Ludum Dare has “Mood” as one of its voting categories… I wish GMTK did, too, because the existing categories aren’t great at rating that aspect. The atmosphere in this game is very impressive. The combination of the colour choices for the city and that really evocative piano gives a hard-to-describe feeling. A little sad… a little foreboding … but a little hopeful, too.
The gameplay didn’t quite work for me, though. I quite like what you’re going for, particularly the use of loops in combat, but I had trouble controlling them. The dashes are fairly long and straight, so they’re hard to connect into a loop, especially a small one. Gravity is also high, and the dash trails don’t last long at all, so actually creating a loop where you want requires some pretty quick reflexes and doesn’t feel all that natural. Especially when the game wanted me to fight enemies, I simply couldn’t make accurate loops fast enough, and I kept dying over and over. (I ended up stopping when one death caused the game to freeze up for some reason.) A different control scheme could make the difference here - maybe dashes are not the best way to go about this. It needs a smoother form of control - maybe you draw the loops or something?
The atmosphere is great, though, and I like the mechanics in theory. Good work overall!
Note: I was going to play this on controller, but even after some experimenting, it wouldn’t work for me. On the web build, even with a controller paired, the mouse cursor is still active and you always dash towards it. Make sure that you’re detecting the type of player input and adjusting the controls accordingly.