I had heard tales of Hair Receive Bullet...
A name spoken in reverence. A name that lingered in the air like the smell of cookies once baked but now forever eaten. I asked questions but all I got were the sullen faces of nodevs lost in nostalgia.
And then I saw it... What looked like a pajama pants wearing girl with a really big forehead (and blue hair).
The art of the character and the level put me off at first, but there's a lot of charm here. I think the gun bouncing surprised me the most. That near-backflip sprite looks so goofy; it made me smile. The controls were a bit odd to get used to at first, but they work okay enough.
There's a lot of variety of enemies and things you can interact with (the pendulum, exploding balloons that shoot you upwards, the vehicle that launches you upwards once you're on its arms, conveyor belts, and the odd little bells(?) you can stick your gun into to shoot and move around a track). The main gameplay element seems to be momentum. I was surprised by all the crazy shit you can pull off when I pressed "C" at the beginning of the level. I realized only later you could walk on water with enough momentum.
There was one potential bug I noticed and I'll list it below:
-When you jump while moving from crouching there's a brief window where your horizontal momentum stays at crouching speed before becoming what seems to be the horizontal movement speed you get while walking and jumping.
Overall, the game right now feels kind of like a sandbox for a game the developer wants to play and understands how to play well. I think one of the best things you can do is make a game *you* will enjoy. The game shows promise if you can get all of these mechanics and interactables to work well together in one cohesive level. The controls need to be improved though and to be made more intuitive (for example, holding to reload feels really slow and it's not fun in what seems like is supposed to be a faster paced game; I'm not even sure why having to reload is important here). The art obviously needs improvement (or maybe not depending on what you personally are going for), but I don't want to criticize that too much since the main focus is on the gameplay.
Hope you keep improving this. Interested in seeing how it involves. It has a lot more depth to it than the initial impression its itchio page gave off.