Bloodletter

TL;DR love this game, want to see the good ending. REALLY EVIL TOWARDS BAD RNG. [softlock]

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Does anyone have a video of the ending for beating the entity? Reached day 42 and spent a few hours before pc crashed due to being unable to get rid of all the blessing cards or skip the mandatory choice cards.

Genuinely trying to beat the last stage while seemingly getting stuck in a softlock due to bad rng with cards made this fight feel more like a chore to complete. Really want to see the ending but considering the fact getting lucky with cards, handouts and HOPING the executioner, purifier, butcher and minstrel are all alive for that final round is just stupid.

And then there was possible and accidental RNG manipulation. Always started off with the blessing cards which honestly were WEAK compared to the cards you get each round. Like during 2 nights, got the exact same hand layout which means there was something done to likely get that hand or just pain bad luck.

And after getting so much cards that they could not be shown on screen, it made the butcher bad as in order to remove those cards underneath your upgraded cards, you need to remove.. your upgraded cards which were better than the ones you want to remove. Not to mention removing 2 cards despite being forced to get another one plus getting blessings which might kill you if you don't play something else makes the butcher a means to delay the game crashing from too many cards in your deck.

Like maybe there is an easier way since people are getting wins under 30 days but trying to beat it by yourself is a lot more nicer.  So please, does ANYONE have a video of the ending?
 

I really enjoyed your game. It's promising ! It took me 1 run to be familiar with mechanics, and, on my second run I win in 13 days. Some character's abilities are broken in combo. Take a good card, buff it in purity and health, clone it and remove bad cards and enjoy your run. The game could really be more difficult ! But I guess you already saw this. I hope you'll add a campaign mode, with more lore on the game, which has a good difficulty curve. Great work !

I really enjoyed the game! I won on my first try, 18 days had passed and I only lost one villager! It was very fun trying to figure out what cards would be best to upgrade as well as managing the abilities so you can not be in a stalemate with the entity for a while! It was all about balancing the purity with the health the further in you got!

It was... a real battle ToT

In all seriousness, it took me, what ? Probably 4 gameplays and 31 days to manage a single win ? Still with 2 villagers dead (heyy, taking a month to exorcise the thing wouldn't be so bad if it was in real life) ? Well, I can say that in the end lots of errors were made and lots of discoveries as well- those blessed cards really saved me when i absolutely wasn't expecting them, wish i had known about them before my fourth trial but oh well

Very fun game, easy enough to understand and with the possibility to establish a strategy and go in a certain way with the choices possible after each day, super neat artstyle and general game design

I absolutely loved playing it despite my despair lolol (also maybe i should've read the rules hmmm... but thanks to have included them, truly, I'm sure it helped a lot of us :), having a bit of a challenge is always nice and the game was just too good (playstyle-wise and design-wise) to stop half-way there.

I don't usually play card games but this was really fun. I don't know why I got a game over though. Maybe there's only a certain amount that can die? I still had plenty of villagers 

first gameplay and managed to win in 12 days with no deaths! cured sickness as much as possible and purified these disbelieving villagers /lh

this was so much fun and the artwork is gorgeous. thank you for the game!

Beautiful game, loved the artworks 

There should be an endless mode or something

A fantastic demo! I got hooked on the gameplay, and was able to get the hang of it after losing twice and played for a few hours after. I saw in another comment that there will be a tutorial added later on, and I think that would be a good addition. The look and feel of the game is great, and I think you have something really special here.

A few notes:

The text size of the effects of the cards could be bigger, to help with ease of reading

After you fill up both book pages with cards, any additional cards on the buff/destroy phase become zoomed and are displayed either outside the page or under other cards. This might be a browser issue (Firefox) but I figured I would let you know. Maybe having the ability to turn the book page or scroll down the page to buff/destroy cards would fix this issue

If villagers die, maybe there could be additional villagers that can take their place, to prevent issues with having enough purity to eventually win, but that issue could also be avoided with other balancing factors 

Overall I think this is a great demo and I hope you keep working on it :) 

Awesome game, I really enjoyed playing it.

It's pretty good, I've got to play more. I don't know if it's me, but the blue-ish filter that gets the screen when you put the first card doesn't go away and it's kinda annoying. Aside from that, it's immersive, the art is super cool and I want to understand and beat it.

Cool game, beat it in 15 days. I hope the game will be expanded. :)

Enjoyed this, but when you increase your hand too much it blocks you from selecting certain cards. Being able to use keystrokes to cycle through your hand would be a good solution I think.

took a while to get into it but interesting concept.

Great game.

One bug: Game gets stuck if last character in list (Butcher) is dead. Button to continue doesn't show up.

Very unique and interesting concept! The fact this is is a prototype definitely shows, I won on my first attempt (22 days, 2 villagers dead) but it was a bit of a drag, it probably took half that time just to get the first bloodstone and in the end I was practically just grinding until my low purity villagers showed up. I'll be keeping an eye on the steam page though, this has the potential to be something really special!

Additionally there could be an overflow mechanic where additional purity and health beyond 100 decreases over time, but provides a small buff depending on how much.

I feel like there needs to be an overall time limit, or restraint  that can help break deadlocks in the mid-game when there are at least 2+ villagers dead. I keep getting stuck trying to meet 660 purity, with only 6 villagers of 100 purity each, and I'm pretty sure its impossible.

I don't know how the other player completed it in 3 days while I used 60+ attempts to do it in 4, and yet barely. Otherwise 7 or 8 with an average RNG luck.
Thank you for such a nice game! Honestly, I wouldn't mind if it was a tad longer. Also, purity gain is much more preferable to any other kind of choice or action, so everything else just becomes secondary. Great art selection, btw. 

I don't play card games, neither do I get attracted to these kinds of art styles, but through the magic of itch.io's random game selector, both of these personal biases was put aside to gladly witness this gem. 

Great game! Got hooked on the second run.

This is me whenever someone starts disbelieving with 20 purity left.

Unable to start the game. It loads, I can read the manual fine but when I try to get into the game, I only get a black screen with a sad looking red folder in the center.

oh my gosh.. this game is amazing. i have been hooked on this game for a few days now. everything about this game is an absolute win!!! the design of the villagers is really insane! every detail is so creative. i haven't won a single round yet (mainly because once i lose 2-3 villagers i just quit) but i have belief!

neat

Cool concept and gameplay but it froze mid session and I lost all my progress

Design is pretty nice i would love it but its pretty hard to find out what exactly to do. I would recommend to add some tutorial for people like me :D 

BBRO! IT IS THE COOLEST GAME I HAVE EVER SEEN, cool web design, I can play this game THROUGH THE BROWSER! 
Cool gameplay! AND IT IS FREE

Good luck in development!

Cool game, I won and I enjoyed it.
The game seems a bit too easy right now, because if you don't die imidietly you can just stack enough bonuses to garantee a win eventualy. So maybe the dificulty should scale with time, or as you get more bloodstones.
I liked the villager system where they have their own abilities, very cool!

The cards effects were also prety nice and varried enough to allow for impactfull decision making.

I liked the graphics and sound effects.

I only saw 1 gameplay issiue, and that is that the vilagers you get seems to be random, so sometimes you get only healthy vilagers and not the ones you need to cure, I think I lost 2 vilagers to this, because I am prety sure I was keeping everyone I got healty enough to not die.

So maybe you should get the unhelthiest vilagers to come to you, or there could be cards that change which vilagers come next (come next time, dont come next time, choose which vilager comes nexttime etc).

All in all great prototype.

I'm a long time downloader from itch io, but I just made an account tonight so I could say how much I loved this game! It's truly so fun, and the music and visuals make it so atmospheric. Since this one is a demo(I think?) I can't wait to play the final version!

Awesome. Super fun and creative. Aesthetically its awesome. I know this is a prototype so Im sure youre on top of some of this already, but heres some constructive criticism:

- Id recommend putting card names horizontally at the top of the card. Its atmospheric with all these medieval superstition cures, but when you have to read medieval font sideways its more natural to ignore the name and just stick to the mechanics. I couldnt tell you after playing and enjoying the game what the name of any card is or what its meant to represent, which is a shame.

- In game text is too small. I have good eyesight and have to really focus to read the text. Between that and the font I first read "health" as "death" and thought it strange that high death was good.

- In order to see some reminder text you have to hover over it with the cursor, but the cursor obscures the text.

- Its not clear as far as i can tell when you get more villagers. I lost 3 on my first playthrough. As far as I understand that puts you in a no-win state since you cant go above 700 purity. So if its possible to get a new villager you should know, and if not you should lose the game for losing 3 villagers, not 4.

- Losing and gaining health is super OP once you get to 100 health for the first time. You start snowballing Blessings real fast. Maybe once youve gotten a blessing from a villager reaching 100 healths you cant get another blessing from that villager unless their health drops below 50 first and that resets them? Youll figure it out better than me, but some sort of balancing there Id recommend for sure.

- Maybe the entity should either get stronger after set number of days OR when you reach a health+purity treshold? The way it works youre incentivized to focus completely on health, belief and sickness and just make sure purity is high enough that you dont lose villagers. So the game encourages you to play an anti-immersive strategy.

I wish you luck with the upcoming steam release. Criticized it because I think its fundamentally awesome and I want to help make it better. I hope youll take it like that. I think you have a winner here.

Love this game but MAN is it difficult to deal 1 bloodstone damage.

Cool font, design and mechanics but it is REALLY brutal if you get unlucky with cards, sickness or don't constantly add purity to normal cards and forced to focus on those -10ish purity cards.

Saw you in the comments talking about difficulty settings and can't wait for that update. 8/10 prototype.

Really nice job! Rare to see such a creative set of mechanics, really required some thinking to create a strategy.

For me, it was somewhat easy (won on first try), but I did lose a few villagers. It *felt* hard, but actually losing was difficult.

It might be worth laying out how the sickness mechanic works. The text was really hard to read (on my browser, the mouse obscures the explanation text no matter how you move, Safari OSX), but also I don't think anywhere explains how the sickness is distributed. Same for disbelief. Even if it's random, it would be nice to know what kind of random. Randomly in the night? Randomly upon losing faith?

Also, the nights were confusing. Why did some villagers not come to see me during the day? I often had someone die because they did not come to see me (maybe for multiple days in a row? Unclear).

So impressed with this prototype! I LOVE the art style and overall vibe here. The cards need a little bit of balancing and there's some readability issues with the text, but I'm sure you're already working on those. For a prototype, this one held my interest very strongly--I'm excited to see what else you add to this before release! Well done!

Fun game, tricky until you can get the first few days right but then it kinda snowballs

This was a ton of fun. I love the style and the designs and the game loop is very gripping. Sick game (haha). 

It took me 18 days to win.

Cool game has great art. Wanted to let you know if you click the books while placing the cards it will get stuck on the book page. 

The game is really interesting and the artwork is so good. Congrats!