Yes. We have a strong lore, but a lot of emphasis will be on the game design, and, of course, on the mechanics. Without them, there would be no metroidvania as such! The world is linear, but many branches are planned, different passages both to the right and to the left, and up and down. Of course, all this is not in the prototype, but in the beta we wanted to try to implement this at least in the first level.
Thank you for your great opinion! This is very important! About the details. About boss fights, we plan to do a lot of testing. As for the combat system itself in principle. It's funny that you mentioned map keys in this sense. Because we literally thought about how to solve this issue in a cool way. Therefore, each ability will add interactivity to the combat system, and will give abilities for combat. Well, and about the story, don't worry. Ours is huge, cool and very well thought out. It was written by 2 people, and it was around the lore that the idea for the game grew
There will be an inventory, but it will be extremely limited. More for viewing your pistol upgrades (and changing them at certain points), for notes with lore and special items with upgrades and hindrances
Thank you for writing out your opinion! However, for now we are planning not to make any divisions into different difficulty levels at all. As in more classic metroidvanias, we want to make a single difficulty level for everyone, which ranges from difficult to normal
Oh, we have a small but diverse plan from the very beginning. Firstly, we are planning a metroidvania shooter, which immediately imposes faster mechanics. And we are also planning interesting buffs and debuffs with consumables 👀👀 I wonder if it will be possible to immediately add movement, but maintain balance?
As the great creators of soulslikes said: If the game allows you to do something, use it for your passage