Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
I love me some super pixelated games that are challenging. However, I felt like this game was less challenging and more just impossible due to several choice in the game's design. Some of them can be fixed without changing much, but others simply can't without changing the game's concept entirely.
The first issue I had with this was how incredibly slow the player character moves. When starting off, I felt like I could only get a few enemies killed before I would inevitably lose due to how much slower I am compared to enemies as they home in on my position at all times rather than be limited in their own movements. The slow speed drove me to focus solely on upgrading my speed, but even at max speed I found enemies were faster than me. I felt like the max speed should actually be the lowest speed.
Then there's the issue of the Unleashed ability. Whenever I triggered it, the sudden speed boost was so tremendous that it almost always led to my immediate death due to the small size of the arena. In short, the Unleashed ability switches things from being too slow to being too fast. This makes the entire playing experience rather frustrating, as no matter what you do you're not able to move in ways that are actually beneficial for you.
Then there are the ghosts that randomly appear, which compound the speed problems even more as they're indestructible, absorb my shots meant for lesser enemies and more often than not bring an end to my runs.
I also found that the spread shot power-up behaves weirdly. Rather than the centre shot always being the same as the normal shot, sometimes the game will randomly decide to lock the shots into a specific orientation that makes the main shot be one of the side shots, making the power-up difficult to use.
For me, the things that need to change are that the viewing area needs to be much bigger (at least double what it currently is) so players can have more reaction time at faster speeds, and that base speed needs to go up. The latter change is something that can be done, but the former falls into that "changing the game's concept" thing I mentioned given that you designed this as a PICO-8 game. At least, I don't know how large the screen can be on a PICO-8 game. An alternative way to deal with the size issue would be to make it that the player is immune to damage when in Unleashed form, and when the form ends it does a screen clear to ensure the player can't get hurt by mistiming where they are when the form ends.
There are also several things which are just inherently broken or wrong. For starters, when you go to the upgrade screen it says to use "Arrow keys or X" to buy. Because it's "or," this implies that using side arrows would buy the upgrade as well but they don't. You need to use X. As such, this should read. "Arrows keys and X." On the same screen, it also says "Press X to Restart" despite the fact that X is used to buy. This should read "Press Z to restart."
Also, you have a control for "strafe" but it seems like inputting in the controls for it doesn't work. I say seems like because I don't even know what a "strafe" would look like in this game.