great artwork and music on this game! they have a nice creepy vibe and hit that Game Boy vibe pretty well. i really like the concept for the game!

the player character and basic ghosts are real cute! nice animations on the sprites too! i also like the background in the first stage a lot. i agree with some others that the backgrounds are a little too busy and can make the sprites difficult to see. it might have helped to put an outline around the sprites just to separate them a bit from the bg.

i had fun playing, but i only got to stage 2. it’s kind of tough! i think i would have liked the attack to have just a little more range so you don’t have to get so close to enemies to shoot them. also it might have been nice to have ghosts wait a few seconds before moving when they appear to give the player a bit more chance to see them. not a big issue though. the biggest issue i think is that getting caught between ghosts is very difficult to escape from. a second of two of invulnerability and being able to move through the ghosts after being hit could help with that.

overall really nice job on this game!

That was alright! The character design is charming, and the concept is interesting.

The backgrounds are quite busy, and the mechanics are a bit janky.

Good work! Congratulations on the submission!

Very cute little game! I like the spooky atmosphere, and love the main character's design - especially the small details added to the animation like the changing of expression when attacking, or the bouncy little idle, the blinking of the eyes, and the secondary motion of the hair buns when using the vacuum.

 I do think though, as other commenters pointed out, that the background can get a bit too busy at times, which distracts from the charm of the spritework. It can also get very hard to parse the UI against particularly complex background textures, like so:

Which is a shame, because there's a lot to like about the sprites.

Gameplay-wise, I feel like there's some room for improvement. Very often it seems ghosts will just pop up right in the middle of the screen, damaging me with very little I can do about it. It feels less like a test of reflexes, and more like a "gotcha" from the game, which rarely feels good.

I also feel like the vacuuming mechanic is underexplored, to the point I wonder if it's needed. As it stands, it's just a clunkier/slower way to get collectibles which I could presumably simply get by walking through. If there was more of an integration of vacuuming with the combat mechanics (like in Luigi's Mansion, for instance), I feel like this would be greatly mitigated.

As for the "meta", I liked the idea spending ghost ashes on the upgrade screen. I can imagine this being highly strategic with choosing upgrades best suited for the mission I'm going for, in a more fleshed-out, non-jam version of this game!

I enjoyed a lot about this entry, and feel there's a lot of potential here should the team chose to keep developing the game. Nice going!

Nice game! I think the gameplay loop could use a few tweaks, like being able to move while attacking and maybe some kind of dodge. I am also unable to buy upgrades after I die, even though I am presented with the option.

This is a game, I feel kinda mean but there isn't to much to say, the art and audio are great and the idea is nice but the gameplay is just very repetitive. again I want to state, there is a lot here that's good it's just the gameplay ends up dragging it all down to the grave with it. this is a solid entry but it definitely needs some work and I get it game jams are hard there is no hate to this game because of it's gameplay and again the art especially was done very well just think the gameplay hinders a lot of the fun. sorry for the overly negative feedback

Visually really striking, and also very cute and spooky. Love the little Ecto-1 car!
I think you're just a few gameplay and UI tweaks away from something really special.