Beginner Hotshoe flash help please

Hey everyone, looking for some beginner flash advice please. I have a Gen 2 Reflex Lab Mini hotshoe flash I got to couple with my Ricoh GRIII, which I’ve been happily using for years but always wished had a built in flash like its predecessor. However, I’ve never managed to get good flash photos with the hotshoe one - the light is cold and over-bright/harsh, or if I expose down to compensate, can only describe it as producing grey and sad photos. It also fires inconsistently, which is extremely irritating. Altogether this means I always wind up giving up trying and settling for hyper-noisy no-flash images.

I do very often want to take photos in night-time environments though, so I want to get to grips with using flash. Before I engage in any more crazy schemes to get my hands on a GRI/II specifically to have a built in one, I would really appreciate any tips for how I can start getting some nicer pics out of the setup I have. (Though if the inconsistent firing is a hardware problem then not really sure if that’s surmountable?)

I’ll admit, I’ve never really gotten into using flash generally, so I’m sure there are some basics I should get my head around to start with - really any advice from more experienced photographers would be appreciated. Cheers

From the small amount of research I’ve done, your options are limited.

I wouldn’t use an on camera flash with no tilt swivel head, or with no TTL, and whilst it seems you can get a TTL flash, it’s still a tiny option with no tilt swivel for bounce.

It looks like the Godox triggers for Pentax work with your camera, so I’d be getting one of those and a decent sized flash for off camera.

But the biggest improvement would be made from understanding the basics of bounce, modifiers etc

The really good news is that your cameras leaf shutter makes for some interesting options.