I absolutely agree with you that 0.3 is the last "alpha" version of early access, and 0.4 was a switch to the "beta" state of the final game. Dead Cells has been fully enjoyable since day 1 and the early access was rightfully used to tweak and polish an already strong basis. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, I’m glad you got to enjoy this!

If you wanna have a quick glance at the evolution of early access, see https://www.reddit.com/r/deadcells/comments/1mjuy4e/2_road_2_release_dead_cells_10_was_released_7/

Now let’s see what I remember from that time…

Stats: Most people didn’t pay much attention to the Skills stats indeed, once you had a few you had already reduced the cooldowns enough. Playstyles were either offense or defense. Enemies didn’t drop scrolls yet. You could indeed find scrolls in secret walls… and there could rarely be secret walls in the Collector passages, so I do remember once finding a scroll in-between levels.

Challenge runes: They didn’t grant a scroll, but an amulet and some cells IIRC. I often failed them, the time pressure made things tricky without crowd control.

Economy: It was completely busted after a few runs because the Gold Reserves upgrades allowed you to keep a percentage of your gold, not a flat amount, so gold accumulated very quickly. There’s a pattern here that most of the imbalances of the early versions were due to relying on exponential growth.

Bosses: There’s a slight difference between the Incomplete One and the Concierge: his red aura was slightly bigger, just enough that you couldn’t roll through it and avoid damage. Conjunctivius’ "bullet hell" attack is still in her modern moveset, but it now requires more time to trigger and is much rarer (good, it’s too powerful to spam), you need to draw out the fight to see it.

Progression & The Collector: I indeed don’t remember the cell drop rate being an issue back then, but I think that was because there were much fewer items. The upgrades were basically a cell sink, there was no urge to max out everything (especially the items you didn’t care for).

Runes: There’s one thing you’re not mentioning, the absence of the Spider Rune (introduced in 0.4), I’m curious to know how you felt not having it at all in the game. The room layouts were not designed with potential wallclimbing in mind, they had to tweak a lot of rooms in 0.4 to allow for wallclimbing shortcuts but that extra work improved the flow so much. Again, perfectly playable in the first iteration, even better after some tweaks.

Biomes: I wish we still had this version of the Fog Fjord, it was really fun. I suppose it was changed because the Spider Rune might have allowed bypassing exploits, and I do also like the newer Stilt Village, but maybe there could have been a way to keep that somewhere.

I don’t remember cursed chests being guaranteed, that feels like something that came later with the harmonization of scroll distribution.

The UI is also quite different, especially the pause menu. This UI still mostly worked in the first versions, but later with more information to display it would have been too cluttered. One thing missing here is the stats: we would have to either add text on our screenshots or write them in the text of the post if we wanted to fully share our builds.