I LOVE THE GAME!

But the RED boss is very difficult, why can't you set a difficulty level?

Congrats on the top 3 finish! I didn't actually get to play this game during the jam, so I thought I'd check it out now, and wow, this is incredibly well done!

The aesthetic and polish are amazing, I love all the creativity in the design of the areas and the fluidity of the animation, overall no remarks there, top notch stuff. I especially enjoyed the urban styled areas where the trees were signposts. Very unique, I wouldn't have expected the final area to look like a crossword puzzle.

The core character movement also feels really good, it handles the way I expect it to, and chaining together the dashes and double jumps lets you zoom through places smoothly. The main thing I'd say was bringing this game down for me was the world design. I noticed that you went for filling the entire map screen with stuff, and for me personally, that didn't really work. I encountered a lot of screens that didn't really seem like they served much of a purpose, like they were just there because you felt obligated to fill out the entire map. I personally think a smaller world would've saved the game better, especially with the backtracking involved.

Still, despite occasionally getting a bit frustrated with all the wandering and backtracking, I was overall super impressed with this game. The final boss was my favourite part, I had a lot of fun with it. I enjoy that even though the character has a ranged attack, its range is pretty short, so you can't just snipe enemies from far away, making the combat more dynamic. I would've liked an accessibility option to make the fire button toggle fire on and off instead though, since I spent most of my 90 minutes holding down the attack button, and it was starting to strain my finger a bit.

Very good work, both of you!

I love the aesthetic of this game.

Enjoyment 4/5: I won't have a recording of this one for you because frankly, I started it, and played way too long to get my organic reactions, and honestly played a bit too late. I've not beaten the final boss at this time but it's probably the closest I've come to simply not having fun, and I don't think it's unfun enough to affect my score more than whatever it contributed to that missing point.

Execution 4/5: Solid solid solid all around. Few if any bugs. Swimming could have been slightly better designed and in one place can be triggered before you have the ability.

Sensory: 4/5: The charm is greater than the sum of its parts. The audio in particular is really pleasing to the ear, and the visual, while not perfect and a little disjointed, still has a sense of purpose.

Metroidvania 5/5: All around goodness. Kudos for the swimming ability and its implementation, and for not relying merely on double-jump and dash, although those were well-executed. The world, with the possible exception of the end-game area, feels pretty well-connected.

Theme-relevance 3/5: It fits/incorporates the nurturing theme, but there's no big deal made of it.

A very well done entry! It was polished, visually cohesive, and felt great to play. There were a lot of little details that I appreciated. I laugh when I saw the first laser enemy stretch upwards, and I smiled the first time I got hit while underwater and heard the filtered "grunt" noise. The zones were all very distinct and it was cool that they each had their own thematic item pickup.

A couple pieces of feedback:

- I'm not entirely sure if the vines were tightly balanced around finding every pickup in an area, but I thought some of the pick-ups (particularly in the city) were a bit tediously placed, requiring multiple loops through a jumping puzzle if you fell down. I was also constantly afraid that I had missed a pick-up somewhere and would have to explore all over the map to find it. This fear of missing a single item (even though it never actually happened) made me pretty anxious while playing.

- The little floaty enemies could probably approach the player's center line a little bit faster to get them into shooting range a bit more easily. They stay just above or below the shot's hit box just long enough to make them more annoying than they should be, especially in tight spaces.

Overall though a very impressive entry, just packed with details and visual flair. Very well done!

I really enjoyed this game, the movement feels fluid and the boss fights were fun (out of the ones I did). I managed to get through about three of the areas. The visual aesthetic of the game is brilliant. The extra animations for even background elements with the sound effects make it feel so alive. My only problem is that the yellow area is too bright for me. Eyes started to hurt after playing for a few minutes in that region.

this is peak, this will win the jam, i played until i got the double jump and wow is it good, the art is amazing and the amount of content is staggering, super uniqe artstyle