Honestly, even to me the game's dev connecting system had felt a little arbitrary on first blush, but on subsequent blushes it's clear that it does a lot of important work with very little!
So, there it is: a way to make run-based progression and stage-based progression, two different kinds of power curves, integrate with each other, without the former drowning out or trivialising the latter.
The other thing is, unlike progs, you always get a full pick of your obtained devs to enable. The devs could have been scattered into the sector, needing to be siphoned like progs, but then they'd start competing with progs for resources and disrupting the base system.
This progression also matches your opponent's equivalent to devs– the bonus powerups. All powerups start enabled from floor 1 because normally the basic enemies don't meaningfully change or increase in power. Your opponent's stage power curve is always flat, with or without them.
Thus, even if you have a ton of devices with super-strong passives, you still "start" each stage with 0 devices, *just like* how you start with 1 or 2 prog. Even as your run progression keeps increasing, the *stage* progression still has roughly the same curve!
(To analogise this with Balatro or something, imagine if at the start of each ante, your five Jokers were disabled, and then you picked one to re-enable for small blind, then two more each at big blind and the boss. That's what this system resembles.)
To me, the huge thing that makes it work (which had already been locked in to the design before I'd started balance testing 2 years ago) is the system of connecting devices. You start floor 1 with all your obtained devices off, and have to pick one to enable (connect) each floor.
A big design thought I've been having about 868-BACK is how it takes a game with stage-spanning power progression (on each 8-floor stage, you start with few progs and slowly gain more as you fight through) and adds a second, run-spanning power progression system (devices) to it.
Anyway, I'll probably say more, and maybe share a few beginner tips, a little later, but for now: I encourage you to try for high scores!! Rest assured, there are rewards to be had for pushing yourself, and strange new challenges to discover.
Making sure that everything that gave big points was correspondingly difficult, and that every scoring build was relatively close together in terms of point yield. I'm really satisfied with where it's at - a LOT of design pinholes had to be threaded to make things just right.
