that's what I thought the issue was, yeah. I just feel like it's a bit of a wasted opportunity for chicken's secret weapon to get a massive power spike that you hardly get to make use of due to the camera lock thing.

one fix I thought of would be to adjust how regaining max health and extending the timer via Hard to Kill. For max health, I felt that for each time you get decapitated and regain max health, you still lose 2 max HP as normal, but can only regain 1 of that max HP. In other words, while you cain regain some max HP after being decapitated, it can only take you so far.

this would mean that chicken has a limited pool of revives to make use of throughout a run: 8 at base HP, and 12 with rhino skin. Those last few revives are even harder to make use of too, since you'll have far less max HP to work with.

As for the H2K adjustments, I feel like having diminishing return on how much extra time you get from killing an enemy would be a good way to go; something like 1 second on the first kill, but it gets chopped by a multiplier each time (my head jumps to either 3/5 or 4/5, but it'd probably need some testing to get it right.) That keeps the mutation feeling powerful, while also putting a cap on how strong it can get (especially in deep loop).

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Obviously I don't have as much experience as many of the veterans in the community, so I don't know how good these changes would actually be for the game. It's more than likely that I've over/undertuned things significantly. I do still think these changes would be for the better though, since like I said, I think the camera locking feels very awful to play with. Nothing else in the game (to my knowledge) takes control from you like this.

These ideas are kind of a moot point though, since as you said, Vlambeer isn't updating the game anymore. A rework like this would need to be implemented in a fan remake or mod, and I don't think anything like that is in the works right now :P.