CarrionCrow: Something is glitching out in your game. All I have to back that statement up are my own playthroughs, but I'd still say that some component of your game has broken, leading to all the enemies being near superpowered.
NoNewTaleToTell: I'm hoping that's the case. I mean, I "get" the mechanics, I beat Returns on Normal with no problem, I'm playing this one on Normal and I haven't forgotten how to play, so I shouldn't be having this much trouble. If I have to do a restart then this one is probably going way down the list on the "to be played again" list, as I'm sure you can understand why.
In other news, my touchpad's scroll feature randomly stopped working. It does that occasionally if I "x out" a game when alt-tabbed out of the game, but a reboot usually fixes it. This time it didn't. Turns out it had somehow (while I was playing Dragonfall) disabled itself, I had to go into the mouse property menu to reset it. Fun times. Oh, before you ask "why don't you always just go to the mouse property menu and reset it that way instead of rebooting your computer", it's because half the time the menu won't even pop up when the touchpad scroll has glitched.
The mechanics for Dragonfall are built on from Returns. The basics are the basics for both games. Still no reason why it's all going sideways so hard.
And yeah, if you have to do a full restart due to brokenness, that sends the game straight into "fuck this shit" territory, restart date sometime between 2016 and 2025.
(Apologies for message delay. Went to fix a snack, ended up making food for people.)