Oh, man, it's been a while since I've played Highly Responsive to Prayers.

It's an easy joke, but this feels like an expansion of that idea, and that's not a bad thing. This works pretty well, and the health being the processor temperature is a cool (ha) way of giving a reason to have more than one hit. Neat.

This is a lot better with the changes to weapons. There's a little more variety and the weapons are starting to feel like they have more identity and more specific utility, and that makes the levels more interesting to think through. Adding the lightning and the aura balls was a good choice, and the more unique levels are more fun. It might be my own style, but I just had a lot of fun adding more floggers and making them faster. . I appreciate also being able to choose your starter for experimenting. I did notice I was able to pick up the weapon I started with in the level up pool. It basically made aura proc twice.

As it stands, Aura has the best overall utility because it's the best weapon for hitting chests. I'd still suggest just touching chests to open them because it makes the utility of Aura almost a must pick, but other people may have different experiences.

Any other things are minor. Enemies still scale up a little too fast, so outside really specific, lucky levels, it's very hard to get your footing. But that might be what you're going for, so it's not a big deal if this is the feeling you're going for.

Good update.

All right. For all the tweaking of the difficulty you're trying to do, you're missing the thing that's actually messing up the pace and making the game unfun which is that the weapons are all crap. Early on this was understandable, but this has never changed through all these versions.

Damage is outstripped by enemy health almost immediately. At 30 seconds, the base whip can't kill the minotaurs in one hit anymore. Weapons all go off very, very slowly. The amount of kiting goblins you have to do before you shoot makes those shots easy to miss because of how much other stuff you run into and because the window is so small at once every 5 seconds. These together make actually leveling up become overly difficult because how unreasonable it is to cut through or kite enemies so you have a path to get to the XP bobbles, meaning if you haven't gotten a worthwhile level up in the first about 20 seconds, your run is in trouble.

And that worthwhile level up thing is the real problem here. If the level system was better, a lot of this would be alleviated, but what you get from levels is pretty bad. Having every weapon have to every stat individually one point at a time per one level means the level up pool is extremely polluted with mediocre to outright pointless upgrades, especially given that those upgrades can appear multiple times in the same level up. Knockback and stun barely do anything when they hit, and unless they're attached to the Garlic equivalent, the small area of everything makes them very hard to hit more than a small fraction of the enemies, which is pointless. This is why the Bible equivalent is the only Good weapon because it's consistently out and does decent damage out the gate, so it's fairly usable in general and actually decent for dealing with the enemies you're kiting.

To compare with VS directly, every weapon starts solid enough to kill enemies for at least the first 3 minutes, which gives you plenty of time to build up levels. Every equip has its own upgrade track that suits the item specifically both in stats and unique effects, only takes up one level up choice slot, and levels almost always give you a new piece of equipment as long as you have the space for them still. This means good rolls on the level up pool are more for specific challenges and goals and not as much almost immediate potential deal breakers. It also helps that the weapons are mostly unique and interesting to use and look at rather than "the same thing but firing up and down counts as a new weapon."

I promise that all of the fiddling you're doing with the numbers for pickups, enemy amount and health, and the clock will be much better if you spend a few updates making the weapons better.