And like Sam saw, I didn’t have a good system in play to reward a player who took the time to get several level 5 cryptids. It was really because, as a free game in an entertainment space with tens of thousands of free/paid options, I can’t realistically allow a player who invested that much time to not see the best ending. So I could have written something to detect the overall strength of the player’s cryptid army, and had monsters to run interference at the end, but what if those monsters won? Then it would behoove a player to do the minimum to get by… I dunno. I wish I had a team in place to bounce ideas and solutions like that off of.

Actually, most of the really difficult bits are optional; I didn’t even notice the exorcism puzzle on my first playthrough. There are a few fiddly puzzles — the stigmata thing had me stuck for a while — but overall, the problem is not so much that it’s hard as that it doesn’t do a great job of signaling the difficulty level, such that it’s very easy to get the idea that it’s very hard. (On my first playthrough I spent hours levelling up monsters to L5, and then beat the final boss with a cheesy L2 Behinder.)