I started in my usual hubris of attempting to intuit how to play rather than just reading, yet I had not realized that I would find it to be more esoteric than I expected; enemies have potent strengths and weaknesses and also look identical save for their status icon showing their element. Spamming the basic elemental attack ran me out of time in short order, and the combination spell probably wasn't something I was privy to stumble upon due to the pace of the game. Even once I had learned it, I assumed I needed to run past the elemental bullet, turn around, and fire back at it. Thankfully I was able to intuit myself out of that hole and simply shoot a double, although the timing between shots feels sticky.
The game is a finely paced and engaging Nerve beater with a null progression; that is, even the most substantial change between levels, the upgrades, are hard to verify because the health and shield bars don't change in size, and attacks are inevitably entangled in elemental damage calculations that I can't see. My radical course of action would be to just take away the levels and centralize everything around the timer mechanic; victory could entail receiving enough time bonuses to reach the maximum, and health/upgrades could be sprinkled in media res, which inverts their ambiguity into a skillful acquittal that I don't have to question if I wasted my time on, because I never had the chance to.
Vampire Survivors is basically what I just described, which uses the swarm of enemies itself as a timer; it's obviously a more economical design whereas the timer adds another dimension requiring support from all adjacent features, such as the clarity of visual designs and the mechanics of sustaining time. On the other hand, the opportunity for dimensionality is perhaps what Vampire Survivors lacks the most, since the diversity of strategies are all fundamentally boiled down to crowd control. Can there be such thing as a pacifist "bullet heaven," or will it remain a style of beater that prides itself on maximal stimulation and destruction.