Fun little prototype! Some of it feels quite polished, and I especially like the art.

The fact that your jump didn't actually start until after lifting the spacebar feels very weird; not sure if there was a reason behind that, but I was not a fan. I would also say that the combat could use a bit of work. The enemies seemed to take quite a few hits, but just clicking and backing away and clicking was not too engaging. I feel like either having them take less hits or having something more to the combat system would help with that.

Overall, however, it is fun, which is a really good sign. I see you call it a prototype, so my hope is you have plans to keep working on it. I want more cool pygame projects!

(Oh, and always happy to support a dev using pygame! Unfortunately, it's just brutal trying to get ratings for a jam with just source code available. I know from experience, haha.)

Edit: Wanted to throw a recommendation for pygbag in here, just in case you've never heard of it and plan to continue using pygame. It'll let you make web builds, which can be really nice to have. Doesn't always work perfectly, but might be worth checking out!

Here's a list of commands you can type in a PowerShell window to run the game on Windows (shift + right click in exporer -> open PowerShell here):

set-executionpolicy remotesigned
python -m venv ./.venv
./.venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1
python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
python.exe -m pip install pygame-ce pytmx
python.exe main.py

I like the artstyle and animations, very neat!  I especially like the dash animation! The controls are ok, the character moves well, but the jump going off on release feels weird!

I think some aspects need some balancing like the visibility of the spikes or the enemies health (it takes so much time to kill them that I often just rushed through them), but overall it's a nice little game, very metroidvania.

I am not sure how to run the game with the files provided. I would love to try out the game but need help running it :)