Feedback: Trial of Sekhemas

I loved absolutely everything about the game - yes, including the previous inability to dodge roll out of bodyblock and including the far lower amount of loot and side quests. It all feels like a game going back to the roots of ARPG and great storytelling without polluting the whole experience with those MMO-Style FOMO generating dopamine shots, timed events and notifications on every corner every 10 minutes.

that is... until I unlocked Trial of Sekhmas.

At first I thought this needs some polishing, but after doing a few runs I feel like this is genuinely the least fun, most annoying and least challenging "challenge" of any ARPG I ever played.

First of all, a Trial should feel hard in a way that makes sense and can be explained in Universe. This is not the case here. I tried first at level 21 and got to the final boss on first try, but only had very little honor left and didn't know what honor meant, so I died immediately, okay, a bit annoying, but maybe I just missed some hidden mechanic regarding that... next time, watch honor.

Next run I discovered that you can actually clear a trial room and then have time to pick stuff up. Great! Or so i thought... Because, even though there are a lot of chests and drops feel rewarding, it immediately punishes if you decide to Townportal - which, btw, doesn't show a warning that you won't be able to return and have to walk all the way back. So I find myself ignoring even blue items that look good because I'm not gonna run manually for 5 minutes just to dump my loot in the Stash. And everytime another Item drops I hate myself and your gamedesign for that. Why do you make it so hard to keep the loot that drops, it's just frustrating.

Okay, ignore loot, just rush through!

Ignoring enemies, dodging traps, killing final enemy in a room. Cleared it without taking damage, great! Balaba appears, I wait near her to see if she says something, and suddenly the post-death effect of that rockthing happens and takes off ~20% of my honor. In the next room (kill Portal Summoners) I bitchslap the large enemies almost instantly, but I fail to see tiny bugs that go near me and zap me for smth like 30 honor per hit and they are fast AF and for some weird reason I cant even hit them with my spells if I click them directly, because my sorcerer will always aim at a slightly off point than where I click and those critters are so small that this is enough to miss them. WTF? (generally speaking, aiming seems bugged in most directions with most sorcerer abilities.)

Okay, next try, only pick rooms where you can easily dodge enemies. Done. Full Honour when starting to fight endboss, great. Dude drops one rock at me and a tiny volcano randomly hits me, 50% honour gone while my HP is still at ~60%.
Fight boss to 5%, lots of rocks fall, hit me, dead with 50% HP.

And the worst part is that there isn't even any in-universe explanation as to why we can't get hit by absolutely meaningless weaklings. I'm pretty sure I never even got below 50% hp when I first attempted that at lvl21 and yet I kept losing because some ant has sprayed me with a tiny drop of acid or elites does crazy AoE which also does almost 0 damage but wipes my honour. Also, traps deal very little damage but take off insane amounts of Honor.

I also keep getting tons of sacred water and I don't see any way to make use of it. You can use it to fill up honour at those little wells, but that only takes 5 and i usually lose my runs with 100+.

The fact that many rooms only have 1 or 2 paths to move forward is also boring, I regularly have to do 2 or 3 of the same trials consecutively.

Hourglass Trial is just boring and makes me want to quit if I get 2 in a row.

The random modifiers like boons and afflictions also seem far too random, some are completely negligible while others, which can sometimes be forced upon you due to only 1 path forward, are almost guaranteed run-ending, especially in combination with a second debuff.

It feels like all the Relics only serve to lessen the suffering which Honor-System was designed to inflict. And I'm not talking about ingame suffering of our Player Character here...

I don't see a single reason why you couldn't just buff the enemies damage by ~300% and remove honor completely. That way their attacks are about as dangerous as now, but it doesn't just feel like a damn bad joke when you die with like 70% HP while the final boss is at 2%.

Generally speaking, it very much feels like Trials of Sekhema is one of those situations in which devs added some mechanics for the sole reason of creating a frustrating problem for players which can then be solved by giving them random drops and random chance on easy rooms or good boons.

I remember Jonathan stating that he dislikes this practice in game design, so I'm extremely disappointed by this, but at the same time his statement gives me hope that this might be changed or removed from final version.