Thanks for playing my game! I'm glad it was more enjoyable than you expected.
I am very happy to hear that the rooms were generally readable! I spent about the first day and a half that I worked on the jam just designing the map, and multiple more of the days on turning those into playable rooms. It's great that some of that early work translated into a feeling of different areas of the world. I did a lot of updates to the color palette on the last day (it was mostly greys because I hadn't bothered to think about it), and I think that helps a lot with the overall atmosphere too.
I absolutely agree with you about I-frames. I was going to lengthen them to about 1.5 the length or so but changing that led to other issues such as being able to go through the laser barrier blocking you from the maze, and I didn't have time to fix those issues so I just decided to leave them as is for the time being. If I continue working on this game post jam, one of the top things on my list would be to deal with that (and yeah the water should stop you from moving immediately after respawning).
I probably ought slow down some of the bosses as well, I can't disagree that sometimes they pull off completely unfair combos on the player.
I actually was also planning on rendering hitboxes larger than they were but never got the time (although now that I think of it it probably would have been like three lines of code, so maybe should have just added it but oh well).
You're right about the control scheme, I have no clue what I was doing there in hindsight. I think I just didn't think much about it , and then got used to it playtesting. My keyboard is a standard QWERTY keyboard and I have zero idea how I didn't notice how uncomfortable hitting x is, which is really is now that I think about it. I think some of it came from expecting to have more abilities that needed button mappings when I started the project but really who knows. I appreciate your suggestions for other ways to lay it out!
I'm glad the final boss twist was an amusing surprise!I was hoping that it would be a funny way to keep the final boss a little more memorable, which it sounds like it has succeeded at.