Congrats on completing your first game jam! You’ve clearly put a bunch of work into your game, and it’s wonderful that you’ve made it over the finish line! I have some feedback I’d like to give you to help improve your future projects: For game jam games, it’s common to not have time to build in a tutorial or a controls screen. When that happens, you should put an overall explanation of the game’s goal and controls on the game’s submission page, that way players can consult it to figure out how to play. It took me a bit to figure out how to play because I had to solve it with trial and error

This game’s design doesn’t really have a strong central mechanic. It jumps between puzzles and rushing through mazes in a way that feels jarring. I would recommend watching this video on designing around a central mechanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u6HTG8LuXQ and this video regarding puzzle game design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjC6fa_YBg I think both of these will help you a lot when you design your next project.

With the maze solving portion of the game, level 3 is laid out in such a way that if you don’t know the perfect route in advance, you really don’t stand a chance against the enemy even with the power ups. When designing a game, always remember that the player didn’t design the game, so they won’t know the perfect path from the get go. You need to allow enough time for the player to make mistakes. That’s why a lot of players really hate time limits. It takes away the the ability to be wrong without having to replay content, and nobody likes replaying content because they failed; that’s why so many games don’t use lives systems anymore (See Celeste and Crash Bandicoot 4).

Try to design the controls so the player doesn’t have to move their hands between control methods. Having to move my right hand from the arrow keys to the mouse and back again felt doesn’t feel good. I’d rather move with my left hand and control the game with my right hand always on the mouse. Same thing for UI. If the game is keyboard only, the UI needs to be controlled with the keyboard; if it’s mouse only it needs to be controlled with the mouse; if it’s both, mouse if you can only add one, but typically both is better

I liked the music for this game. Good job with it!

Also, I found a few bugs while I was playing:

- On the shop screen, you can use WASD to control the player, but in the levels, only the arrow keys work

- if you press the shop button while walking, the player will walk off into the abyss. I had to relaunch the game twice because of that error

- level 2 is unfinished (I think?). The demon noclipped through half the maze and then got stuck in the wall, and I wandered around for a few minutes before exiting out and skipping to level 3. I would have just cut level 2 entirely if it wasn’t finished

I hope this feedback is constructive for you. It’s wonderful to see someone finish their first (or nearly their first, apologies if I’m just assuming) game jam. I can’t wait to see how you improve! Fantastic work, and keep it up