I really enjoyed the idea yall were going for, even though the execution I think just wasn't up to snuff with the vision. I have a few things yall could consider for future projects, or even this one if you plan on an update. I can see from your itch page that both devs haven't made too many release yet, so I was a little extra nitpicky so you guys could know exactly what to improve on for future projects.
- Mixels: Using assets from different sources (for sprite work), is usually discouraged due to not being cohesive in artstyle, but you could get away with it as long as you kept the pixel sized consistent. The issue here is that the character's are finely detailed, while the environment has massive pixels. You almost never want to mix different pixel sizes, and it is the biggest contributor of the game looking chaotic and half baked.
- Color pallette: This goes back to using assets from multiple sources. With the environment being basically all green, the character icons not following this color even slightly makes them looks jarring. A quick fix to this would be to tint your characters green as well, to cement the green lighting, but a better way to go about it is to not use clashing palettes from the very start.
- Dashing: The dash being a teleport forward without any animation (or cooldown) just feels bad. Usually a dash wants to be a speed up rather than a teleport, but if you do want to make a teleport, consider adding some camera smoothing and a disappear/reappear animation, so it doesnt look like the game was just fastforwarded. (Also a cooldown for balancing reasons in other games)
- Attacking: I really liked how the daggers spun off after they hit an enemy, but I don't see any reason that the attack shouldn't just be hold to attack. In the current implementation, there's no cooldown so the optimal way to play is to mash the hell out of lmb, and that's just not very fun. Also, attacks have no oomph. No weight to attacks contribute to stale combat.
- Enemies: I couldn't tell you what the enemies do. I found no reason to approach and let them attack, so they all just slowly moved towards me (or literally didn't even notice me) while I went around in circles. This is a let down mainly based on the combat.
- Combat: Combat just wasn't fun. I'm sorry if I'm being harsh, but the combination of movement being too quick, ranged combat, mashing the attack button, and enemies being too dumb to actually pay attention to me made combat more of a shore than an actual enjoyable activity.
- NPCS: I liked the idea about pursuing a different romance option. There isn't really much depth to it though sadly, and I can contribute that to mainly a time crunch. What I can't really contribute to a time crunch is the lack of consistency when talking to NPCs. I can only interact with them sometimes, and there's hardly a reason for that. I talk to them, go back in the dungeon, talk to them, repeat. Feels more like a poorly communicated checkpoint system for a quest.
- Gold..... What does gold do?
- Audio: I like the hit effects, and the shoot effects, but the overall track doesn't feel like it fits the vibe? it feels very ethereal, but the game visually doesn't follow this energy.
- Misc: I just found it very jarring that leaving the dungeon doesn't put you in front of the dungeon, but the starting location. Also, what's the point of the bomb objective if you have to kill all the enemies to leave in the first place? That's the true objective, but isn't portrayed in the story at all.
Overall, this was a pretty cool entry that was just undercooked due to inexperience. Great job submitting and getting something to run though. That itself is an accomplishment, and jams are the perfect environment to learn.