So I finished it. Did pretty much everything; I'm just missing some follower forms but since at least one is tied to something that's bugged I'll wait for an update before I think about getting those.
Might post more focused thoughts when it's not extremely late at night, but... while I think it's a good game, all the systems
extremely fall apart at the end. The feeling that things are polished is very front-loaded. A lot of things in both the combat and the cult-management give off this vibe of like... you can tell that they meant for it to be more fleshed out, but they had to reign in the scope?
The fact that there's no way to change doctrines later, for example, along with how you have to restart if everyone in your cult dies (which I've heard some people are getting bugged into having happen and immediately losing their saves, oof) suggests that they were intending it to be more of a campaign-focused game where you'd want to replay to try a different approach to managing the cult? But there's really no reason to replay, since you can salvage pretty much any problem without much effort. And being locked into the doctrine choices ends up being very funny because of how some things end up being totally inconsequential. For example, one doctrine choice is:
- Less faith loss if you put a non-dissenting follower in prison, or
- +10 faith every morning that no one is in prison
...except there's extremely little reason to do the former (it's just if someone suggests it for a quest... and you can immediately take them out anyway). But if you think there's a reason for it being offered, you might take that, thinking based on what you've seen early on that using the prison is going to be a regular occurrence anyway. But... no, it's not, dissent ends up being very rare most of the time. And in fact even when it happens you don't need to use prisons, because there's food that will fix it. So I just permanently got +10 faith every day.
It's even down to stuff like how little the individual cultists traits matter. It's not like you can really even treat them differently based on their negative traits, so everyone's going to be doing the same work anyway. The only thing that really ended up mattering was what demon they can turn into. By the end of the game I had everything unlocked and so was almost entirely ignoring everything about the cult management beyond using some rituals + making a ton of food when needed. At most I was boosting loyalty of the followers that could become the demons I needed. Especially as them getting older meant I would need to cycle new ones in. Except... one of them actually ended up never becoming too old despite being, like, 96? I think being in demon form made it so they didn't become an elder? I don't know.
Meanwhile the combat is fine, but I maintain that several weapon types just feel bad to use and enemies aren't designed around them, and you have no control over what you get. A lot of the weapon upgrades also just make me annoyed when I see them; poison sucks when a tarot can also make you do poison damage (and also poison barely does anything for a lot of enemies anyway), "ghosts on kills sometimes" barely helps, etc. And later on it's even worse because you
could have gotten the types that just outright do more damage, which can make bosses much easier. The curses ended up being better than I initially thought (pro tip: try holding the button even though it only points out that you can do it on specific ones for some reason), but you can still be stuck with something that's terrible for the enemies/boss you're fighting. Your ability to actually use them regularly is entirely dependent on being lucky with tarot cards too. On that note, cards range wildly from being completely worthless to being extremely powerful, but not in a way that really feels intentional in either direction? And the amount you can get per ran can vary
significantly (I've had runs of the fourth dungeon where I had 3 at the end, and I've had runs where I had
9). All of this stuff
should just add up to mean that you're using different playstyles on different runs; instead it feels like you sometimes you just have a shitty loadout and that's that.
Bug-wise, on PC I thankfully didn't have a ton. I had a few times where I was talking to a new follower and the menu to name them never appeared, but I could still save + quit so it was fine. I also had a couple times (in different ways) where I wasn't able to finish a room and had to quit the dungeon due to enemies not spawning correctly, which was mostly annoying because it happened when I was trying to do the last few dungeon runs I needed to finish the game and that + some horrible rng on weapons/curses really dragged out the end. There were a few other weird visual things or times when something seemed to get messed up at the cult, but restarting (due to the follower menu bug) always fixed it.
I feel like the penalties on pretty much all of the fleeces are a bit much aside from maybe the one that turns red hearts into blue ones, but I'm not sure what the heart cap is so that one might suck too. Not feeling very compelled to use any of them aside from maybe the one that gives you 4 tarot cards at the start of a run, if I know I'm doing a short run (i.e. wouldn't get any more than 3-4 tarot cards on the run anyway).
Kinda wishing they just straight up didn't have any penalties. Would really like for the dungeon run part of the game to sort of start escalating the same way something like Isaac (in a single run) and Hades (in the longer run-over-run way) escalate. The dungeon stuff is feeling pretty samey and repetitive now, I'm slowly getting stronger when it comes to pure numbers, but so are the enemies, and there haven't really been any interesting mechanical changes.
So in my experience the tarot one was actually pretty bad. Because it felt like it just replaced all the tarot rooms with combat rooms, which just meant more chances to get hurt and the initial cards might not even be good. Meanwhile the penalties on the others weren't as bad as I expected in practice, though granted I was very far/at the end of upgrading weapons/curses when I tried them.
You mostly just need to account for the penalties by summoning demons. I was using the glass cannon one for a long time, and having fervor + extra hearts demons made it mostly fine. The issue is that if you're not lucky with tarots you may still have to rely on weapons a good amount of the time; the weapon damage cut wasn't as bad as I expected but it's annoying to have to hope for good rng to have good fervor generation (and sometimes I got screwed over on hearts thanks to an effect in the dungeon too). And unfortunately I got the golden fleece last (I have no idea why I got the heart one when I got my third unlock; I had 0 intent to use it and was considering using golden) so I didn't have much time to try it out, but it's actually very very strong. You get 10% more damage for every kill without being hit, which adds up fast.
