Six playtests in: what's actually wrong

Got six friends to play Pyrekin for an hour each over the last month. Here's the honest list of what they said versus what I thought they'd say.

What I thought would matter

• Card balance. I've been agonising over Pommel Strike numbers.
• Boss difficulty. I expected the Reaper to feel mean.
• Map UX. Bezier curves vs. straight lines, bias of branching.

What actually mattered

• "The cards all look the same." Five different testers said this. They could feel the differences in play, but the visual language was "name + paragraph" and that read as homework.
• "I don't know if I won." The boss died, the reward screen popped up, and they didn't register that anything special had happened. Boss kills need their own beat.
• "What does this relic do again?" Hover tooltips don't exist on phones, and even on desktop they fade fast. The relic compendium that just shipped is a direct answer to this.
• "Where's the music?" The drone wasn't doing it for them, and I had to admit it.

Note the pattern: zero of the issues were systems-level. They were all visceral — the game didn't feel the way they expected, and the friction was everywhere except the place I was looking.

What's queued

• Compact effect-icon strip on every card.
• Full-screen boss-victory overlay with proper celebration.
• Real procedural music — chord pad, melody, reverb send.
• Inline tutorial that doesn't auto-skip if a player rushes past it.

If the next batch of testers still flinch, I'll do another round. Building games is less about being right than about being willing to be wrong on schedule.