Drawn Down Abyss is a solid little game with an interesting premise but flawed execution. The art is good and the music is fittingly mysterious/wild, if a bit repetitive. The world art does get a bit old, and there aren't that many unique layouts, but it's enough for the length of time you'll probably be playing.
The core gameplay loop has a lot of potential. Your first run has you starting a new "deck" that will persist between runs. From this deck, you will be dealt a handful of cards at the beginning of each floor. More cards can be added to you hand from your deck by either picking them up off the ground or playing a "draw" card. The goal of each floor is to simply survive until the trapdoor to the next opens. At the start of a new floor, you can choose to change your deck using one to two cards "dropped" from the previous roundd.
There are three general types of cards that enhance your character: movement, combat, or defense. Movement cards will usually add jumps, dashes, or teleports. Combat cards will be either permanent or timed damage-dealing attacks. Defense cards could be healing or shields. Cards are played by from your hand and cost different amount of mana. You can get more mana either via timed regeneration or combat.
The issues start to appear with the enemy AI and placement. At the start of a new floor, it seems like a fixed number of enemies spawn. Their variety is fairly good, but they can broadly categorized into two types: ground based, and air based. Air based enemies will usually fly directly at you or hover, while ground based enemies will typically fire projectiles or leap if within range. The problem with this is that once ground enemies reach the bottom of the map, they're basically stuck there until they die. Air-based enemies will follow the player, but are typically pretty easy to dodge. It's fairly simple to abuse this mechanic to just wait out the timer and hop to the next floor.
To make things more interesting, you may be tempted to try the combat route instead. The issue with this is that there doesn't seem to be any reason to kill enemies and, in some cases, you're actively punished for doing so. Releasing a 5 mana attack will almost never get you a return of more than 5 mana, causing most offensive tactics to be net losses. Additionally, a fixed number of enemies are present at all times. Enemies spawned at the start of the floor won't despawn unless killed, regardless of if they're on the screen. The moment an enemy dies, another will take its place in your field of view. This leads to chains where you unleash a couple attacks only to be beaten down by a never-ending stream of monster spawning near you. This leads to either running out of cards, mana, or health. Enemies will also sometimes spawn directly on top of you, or in your path, causing (seemingly) unavoidable damage.
There seems to be an end goal after about 20-30 floors, with floors taking around 90 seconds. The unavoidable damage from combat requires luck of the draw and decent defensive cards to have any real success. This cuts down on specialization, and makes for very slow hit-and-run gameplay.
Drawn Down Abyss is worth a look as a curiosity, and I appreciate the commitment to the concept. At some point I may try to see what's at the bottom of the abyss. Unfortunately, I have a feeling the run that does it will involve a lot of standing around waiting for the door to open while I kite enemies far away from the floor of the map. Edit: Having played a bit more, things do get more chaotic. The same issues still apply with enemies spawning on you.
Technical stuff: It ran well enough at 1440p, although only in fullscreen (1080p is the highest resolution I saw windowed). There's no ingame sound option. It doesn't like to be alt-tabbed. The menus can only be navigated using keyboard (untested with a controller). The way the window is displayed stopped both Nvidia and Steam overlays from showing.
