I remember seeing this in SMVM (I didn’t enter, I had only recently learned about it), super cool to see it progressing!

While I love the standard metroidvania mechanics, it’s a real treat to see different ones. I like the shield but once I get it, using left stick to aim the hats feels wrong, I’d just have right stick aim all the time.

Level design is fine but I think you could really show off the abilities more. Right now double jump gets used all the time, then occasional hats for triggers or shielding and ground pound and dash are hardly required. Hat bounce is a bit funky to use but I can still imagine some interesting sequences where you have to combine several abilities, dash, jump then use a hat to trigger temporary ledge, or use hat bounce at the edge of ledge for extra distance with dash and jump. Ideally sections give you more opportunities to focus on a skill, then master them, then combine them with the other skills.

Movement is mostly good but sometimes the slopes are kind of weird, slipping around on them. It’s not actually a problem, it just makes it feel less responsive. Ex, you run up a hill then quickly turn around, you functionally “fall”. One way to solve this is if the player is on the ground and, without jumping, moves off the ground, snap to the ground withing some threshold.

Misc note: the UI doesn’t work in ultra wide screen, it clips the health so you can’t even see it (among other things.)

First impressions:

• Beautiful and charming hand-made drawings in the main menu
• Nice soundtrack, fits the theme
• Nice abilities, allowing for a huge amount of skill expression (i.e. parkouring on bouncing hats is hard but satisfying to pull off)
• Interesting lore (the little I was able to parse from the very quick text!)

Analysis:

You got yourself a very cool looking platformer with a super nice set of character skills, and huge potential for a fun game. However, repetitive looking areas quickly become confusing to navigate and boring to adventure in. Enemies strike fast and with not much indication, leading to pretty much one way to succeed in combat: strike fast and as far away as possible and then run away. There's not much interplay with the enemies, because allowing them to do anything at all results in punishment to the player, and the enemies seem to have just 1 move. Enemy design seems a bit incoherent. Why am I killing birds? What are the slime blobs?

Platforming mechanics (bouncy hat, dash, ground pound, wall-jump) are pretty solid and incredibly fun. The wide breadth of possibilities is awesome, and lets you navigate the platforming challenges in however you see fit.

Issues/Bugs:

• Controller D-pad doesn't work in menus (need to use stick to navigate, which is unusual)
• I have two sticks - feels weird to have the left one for both walking & aiming, and the right one unused
  • Correction: Feels even weirder to aim the hat with one stick and aim reflect projectiles with another! If you want my opinion here, I'd suggest to keep all aiming on the right stick, and all movement on the left. I kept stumbling over the controls because I kept forgetting which stick served to aim what. And kept foolishly trying to use the right stick for aiming the hat, several minutes into the gameplay... Muscle memory is powerful, remember your players bring baggage from other games; trying to keep things as standard as possible will make your game much more intuitive.
• Text too fast
• "I forgot my hat" message is confusing, it looks like I already have a hat on!
• Typo: "Come find me ... if you are gnome enogh" (should be enough)
• Enemy animations are hard to read. They should have some sort of charge-up, to telegraph the attack, and then a wind-down after the attack misses 
• Unlocked dash but it remains locked in the abilities menu
• Pressing the "start" button on my controller while in the pause menu unpauses the game but the pause menu remains visible on the screen
• Game doesn't pause when showing what was unlocked by the rock, leading to deaths that are impossible to avoid (because you can't see what's attacking you)

Verdict:

You have a solid prototype and good foundations to make a great game. You nailed the design of the protagonist and their abilities. If you put some work into adding more visual variety and polish, and more carefully think about the enemy interactions and solving some of the "jank", you will have yourself a great platformer IMO. For now, the clunkyness is getting in the way of my enjoyment, and every attempt to have fun with the mechanics leads to some frustration with the jank getting in the way. But don't be discouraged! Everything can be solved with patience and iterations; some of these things are hard to nail the first, second, or third time. 

Good luck with the project! Don't hesitate to contact me again if you want me to give it another try in the future, once you've addressed some of these issues.

Best,

FLCB

Alright, first, I like that the game has a little introduction with the story. However, the text disappears too fast, so I can't even read all of it.

Getting into the gameplay, I like that there’s a good amount of abilities and that the abilities menu lets you check the controls. The little video showing how each ability works is pretty neat and useful. However, the game feel is lacking in a lot of areas. When you hit enemies, there’s a very subtle animation indicating they got hit, but it’s too subtle. Try adding more juice to it, like making the enemy flash white (or another color) for a fraction of a second, adding screen shake, and other feedback effects. Overall, the game lacks impact and game-feel.

The controls are okay, and it even has gamepad support, which is great. The indicator for throwing the hat is useful. As for the level design, I don't think it’s bad. The game is short, but it makes good use of the wall jump, and the hat jump is useful in some situations. The rocks are well-placed, and I didn’t get lost. I also like the 3D background, it looks nice.

Visually, the game is pretty inconsistent. It’s clear that some assets come from an asset store or a pack, with the most obvious ones being the attack slashes and the water attack from the final boss. Oh, and the final screen after defeating the boss is the lamest thing I’ve seen in a while. At the very least, make the boss say something after being defeated before showing the "You Win" screen.

Overall, I had some fun with the metroidvania aspects, like the level design and the variety of abilities. That part was fun, but the game feels too clunky and unpolished. You can even easily jump over the bridge in the introduction when it falls, walk to the other side of the map, and fall into the void. I appreciate that there’s a story and some original art. I think the final boss looks great. If you’re planning to continue this project or work other similar, please focus on making the game feel nice to play first. There may be a lot of mechanics and cool ideas in your game, but if it feels this clunky and unpolished, it’s hard to take it seriously.