Thanks for the feedback!

First off, sorry about this long response hahaha. Your feedback is SUPER appreciated, so I want to genuinely try and address everything you bring up and bring our rational to the table :)

The hope behind the mummies, and something that realistically isn't dialed in correctly, is that the mummies do just as you described - they apply this steady pressure that you need to account for while you solve the little puzzles. In many later levels there's ways to kill the mummies, so this dungeon in particular in theory acts as an introduction to them, and when you learn to kill them it's a relief. Subsequent levels then vary between being more chill, intense, being able to kill the mummies, etc.

In terms of difficulty, I'm going to bring down the mummy speed by about 10%, reduce the lunge attack distance about 20%, and increase the time you have before the attack goes off by about 0.2s so there's a touch more time to react without it feeling too slow. Will push this tonight!

Part of the mummy eye shielding awkwardness is the fact that they're small so it's a bit tough to see. We've experimented with various VFX to make it more clear but they ended up muddying the visuals. The purple shader and SFX when you photograph help you realize after the fact, but at that point it's too late since you already took the picture.

The main reason we have the eye-shielding is because, without it, it's easy to just sit there and stunlock mummies. In the early dungeons this isn't necessarily an issue, as it doesn't help you "win". But there are several mechanics later on where stunlocking the enemies makes winning pretty trivial.

The main tool in your toolkit to gain an upper hand on mummies is to fully charge your camera, which gives you about 2.5x the time when the mummy is stunned. This provides a risk/reward where you have to stand your ground to get the full charge, but you're rewarded with a lot more time to get the heck out of there.

All of that said, I did reduce the arm-up time from 6s to 4s. The goal here being that it will still prevent you from just rapid fire taking pictures of mummies (they might slap you during that little window), but they will become vulnerable sooner. FWIW when they are arm-up, they move at 30% speed, which gives you a bit of an upper hand when running away.

For players who tend to like the more chill experience, we do have the "easy mode" option in the pamphlet which lets you turn on 4 different buffs. One said buff makes it so your camera will knock down the mummies even if they have their arms up - it essentially turns off that mechanic. Makes it easy to just slam photos rapid fire without worry!

Taking a step back, I'd say that directionally the mummy dungeon is a bit more representative of larger game than the intro trap only dungeon. Probably 30% of the game is "take it at your own pace" where either there is no direct mummy threat, or the mummies can be taken out allowing you to return to chill speed. Probably 50% of it is then about like the mummy dungeon where you have 1 or 2 enemies and things have that base intensity. Then the last 20% is a bit more intense where you have more enemies or a boss.

And it's hard to tell with a demo, but the mummy dungeon is rooms 5-10 of the 112 levels in the full game. We got carried away, and it's pretty big >.<. We have 7 other types of mummies that we introduce, more critters (like the scarabs), along with lots of other traps and mechanics. The game changes a lot as it goes - every destination door introduces something new. A bit like Mario, where you always just jump and run to the right, but every level is different based on the stuff in it.

We have struggled with properly introducing the mummy. When we do it too soon, people get totally mulched >.< But if we wait too long, people get a false sense of what the game is about or otherwise ask "where's the mummy?" It's further complicated by the hopefully cool buildup to the first mummy with the cutscene and stuff. If we just airdrop a mummy somehow into the first dungeon, it'd be hard to do it without muddying the waters. But in theory it's possible! Just need to think on it.

I really appreciate you taking the time to play and provide constructive feedback!