Awesome entry, I really enjoyed this! I played it on both keyboard and controller. Definitely the most fleshed out game I've played so far, covering so many aspects of what one can expect from a game.
Extensive story cutscenes, addictive gameplay that keeps itself fresh, a full on menu containing bonus features such as a high score system as well as being able to watch the ending dance.
I think the thing that stood out most that I wasn't a fan of was there seems to be a big conflict of visual styles, 3D models are fairly low poly, but then this clashes with the sprites and the text used in a majority of the game that you would expect to find in an 8-bit game, and then to top everything off there is the slightly nausea-inducing rotating background.
The first thing I noticed when starting the game was that the dialogue seems to share the same amount of display time regardless of length, I found myself missing the last few words of some sentences and would have to speed up and start skimming the dialogue to avoid missing the story. Either timing these relative to the number of words/characters used or letting the player be in charge of the dialogue pacing would be a great improvement to let people read the short story you have crafted.
Right off the bat when the gameplay starts, you have the elements sitting all the way at the bottom row but still have the same length timer before they drop, this means both that most people don't have time to figure out how the controls interact with the game before they start getting told how they are doing a bad job, and then even after understanding how the controls work, you have to have decent RNG with element placement for there to be enough elements close enough to the bottom for you to be able to set up a row of 3. I really think having the lowest 2 rows be empty would massively improve the player experience, there's already a button to drop the elements into the cauldron so even players who are lucky/fast would not be sitting around waiting.
This might just be personal preference but I wasn't much of a fan of the selection being frozen when elements drop into the pot, it's not that big a deal but I do wonder if it would feel better keeping control even as they fall.
Finally I didn't encounter any bugs, but I have a few little nit-picks on some small oversights:
- The game text is cut off at the edge of the text boxes during the cutscenes, this seems to be happening because the text is italicized.
- The song during the dance at the end doesn't properly loop, it is off by what might just be half a beat where the loop happens and it sullies what would otherwise be a pleasant song.
It's crazy how much you've managed to put together during the 2 weeks, I surely would have thought this was done by at least a 2-person team, and to have the game have replicability value is truly a cherry on top which I have yet to see elsewhere in the jam. Great work!
PS: The fast paced classical music gave me some massive nostalgia of a Net Yaroze PS1 game called Haunted Maze I used to play a ton as a kid :3