Probably took twice that long counting my deaths.

Anyway, took some notes while playing:

Game looks fantastic. Holy heck.

The Double Jump feels a little awkward to use for platforming since it doesn't give you any height if you're holding left or right at the same time and you usually need to move horizontally as well when you need the double jump. Maybe I just needed more time to get used to it, but it really annoyed me.

Wall jump is a little esoteric. I only figured out how to do it because I did it by accident. Is it explained somewhere that I missed? I think I'd have gotten stuck near the end without it.

Found a bug. If you enter the inventory screen in the room with the combat rifle, you can still highlight it in the inventory screen with the cursor. I didn't think to check if it also happened when I dropped it.

Would've been nice to get a pop-up telling me how to switch weapons after I picked up the combat rifle or pulse rifle.

Another bug: After I died embarrassingly after picking up the  rifle, I got kicked back to my save before the robot boss. When I got the grenades again, I checked to see if they'd damage me while exploding the floor, and it seems like the map didn't know where I was until I exited the room.

Gotta say, not having enemies drop any health makes the game feel VERY hard core, and it feels kind of incongruous with the way they drop plenty of grenades and ammo.

I keep wanting to cook the grenades by holding the button, but that's not a mechanic. :(

I noticed the smooth pillars reflecting the main character when I got close to them. Jeez, now you're just being extra lol, stop making the rest of us look bad.

I got up on the spot after dying to the big green boss thingy the first time? It didn't happen again so I don't imagine it's intended. To go into more detail, I died, it gave me the option to return, but instead of sending me back to the save point I just did the regular get-up-at-the-altar animation right there in the boss room. My health was still 0.

Would've been very cinematic if the boss hadn't immediately murdered me again anyway.

The boss' moves seem to have very varying openings for actually hitting it back. Like the shove it does seems completely unpunishable, while it's just eating shot after shot when it spawns the little purple dudes. Shove is also really hard to dodge if it starts up outside of the screen.

After five or so deaths in a row to the boss, the very slow get up animation at the save point when loading your save gets a little grating. Please hurry him up if I spam jump or something.

I played in windowed mode since that's what it did by default and I couldn't find a menu, and my constant frantic clicking at enemies with the pistol got me to leave the window a lot by accident. I can't think of a way to avoid this myself, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Final verdict; jesus christ this is good. The mix of 2D and 3D is incredibly cohesive, and you use it to do some really cool stuff. And while the gameplay itself is not as impressive, it's still very solid. Hot damn am I glad I played this.

Really excellent start. I won't reiterate all the things that are specifically excellent, because it's most of it. I've been admiring the clips of this you posted in the thread so I'm glad to finally get my hands on it. My feedback, is that I personally don't think the camera, controls and movement are quite there yet. Close, but there's a certain last 5% which I think this still needs to achieve. The three are tightly related, so its difficult to change one without changing the others.

When building the camera, there are two dangers. The first is that you're the developer, you've played with this camera over and over and over and over. It's very easy to become accustomed to it. The second is that there isn't one single camera setup that is perfect for everyone. However we can say, that for those whose ideal camera is slower, a faster camera is a problem. And for those whose ideal camera is faster, a slower camera is not a problem. For this reason, a slower camera is preferable. I would classify your camera as a too-fast camera, by about 20% or so. 

To get the camera under better control, I think the first thing to do is stop moving it out front of the player. This is the sort of thing that seems smart on paper, but in practice it just adds so much unnecessary movement to the camera. The ideal camera is never even noticed by the players. And this sort of thing really announced itself. In my opinion, toss it. A far better thing to do would be to calculate a camera offset based on the aim offset. Just take the aim vector, and run it through an easing function so that the farther the aim reticule in any direction, the more the camera moves that way. Being a shooting game, I think this will feel a lot better.

The second thing I think the camera needs, it proper lerping. Aside from sticking out front of the player, it feels perfectly glued to the player in an uncomfortable way. Lerping softens the edges of all those movements, making everything easier to visually track. It can be a pretty tight lerp, just add it in and then play with the factor. It's just cameraPos += (cameraPos - targetPos) * lerpFactor * dt. Higher lerp factor for tighter camera movements. Additionally, if you add the aim offset like I suggested above, you can overlay a second lerp, which is the camera lerping to the aim offset position. This one can be a lot softer, so that little adjustments to the aim are not immediately felt by the camera. 

Of course, the camera is related to the character movement speed, which I think is also about 20% too fast. The movement speed depends a lot on the character sprite size vs screen size. Here you have a pretty big player, and your screen is fairly small. Zooming out 20% would have a similar effect. Jumping also feels very stiff, and without any camera lerp, is a bit jarring and disorienting. I think setting Y velocity to zero on releasing jump is too harsh, halving Y velocity feels a lot better and smoother, in my experience. That combined with a proper camera lerp should be good, but you can give the camera a different Y lerp factor than X lerp factor if needed. 

The ledges and platforming aspect could also be improved. Personally, I think it's a huge mistake to have really technical platforming. That is such a niche thing, that if a game isn't explicitly and obviously leaning into that as its core mechanic, it should be minimized as much as possible. The Dead Cells creator says it a lot better than I ever could, but the essential idea is that as far as movement goes, whatever the players intention was should be executed. That means every time a player tries to jump a gap, get up onto a platform, etc... and they fail, you have made a mistake as the designer. 

Anyway, great work. In my humble opinion it has really huge potential. Here's the Dead Cells creator with a great talk I mentioned:

-Environment looks beautiful, I could eat it. Only weirdness is that when jumping some white lines in the background columns show up.

-Controller seems partially supported? Causes funny visuals like so:

-I imagine that's the case since you're scaling the image by 1.0 inputs and you didn't know the analog stick was auto-bound. Anyways, I was disappointed that controller support wasn't there. 

-Sudden infinite falling glitch, was messing with controls so I don't know why:

(right side of pool at spawn)

-I like how enemies can get dislodged from surfaces and not die, makes them a bit more dynamic.

-I killed the mini boss but after picking up the red orb I seemed to have gained nothing?(maybe it was HP but I didn't notice) The fight was alright, though it seemed to take a while for how simple it was. 

-Don't care for how you have to spam click to get high DPS. It's also more of a problem(compared to other 'vanias) because shots can intercept projectiles, so it acts as your shield to a degree against ranged enemies. This makes a turbo button even more powerful, and me more annoyed with having to tap repetitively. 

-Grenades instead of missiles is a nice change of pace. Only thing is that it felt a bit weird when trying to blow something up next to a slope or if it had no floor. Felt like I lucked into, rather than figured out, how to do it. 

-Exploring and so far it's pretty fun, I like the movement options, especially doing the high jump into wings. Dashing feels a bit weird at times, though I think it's just me. Wall jump is mostly fine, though it falls into the category of "sometimes I just can't do it", which is a me problem in some metroidvanias. New weapons are pretty neat, though for the demo it seems a bit much considering most things die in a second or two regardless if you can aim. The battle rifle is an interesting idea, a little treat that adds some spice to the otherwise energy weapons. 

-Woops I accidently went into the flying boss before saving, and I lost like half of the gameplay time. I could get back but I don't feel like it. Regardless, the boss seemed pretty fun for how far I got.

-Overall I'd say it's mechanically solid. Spread over a longer period of time I can see the upgrades having a nice progression path. The enemies could be better though, they're all trivial except the bosses. 

Looks really nice for an early demo , but I couldn't figure out where to get the double jump or the upgrade used to go through the tiny passage.