As a disclaimer: Sadly I can't play this game during the rating period because getting a group together and setting up a campaign isn't that quick for me, so all the impressions are in the context of only reading the pdfs

On first glance, this is one of the most polished entries to the jam I have seen so far. The layouting is clean, and the minimalism works really well!

With more scrutiny however, it's evident that this is still not finished. Starting with information communication, I felt lost during reading because the game never actually told me what it was. I never learned what the intended player count is, and more importantly, the fact that Soulsplash requires a GM is only mentioned on page 6 (of 11!) mid-sentence during spellcasting procedures.

Continuing on this thread, it seems to me that characters are a bit more complex than freeform descriptions, which is totally fine and really cool! I love the use of colors to represent different aspects of the world! But then the manual needs to account for that. Give me an overview of what constitutes an Arderer; what stats do they have, when do they change (like a table with xp thresholds and corresponding changes), etc etc.

The last point I wanna mention is wording. And here I would advise that you make everything as tight as possible. The first glaring example for me is on page 3, where the rulebook tells me to choose 4 skills and improve them. For me, these two short sentences have two ways of being interpreted:

1. Choose 4 skills and keep/improve only them. Discard the rest.
2. Choose 4 skills and improve one with +2, three with +1. Keep the remaining four on your character sheet with +0.

And because the game never told me about the parameters an Arderer has, I couldn't infer the correct interpretation with context either.

So then, here I am shredding your hard work to pieces. Why? Because humans have negativity bias, so any small hitch during gameplay might turn them away, even if they are really into one of your mechanics. But I only do so in good faith because those good mechanics that you have, they are good.

Skill Wounds and the Death Meter read amazingly and the freeform descriptions in the Spell List just reek of shenanigans a creative playgroup can come up with. The foundation for something great is here. (From reading the Discover Reflections chapter, the different, non-equal ways of discovering Reflections might turn out to make it unfun to play certain colors, and that's totally fine, that would be discovered during playtesting. I don't care about untested mechanics that might not work.)

Though it might not seem like it from the three quarters of negativity in my comment, I really like the premise and concept behind Soulsplash and with some thourough formatting cleanup, this could become a cool system to play!