This one is an interesting entry! At first I wasn't sure about the art, but once I started played it all really worked together nicely. There's a lot of detail and atmosphere, and I think it works well. I liked the music and SFX too!

The levels I played were neat, but I got cut short after getting stuck in a floor/wall in the underground maze. Others have mentioned this, but the overall controller is a little off right now. Sort of slippery/floaty, and I both had a hard time scaling walls when I wanted to, and NOT scaling them when I didn't want to. I do think the control needs some reworking. The combat also feels a little unsatisfying right now. Especially the magic attack... you need to wait for it to charge, but it feels very weak.

Despite these issues, I think this is a good entry... and with some polish and fine tuning, could be a great entry. Nice work, keep it up!

Observations as I played:

Music is loud and the slider in the options menu doesn't do anything. Nor does toggling sound sfx, seemingly (the button is permanently 'on'; clicking it seems to select it rather than actually toggle it?)

Could have done with a prompt for which button to press to start the game in the map screen

Vertical parallax with the background/foreground elements is honestly too strong for me; it looks more like elements moving up and down on their own rather than a perspective effect. The vertical movement itself is too strong in relation to changes in the player height, the treeline graphic in particular seems to 'float' above the world, leaving cut-off parts exposed that probably aren't meant to be visible.

The foreground object in particular looks very similar to the actual playing area, so when it moves it looks more like a rising platform; it's pretty visually confusing.

Tl;dr look into how other games handle these things, f.ex try making the foreground darker, blurry and indistinct to clearly, visually separate it from the playable area. Similarly, you could make the mountains look more 'distant' by way of atmospheric dispersion/fog pulling them closer to the skybox's colour.

Mouse cursor being a sword keeps making me think I'm going to issue an attack order when clicking. That's probably just me though.

Near impossible to climb with an xbox controller. Much easier to play on mouse/keyboard. On a related note, there is no jump button for people with xbox controllers. I'm guessing you're using Unity's old legacy input? Controller mappings are a nightmare with that; I strongly recommend switching to the new Input System, as it solves a lot of that tangled mess.

On the first climbing wall, actually stopping on top of it for the coin is uncomfortably difficult as you zoom over instantly given in the instantaneous velocity you get whilst moving. You speed up instantly, but you actually slide about if controls are released, resulting in very slippery movement that's difficult to control. If you want to dig in on 2D platformer controls, this Gamemaker's Toolkit video breaking down how Celeste's movement works is an excellent start.

Sometimes she summersaults when jumping and sometimes she doesn't, and I'm really not sure why or when.

Died constantly just trying to grab the handlebars on the first hazard, because of the slippery controls. Eventually just gave up, took the hit and continued, which is probably bad tutorial design if you wanted to teach about the overhead bars.

I think she's trying to climb over very short obstacles. Like again, the first hanging bars, there are two small steps just in front of it. Push up against them and she goes into the 'against wall' climbing pose. This almost makes actually stopping on the last step difficult, because she keeps doing that climbing thing when she reaches the top of the wall and zooms off... into spikes.

Overhead climbing is as fast as walking. Feels weird and definitely doesn't match the climb animation.

The sword attack animation pushing you backwards is a very strange choice. Combined with the slippery keyboard controls it's definitely not fun. How far back they get pushed also feels very erratic and inconsistent.

Pretty sure I broke something at some point: enemies were just walking into me and dying. I suspect the damage trigger on the sword didn't deactivate. I was constantly getting pushed backwards too. Attacking again reset this, and I wasn't able to reproduce it. I assume activating/deactivating the attack box is based on events in the attack animation? Presumably, something interrupted it inbetween those events. If you're using AnimationControllers, you can addstate machine behaviour scripts that - amongst other things - can run code in OnStateExit to always close your attack boxes when it leaves the attack animation which would solve this issue.

It's not too obvious when you take damage, or how much health is left. I died a couple of times in the trap-house and often didn't understand why. It's a matter of visual feedback, mostly, it's easy to miss the player flashing red if your attention is elsewhere and the healthbar is pretty small.

The audio in the trap-house is odd. The sounds of the traps are at a constant volume, rather than increasing/decreasing as you approach. I honestly thought it was an audio bug at first.

Unfortunately I was unable to progress much further than that between the deadly traps and slippery controls, so I can't comment at all on the rest of the game.

Well, that was interesting.

It has a very different feel than I was expecting from the games of this jam. As I found out halfway through the last Magical Girl Game Jam, magical girls are a Japanese thing and you tend to get a lot of animesque games. This one has a very different style and a kind of Norse mythology feel to it. It's kinda iffy on being a magical girl game but I really like the style and premise here.

The main menu theme makes me think of Game of Thrones.

The art is absolutely the highlight here. It looks really good, very polished, maybe not AAA but definitely a big-I Indie game that could be on Steam for $20. The character art looks good, the environment are amazing and the parallaxes really do add an extra amount of depth. There are a lot of good looking games in this jam but this one really stands out because of its style and polish.

I read your devlog and noticed that you used FMOD and spent a lot of effort on the sound design here. To be honest I thought the sound was good but it didn't blow me away as much as I thought it would, so make of that what you will.

I had mixed feelings on the gameplay. Generally I liked the ideas but found it often fell flat in execution.

I think ninety percent of this boils down to the levels demanding very precise movement while the game makes it very difficult to move precisely. I guess I would describe it as bouncy. Your character has a lot of inertia but also seems to bounce off objects, and swinging your sword pushes you around as well. Climbing doesn't seem as sticky as it should be either.

I really feel like either the movement needs to be tightened up or the levels redesigned to account for it. Honestly most of this comment is me being ridiculously nitpicky, but this is something that really needs to be addressed.

I'm kind of on the fence about the combat. The power attack didn't seem all that powerful, and it was kind of unclear how to trigger it. It was hard to get a good feel for this with how short the demo was (or at least seemed to be- I think I hit the end but might have just got stuck). I think the fundamentals are there but it needs some tweaking to be really satisfying.

I didn't like the lives system; I found it both unforgiving and kind of confusing. Lives seem to work more like health. But once you're out of lives, it's permadeath. Between this and the aforementioned gameplay issues it would become incredibly frustrating if the game were a lot longer.

I'm not entirely sold on having to pick up weapons every level. It could make things interesting or really tedious. I think it would depend on how you decide to use this mechanic.

It plays in a tiny window on my machine but I blame Unity and their decision to remove the resolution dialog for that, not you.

Overall I enjoyed this game. There's a really good start here and I'd be really interested to see it continued.