The new 5/30 build (which is actually already up, but I found these when going to write the post and wanted to stop and respond first) should address the swarming issues: enemy groups used to communicate with each other about your location if they were in sight of each other, so it was very easy for them to “chain” together if they were already semi-close by and any of them spotted you.

Demon’s smallest hallway is 2-wide, as you identified. I was hoping that would serve the same purpose as the 1-wide hallways in other roguelikes, adjusted for the fact that most of the time, you’ll have a party of 4. I could experiment with 1-wide hallways, but I’m not sure there’d be a good way to utilize a party of 4 in those.

It’s true Demon doesn’t have the full strength weakness-smashing bit. This is in part a concession to permadeath: one mistake or even just being outranged by one group of enemies could lead to more or less unavoidable death if weakness-smashing was at say, the Shin Megami Tensei IV levels. On the other hand, I agree there may need to be more here… I’ve been considering following the Persona Q model instead perhaps (after hitting a weakness, you can use abilities at 0 SP cost next turn… might also allow bypassing of lesser cooldowns like Breath, Light, Dark, etc.)

There’s no money in Demon, so demons don’t ask for that. As for questions… I’ve been thinking about that recently. Initially I skipped those because I felt like they would either have to be largely or entirely random, or risk being something you just dealt with by spoilers. In SMT games this is less noticeable because you can always just grind for another shot at a demon, but Demon doesn’t have infinite respawns and also lets you recruit bosses, so some deals are once in a game. That said, I agree some of the flavor of negotiation has been lost by not having questions, so I’m trying to think of a fair way to work them in.

Thank you again for the feedback! Sorry again about the spam filter, until I figure it out, I’ll keep a much closer eye on the comment queue.

EDIT: Think I fixed the spam filter. It was apparently filtering any comments with “.com” in the e-mail address. :X

Dungeon generation is also not my favorite, because you’ve blocked off a very important strategy from other roguelikes: funneling through a small hallway. There’s no way to take on demons by yourself in the beginning because of this, kind of ruins the mood.

My last complaint is for linking, the demons only ask for health or healing items, or sacrificing a partner. Do they ever ask for money or just ask questions? Maybe I haven’t just found the right demons yet.

I’d complain about the keyboard bindings but they’re really not that bad. And the commands make sense.