Hi everyone and Dev!

After beating the game for the first time and played over 70 hours I want to share my opinion about the game.

First of all, I´m a Spanish dude, my English is not very good but I´ll try my best for explaining myself.

Im going to separate every aspect of the game I think is relevant, rate it, comment it and finally share my opinion on how to improve it.

1- GRAPHICS: 10/10

The art is amazing. Everything, chracter´s aesthetics, enemie´s designs, every wagon of the train is charming, the background, fight animations... Brilliant. Everything is fantastic and well fit into the whole concept of the game. Very very cool.

If anything could be improved I would say the dungeons are yet a bit empty and look sameish, they could look more unique and detailed.

Also, as an idea, I would love to see day and night background cycles while traveling in the train, and why not, even seasson cycles with snowy mountains in winter, falling leaves in autum, etc... It would be a great adittion in my opinion.

2- SOUND: 7/10

Nice FX effects in general. I love the rattle of the train, its very accomplished and feels comfortable and quite immersive hearing it while you are doing your things.

Both the normal enemy fight and boss fight´s soundtrack fit quite accurately with the atmosphere, specially the bosse´s one, is kind of epic and sounds exciting, as the situation demands.

As something to improve in this area, I would like more variety of music. I think each boss should have his own soundtrack and maybe the train itself too.

3- GAMEPLAY: 8/10

The combination of the dungeon exploration with a deck building fight system I honestly think it hits the mark, I really like this concept. Also experimenting with different subclasses and customizing your own cards, its a strategic component that I love, you can either create a super hero or a total disaster, is so much fun, as well as improving your character stats, doing surgical operations, funerals, drunk parties, recruiting fresh noobs... Quite a lot of management.

However, this is the area I think the game has the most room for improvement.

1- More and better tooltips.

Some skills say "when triggering X skill you gain damage" Ok but how much damage? Is this skill better or worse than the skill I alrerady have that also gives me more damage? It should tell the numbers.

Some other skills don´t tell how many turns they work for, you need to play them and then you can see on the character sheet, but you should have the info beforehand.

Then there are some skills too that trigger when other cards are played but in some cases I never figured out what skills are those. This could be easily fixed by marking key words with diferent colours. Also some descriptions in Spanish translation, I have confirmed are wrong, they don´t do the thing it tell they do, and others are hard to understand because the translator didn´t use the correct words to make it easy, which in my opinion , people freaks of roguelikes like me can handle but can be devastating for a kind of more casual players.

In any case if the dev is interested I offer myself to fix the Spanish translation for free.

2- The balance.

After 70 hours of gameplay, I think the balance between characters and subclasses is mostly fine, maybe I would tweak the HP stats to close a bit the gap between the Engineer (60) and the Scholar and the Railmancer (30)... or instead, make the subclasses tied to the characters, so 15/5= 3 subclasses for each, giving the most powerful ones to the characters with low HP (Blood hunter, Wizzard, Profaner...) and the more average ones for the high HP characters.

I think this change, besides healthier for the game, it would make the characters more unique, which in my opinion is something they heavily need, because as there is right now, the only diference between them is their special ability, and the HP/Sanity points, which are less meaningful specially at the late game.
It would also make less chaotic for more casual players because even experimenting is cool, sometimes I felt a bit overwhelmed with all the possibilities I could go ahead, but maybe is just me, I don´t know.

3- The Gameloop.

While I think its pretty solid, I have think about an idea to spice it up for a more engagging situations: Events.

The concept is to add special events with different risks/rewards to force the player make a decision acording to his current resource economy and roster status. So the idea is to put a NPC in the front wagon with a bell, something like a watcher, and every 3-4-5 or x number of dungeon expeditions, he will spot something in the distance, ring the bell and stop the train. Then the player will choose to accept the challenge or keep going. These events could be such as:

1- Limestone cave. Mid risk/reward. Bonus dungeon with considerably more iron and coal than usual. mid tier enemies that could be rat-mans and spiders.

2- A fallen tree blocking the railroad. No risk/ low reward. The crew will mandatorily leave the train and chop the tree to clear the way and gather some extra free wood.

3- Strange cemetery surrounded by fog. High risk/reward. Bonus dungeon with moderately more estatues and tonges than usual. High tier enemies such as undead skeletons and spectral creatures.

4- Crawling man. (rare) No risk/random reward. An injured vanilla character with random subclass and level. You can choose to help him and include into your roster or abandon him to a sure death.

5- Bandit town. Mid risk/reward. Bonus fight against a gang of pillagers that are robbing in a tavern. If you choose to help the villager and win the fight, he will reward with a high number of beers.

And so on... that´s the idea.

I have some other ideas about new items, recipes, mechanics, etc, but I think I´m already overextending the post so I will keep them for now.

And lastly I will share my final conclussion:

In general lines, I think this game is a gem, it has a lot of potential to be a masterpiece at the level of Darkest Dungeon (where I already have 1800+ hours) but needs to be polished. I know it´s an EA game yet and a one man dev team, so I´m aware it will take time to release updates, but definetely has some solid foundations and I´m looking forward for the new content. As I said in the title, great game.