Oh boy. I took notes while playing, and uh... it became kind of verbose. Even moreso when I went through and made sentence fragments into actual sentences. But I hope this helps you two out, I liked this game and I'd like to see it improve:
Loving Shea's art style and the way that Willy's propensity for pixel spotting minutiae is preserved even though he's not the one drawing the pixels this time around. Monster sprites are excellent, though some NPCs like the hyena woman and the slave could use more definition.
I thoroughly enjoyed the environment interaction style of gameplay. I feel that Willy's so good at this type of gameplay that I have very little to say about it except that it's good and I really like it. I don't feel like I have much input as far as writing, map design or field scenarios because in my eyes, it was all pulled off wonderfully.
However, there's a real RPG battle system this time around. These additional RPG mechanics do have a lot of room for improvement. If improved, they could add a lot to Willy Elektrix's already great explore-and-collect gameplay formula, but right now they feel extremely rough and in need of tweaking before they add to the experience instead of subtracting.
Starting out with field/out-of-battle stuff:
Encounter rate in starting room seems a tad too high, and running into enemies just walking between the save point and the vending machine feels off. Maybe reduce or remove encounters on the bottom section of this map.
The microbots danger tile room was decent, but it seemed out of place being the very first room you explore outside of the starting room. I'd expect to run into a room like this at least 3-4 rooms in, it might be better to have a less complicated and walking-on-eggshells experience for a new player who's just a minute into the game.
Wits reducing prices for the mid-dungeon merchant and not the vending machine in the starting room felt inconsistent. I know logically it's the difference between buying something from a machine or a person, and you could use wits to pressure a person more than you could a machine. But still, from a gameplay standpoint, I felt it was kind of nonsensical.
The flashing lights effect in the laboratory was, to be frank, bad. It almost immediately gave me eyestrain, and could even be dangerous for epileptics. Yikes. I recommend making it flash between very dark/barely visible and dimly visible -- instead of pure black to fully lit. It would be less extreme transition-wise while still successfully impairing the player's map vision in accordance with the situation. It would need more work as far as palette or map layer tweaking, but I think this room feature either needs significant improvement or you should cut it altogether.
I liked the fact that you could open up alternate paths to the starting room from deeper into the dungeon, but needing VERY high stats to make either of the two work is a huge bummer...
On the subject of stats, here is probably my biggest gameplay mechanic gripe with Void Crypt:
Picking a class will skew stats that are required to get through certain parts of the game, requiring a lot of grinding to buff up other stats just to get through everything. You can buy stats, yes, but they're expensive. Making buyable stat bonuses more expensive but having more consistent and frequent after-battle and puzzle completion stat gains could improve the situation greatly and make success in battles and puzzles feel more rewarding.
My personal experience: I picked Scribe and I've failed every single field obstacle that requires Brawn. I will need to grind up Brawn for a long time to get through things, and by the time I do that, my stats are no longer specialized to my low-Brawn class... what was the point of having classes, then?
Having multiple ways to get through some puzzles/obstacles based on stats was a great idea, it would be nice if there was more of that in the game. Also, the way that field and battle stats are completely separate feels like a wasted opportunity, and it comes off as disjointed – like the field exploration and RPG battles are too separate from one another.
On to battle stuff:
Monster rewards felt overly random; you could kill a weak enemy and get nearly 100 Deben or kill a relatively tough one and get 2 Deben. Or the other way around. Way too random. Battle rewards, or even percentages of potential rewards, should be in line with how tough an encounter is.
Encounter rate for weak enemies that give no rewards should be greatly reduced, or make flee or annihilate near 100% success rate. It's tedious grinding through enemies that die in one hit. Actually, some of the enemies deemed too weak to grant rewards take 1-2 hits, depending on RNG... meanwhile, enemies that are deemed strong enough to still grant rewards also still take 1-2 hits. Very inconsistent. Whatever system is in place to compare monster strength to current player strength might need numbers tweaking.
On that note, all random enemies die in 1-2 hits across the board, no matter the power level of your character at any point in the game. If you get strong enough some enemies will consistently die in 1 hit... but that's all. If the fight/flee system was leaning more towards “you can run from most battles if you want to” rather than the current “good luck running from anything that isn't a Sun Crow” then you could have tough enemies that take 3-5 hits on average to slay, and the player could make decisions on if they feel they can take a particular enemy on. In any case, I think that more enemy strength variety would be good.
The low health pool and riskiness of RNG damage output presents a good amount of tension in battles - do you risk death by attempting another attack or play it safe and use a Drug when you're still at mid health? Definitely preserve this element of tension, it's great.
Some sort of variety in attacks feels needed. You mostly just mash Spacebar and the only attack all enemies have is "do some damage". Variety in attack captions is fabulous, however. Having a written description of how each enemy attacks you makes it feel more threatening and dire. Combine that attack caption variety with a variety of attack strengths or effects and you'd be golden. Personally, the feeling I got while playing is that stat buff/debuff moves would bring much needed depth to the battle system. Give it a try, perhaps.
Battles feel very predictable in terms of lack of variation in attack sequence order (Sun Crows and Serpopards always go first, Apeps and Scribes always go after you, etc.) This is a good argument for finding a way to bridge the gap between the 3 field stats and the 3 battle stats. Agility should affect your battle speed, certainly, and Brawn and Wits could be incorporated in other ways, I'm certain. Perhaps Wits could make using a Weapon more effective.
Speaking of which, 'Weapon' seems really ineffective and barely does more total damage than a regular attack... and seems to be less total damage than a VITAL HIT from a regular attack. Should tweak the damage math so it's more in line with what attacking 3 times in one turn but using up a limited item should feel like. In other words, it should feel impactful. But perhaps it could be much more costly and rare.
And finally: Serket. Oh boy, Serket. She does insane damage, and based on previous encounters I had no idea I would need to raise Life and Defense to the degree that's required to deal with her. This takes a LOT of grinding to make up for.
I feel that even getting to Serket should have required more prior challenges that would test the player character's ability to take punishment. Aside from the hyena lady (who hit hard but actually had very little health), the only battle prowess the player needs is what it takes to grind through a bunch of mooks, occasionally using Drugs to heal up. My game timer is at 2 1/2 hours, I've done everything there is to do that doesn't require Brawn, and I still can't even make a real attempt to beat Serket. Kind of ridiculous. Her attacks should be toned down and perhaps she can be given more tankiness to compensate.
Here's some broken wallmaps I've found:
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