Samurai Shampoo Classic

Take with a grain of salt: when i started writing this, I hadn't bothered to go past the first boss. In between then and finishing this review, I've put in a few dozen minutes more in just to make sure i wasn't tripping, because some of my complaints sound kinda dumb considering the genres of this game. I'm also setting this as a positive review bc i dont feel like it's a bad game for what it is, despite my complaints. This game is ok, and thats fine. it's probably a test project for the devs to learn more about the tools of the game engine and how to use computer code language in general, and I like that. However, the gameplay is... not to my taste (I am extremely spoiled on Hades I & cult of the lamb). Hitstun is... nonexistent? IDK if that's an intentional feature or an oversight, but in other roguelikes (Hades, Cult of the Lamb, , putting enemies into a short lasting state that interrupts attacks is pretty much standard to have. it rewards players for getting a hit in by letting them effectively perform combos if the affected enemy has no moves that provide a way to escape or contend with incoming hits. There is also no windup/startup animations for the majority of enemy attacks to give the player a heads up, save for the Bomb Tosser Mimic's bombs and the red guy having one animation of red pixels showing up for a bit that looks like a running charge that I think(?) is an attack. on top of that, getting hit does not have a lot of communicated significance, often resulting in me looking at my health and thinking "Huh?" because i'm at 1 or 2 hp and don't remember noticing getting hit since spawning. With these three features (or lack thereof) acting together, it can often result in me wondering why i died. Which is a huge part of why Broadsword is good. Huge range means you dont have to be as close to an enemy to deal damage, giving more room to run away/juke while attack recharge does its thing. Big damage means less hits needed to kill, which means interacting with enemies less. Big weapons like these in other games usually have noticeable attack startup to offset these strengths but i think startup on attacks may be frame 1 universally. I hope this can be of use for the developers in any future projects, and i'd love to hear some opinions on my review/ideas on what they could do differently next time.