Oh boy, people seem to really like this game (so much so that it won the entire jam), but im afraid im a bit of a 10th dentist here; i thought overall the game was just,,, fine.
The good: The sound stood out to me as a really, really great aspect. Congratulations to your composer, because they did a stellar job. All of the art from asset packs was ended up cohering very nicely, and it all looked very pretty! Early level design was very good, and the difficulty curve ramped smoothly.
The bad: i've got a lot to say here unfortunately...
- The character controller felt very wrong. Precise platforming was very difficult, which, given your game is a platformer, is a cardinal sin. The character slides around when movement keys arent held, the dash is imprecise (and was endlessly spammable prior to a patch), and the jump feels quite heavy. A platformer lives and dies on how well it's character controls, and i think this game fails to pass the bar. The speedrun uploaded on your game's page is a prime example of just how poorly the game controls - even the dev died in bullshit ways several times over.
- Tutorialisation: There were no keybinds in the game. I had to read the itch page to figure out that there was a dash, or that there was a time change mechanic. This kind of tutorialisation is sloppy - at the very least, i expect keybinds to be visible in games alongside the tutorial that demonstrates that mechanic.
- Visual clarity: Due to the usage of asset packs, visual clarity was, at times, poor. The standout here is the level with the electricity pylons - it's impossible to know which objects are solid and which arent without trial and error. i threw myself in several pits trying to figure this out. Under this heading i also want to put the time change mechanic - if it's used inside another object, it fails with (i think?) a quiet audio cue. This felt very, very buggy before i realised what was happening (after quite a while)
- Moving platforms: This game copied a lot from celeste. One lesson it didnt take was that your standard, slow-moving platforms are not a very fun mechanic. Celeste features exactly zero typical moving platforms, but despite that, this game based it's entire latter half around them, much to its detriment. My enjoyment absolutely tanked when i had to contend with standing perfectly still on platforms, or while waiting for platforms, or while waiting for them to come back around after i died.
- The level with two moving platforms, and the blue zone that kills you was *miserable*. Seriously, i had such a bad time trying to complete it. Celeste can make levels far more difficult than this, but because celeste is a game that operates at the player's pace, they're fine. Fragments of time demands you play at it's pace because you have to wait for those fucking slow-moving platforms, and it's just not fun. I spent as much time on this level waiting as i did actually clearing it.
- There was dissonance between the mechanic of "time period switching" and the level design. Usually, changing time period caused sensible changes (i.e. growing of moss, crystals, or a tree). Often though, it caused changes that were absurd, like a large segment of level geometry spawning out of nowhere, or moving inexplicably to the side. In these situations, it felt more like teleporting between two discrete locations than the same location in different time periods. Only having one tileset and one background reinforced this, and on some screens it was impossible to tell which time was the future, and which was the past
Did i like this game? Well, I dont know. i dont think it was bad, but i dont think it was very good either.
