, or the chemical recipe is found only in a PDF manual as copy-protection, or ....
