I was excited to check out your game. The art is fantastic, the characters are cute. I love Giovanna’s dialog. However, I feel like there’s a disconnect between the story and gameplay; I would consider focusing heavily on one or the other for now—and, if it were me, I would do gameplay.

The gameplay, story, narrative, and visuals—I want to know if, even though this is a very story-centered game, it’s still fun to play. Does the story reinforce the excitement of the gameplay, or does it just get in the way, making the experience slower or boring?

I also want to know if the story is engaging enough or if I need to advance it faster to reach the interesting parts.

Currently, I find the story gets in the way. You’ve got a lot of text up front, but that text doesn’t draw me into the characters or their world as much as I was hoping. I was surprised by how long it took to get to the action. I would consider introducing core gameplay much sooner and, importantly, be more concise in your writing. Rely more on storytelling through character action and atmosphere—and, as much as possible, through the gameplay itself.

Additionally, please let me know about any bugs or poorly designed parts that I could fix.

There are a bunch of typos; you’ll want to do a language pass. Also, I don’t know if this is a bug, but there were some unclear moments. For example, picking berries for Giovanna: “Did I already pick berries from this bush? Did I not? Do I have enough?”

As someone used to left-handed movement (ASDW) and right-handed action input, I would love rebindable keys. Z and X took some getting used to.

Personally, I value “game feel” in metroidvanias. I think you have a decent start, but to make ENCAPSULATED the best it can be, I suggest zeroing in on gameplay and feel at this point in development.

I hope that helps. I look forward to seeing where you take your game from here.

I really liked the visuals and the artstyle, I love seeing pixel art that doesn't reduce itself to chibi or chibi-like sprites and the portraits in the text boxes really helped add more detail to the characters.

The story was quite captivating with the way it set up the idea that she was being kept in captivity and isolated from everything and everyone outside her dreams, however I think a way to bring the player more into the game would be to have maybe a level based on her dream that works like a tutorial, so the player can start interacting with the game and get more invested.

The gameplay could use some work, specially when attacking, the spiders sometimes felt that they were too short and the attack would not hit them. In a few areas, the spiders had colors that were too close to some backgrounds and sometimes I would not be able to keep track of their positioning when they jumped.

Also when collecting the berries right after getting the sword, I had no idea if you had to hit the bushes to get them I was just playing around and ended up having all berries with me, maybe have the bushes with a highlighted outline or a berry icon pop up when collecting them to just clarify that!

All in all, the story and art are pretty good as they are, you should turn some focus now on developing more gameplay mechanics and brainstorming better level designs (make sketches of them, if you don't like them then you can throw it away until you make something that you like better!)

I got as far as wall rainbow and the game stopped responding to x and all other keys. Only the sound was playing and the idle animation for the character was playing then, the screenshot at that point is below. I honestly thought the story was the game, the only agency I had was pressing X. But the story is good and engaging, and the translation is really good, it was very clear in English what everyone was saying and her inner monologue. If you advanced the story faster (the converation, you and the scientist is a long convo) it might be ok. The pc sprite is cute, the eye blinking falling asleep was a nice touch. 

1. Good worldbuilding in the white room. Sets up a cool concept of "what if a human was raised in total isolation". Not sure about her suddenly knowing how to swing a sword and jump and all that. I do wish there was a bit of interactivity in the white room sequences, even if it was as simple as just moving around.
2. Combat is pretty basic. Just move around and slash, maybe jump on enemies. The lack of a jumping attack is also a bit jarring - unless that's a conscious design decision.
3. Art style looks good. There's a lot of instances of enemies and hazards blending into the background due to the colors. Needs more contrast. The female goblin sprite is the only thing artistically that looks off - is this a placeholder perhaps?
4. I enjoyed the platforming involving hitting the buttons to rotate the platforms. My favorite part of the demo so far.
5. As mentioned by everyone else, UI needs work on being readable and needs more QoL features.
6. Hit effects, especially on large spiders look great. 

1) The intro does a good job of worldbuilding. It could however benefit from some cutscenes (dream) mixed in with the manual dialogue. That would make it feel less like a chore and more something uncontrollable like a dream.

2) The inventory UI is jarring. Everything in the game is neatly stylized with pixels and then you get a bright flash of white, modern text that takes you out of the experience.

3) An option to change control scheme would be nice. Personally more of a fan of the WASD, spacebar, e kind of controls than the arrows keys + bottom keyboard row.

4) The first objective you get is collecting berries. Without a solid indicator of progress, you end up having to find out at the very end if you accomplished the goal. To make it more confusing, when you transition between scenes the berry bush sprites are reset and you have to manually walk past each of them to find out if you missed them.

5) The objects that allow you to save, require the player to manually interact with them. Perhaps you could make the default (walking next to them) be saving. This would still leave you with the level up part as functionality for interacting. Forgetting to save is worse for player motivation than saving one too many times.

6) Having each "room" reset on transition seems like a disaster in the making when it comes to balance and gamefeel. It would make it easy to farm currency which only demotivates the player. As an example fully clearing a room could be rewarded and not punished.

7) Lastly the transition from the introduction to the actual gameplay could be smoothed out a bit when it comes to visual appearance. I don't know what part of it felt a bit off but the transformation was very sudden. Perhaps a short animation giving the sword would already resolve the issue.