Love the playing through a storybook idea! The game has solid foundation with lots of interesting ways to take it in the future. Great work!

Like the idea! good art and animation. good solid gameplay.

I love the concept and high level of polish. Good job!

Hey, super interesting submission. I really like the children's story book vibe! Some notes:

Good Aspects;

Cool concept, fun story to follow along with

Enemy types evolved with the story

Solid difficulty levels throughout

Aspects to Work On:

The sound effects, particularly for shooting, get grating after a while because it's the exact same sound.  A good practice is to set the sound to pitch slightly up or down randomly each shot, to give the sound more variety.

The ghost characters were a bit jarring. They popped out and immediately damaged you with no warning, might be good to give them a bit of a warmup before they attack.

Some Brainstorms for New Aspects:

Since you needed to reach the end of the page before the level could start,  it disconnected the story from the action. It could be interesting to draw the text during the fight, and leave some sort of enemy hint or clue to finish a level in the text, so a player is encouraged to read while fighting, taking advantage of the little amount of text on the screen at any one time.

Some more animations could be a welcome addition. Most characters only had one perspective drawn to them, and only one animation - walking. Some new animations, even if they're a  bit crude and only involve a few moving pixels, could go a long way.

All in all, a super interesting submission! Thanks for your feedback on my project as well, good luck in your future developments!

Hey buddy, thanks for your feedback on the game i'd participated with my friends. 
Good points:
- good story and a beautiful idea make this like a book.
- simple is good, your artwork are rly nice, congrats!
- no bugs, very clean <3

Bad Points:
- I have the sensation that IA's are all the same thing and thats bad.
- winter father is the unique person dat gives me a sensation "let me understand this pattern"
- Book idea is good, but at the same time not if your story aways force you to the same thing (press shooot to start) [i also liked the start cus the elf comes from nowere and i'd ran and started shooting, i was surprised and thats cool].
- need to adjust SFX and music volume

Overall your game is good, just need a more complex IA for enemies. (Think about enter the gungeon)

That's a nice idea with the book, I liked the dark Christmas songs and how it all came together. Good job

This game was nice! The method of storytelling by having the characters traverse a book through its pages was very "novel" (with lack of a less pun-esque word). My main gripes with the game were related to the near-zero difficulty level. Most enemies could be avoided by simply shooting forwards while walking backwards. I think that if you varied the enemy AI and attack patterns a bit more, you could have a fun and challenging post jam game. Great Job!

I loved the book theme, very clever way to include a story. I liked the music choices, my wife said the shooting soundeffect sounded like a baby's heart in a heart monitor though.... I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. I also liked how many of the enemies had a sort of second form with the spirits.

Great game! I enjoyed playing it all the way through to know the whole story.

I really liked this concept! The gameplay was fun and the story was nice, and I enjoyed the music you used as well. In terms of difficulty it was fairly easy, but that doesn't bother me as I still enjoyed myself. Great work!

The enemies are well varied and look good. Also, the story was well presented. Nice game!

The story book idea was awesome! I love top down shooters and this check a lot of my boxes for what makes them fun. The only downside is, I don't like cats. HA! Good work.

I like the idea of it being on the story book.  You should take this general idea and polish it up into a full game.

Using the board to tell a story was a pretty neat idea. Loved the art and the animations, they were not only consistent but charmingly simple as well. The enemy variety was pretty decent too and the level balance was good.
Good job!

The book as a playing field works really well. It kept me invested in the story all the way through. Sprite work is charming and, more importantly, consistent enough to not distract from the narration as a whole.

Music choice is kind of a mixed bag. The happy intro theme kind of clashes with the melancholy that  follows during gameplay. From a story perspective, the dark jingle bells is quite functional, but on the other hand it lacks the tempo and drive that is common for the genre (Binding of Isaac is an example where I feel the music enhances tempo of gameplay). 

Audio is functional and non distractive. Going into nitpicking, I would suggest adding a random pitch and/or gain to the attack sound - it would perhaps make the sound more dynamic? 

Balance wise I feel the game treated me fairly all the way through. Perhaps too fairly, as the abundance of player "health" had me breeze through the game the first time around. It would have been interesting to see more punishing enemies in the later stages, perhaps coupled with some kind of power up, forcing the player to adapt  and learn new things on the go? 

All in all, I feel that the game was well executed. Good work!

This game was really cool! Having the story on the playing field was really clever, although I got pretty lazy reading.

Your sprite work is really good too, I really like the scaling and rotating animation style. The designs are also pretty nice. Especially the Yeti and Father Winter.

Father Winter was also really funny.

For feedback: Most of the enemies follow similar patterns, so I think having different movement and projectile patterns could make this game a pretty exciting bullet hell. Time is probably a factor in this, but more variety would help!

Great work!

Awesome game. Love the idea with using the story as playground, although that's the same as an older game you made. But, I haven't played that game, so it's new to me :D

The story is awesome. Really good writing.

The fights are ok. Yetis are useless :D Elfy is a nice tank for the shooting enemies :D

Good job for a solo dev, although you reused some assets.

Would love if you check out our game too ;)

Really awesome! The overall story being on the environment was a cool touch. Not to mention the story aspect made me want to play completely through it. Most jam games have an appeal for playing thorugh only about 5 mins, but yours kept me invested due to the good progression and fun gameplay loop.

If I had to critique anything, I'd just say it would be nice to have him face which way he shoots and multiple sounds for shooting, but it's understandable with the limited time, and especially because you dropped that to put in more enemies and content, which was much worth it!

Great job!

Nicely done, great idea! Fantastic work for 48 hrs. 

WOW! This is great! To be honest I was too lazy to read the story. The idea is great! and the game is very fun! a nice boss fight in the end! just a great game! I'm stunned how you made it in a weekend.