There are a lot of things in shattered that need strategies, which weapons/amor/seeds/potions/scrolls you wanna keep, what you spend your skills on, what artifacts and enhancements/glyphs you prefer. Alchemy can do a lot and you have to decide what to keep and what to turn into energy. A lot of things can be accomplished in various ways (alone how to identify scrolls and potions) and it all has their pros and cons.

My mage strategy is often to dump all upgrades into magic missile staff. And the new blacksmith into armor, which is equivalent to three scrolls of upgrade.

Shattered also introduced some mechanics that allow farming, at least more than in PD.

I didn’t manage to ascend yet. But I agree, I either die early on or I get to the final boss. For a long time I didn’t even get to the king.

There can be always situation that can get you killed, but on average it works. In my last run I stepped on a distortion trap which I didn’t discover yet and the monsters triggered a summoning trap and these monsters triggered a storm trap … among the spowned things were an evil eye, a normal scorpion and an acid scorpion. You can just have horrible luck sometimes, but I still managed to get out of there with teleportation scroll … and a health potion and blessed ankh when I ran into the acid scorpion later.

And I’d really recommend the desktop version, that’s where I got to the last boss for the first time. Keyboard&mouse input is less error prone than touch, you see a lot more on a bigger screen and steam allows to take notes (where and how you got what kind of potion/scroll and rooms you didn’t finish or find) which can be overlayed with transparency.