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So, I have mixed feelings about this one.

First, the good: the art is great. Simple, but it sells the ambience. Good CRT shader. The audio is solid too; even though it’s just one song, it doesn’t feel repetitive. Good choice. The jump sound is a tiny bit loud, but other than that, the audio is on point.

Now... I know you’ve worked a lot on your game, so it’s hard to receive criticism, but I’ll be constructive. It’s almost certain that people will make puzzle platformers for game jams, I think it’s the most crowded genre in jams. So I’ve played hundreds of these already (not exaggerating): some good, some bad, some average. Some had something special (even if it was something small), and some didn’t. The puzzles in your game are very simple and straightforward, and they’re almost laid out in a way that if you “run forward,” you’d solve them, so there wasn’t really a puzzle to be solved.

I don’t see the theme implemented other than in the title and the fact that the characters have masks (I actually thought the power-ups were diamonds, not masks). And the controls... I think the spacebar is the standard for jumping. So many times I was like, “Okay, now jump and dash,” and I’d just instinctively press space and dash to my death :-/ When you make a game, it’s good to look up standard controls for that type of game so the player doesn’t have to relearn them, especially for a genre with such standardized controls like platformers.

I hope this feedback helps you improve your game. I’d love to see you add something special that makes it stand out from the rest of the puzzle platformers, a new original mechanic, different ways to solve the same puzzle, or more fun elements. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! I really tried to make the game and the puzzles a bit more challenging (for the later levels), but since the rooms were so small I ended up without any ideas, so I just kept things as simple as possible. Also, I should start using configurable controls, that would probably help a lot XD.

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I know the feeling, trust me. It happened to me too. Two game jams ago, I went for a puzzle platformer (that was when I realized I needed to change my type of games), and I found myself really constricted by the options. It looks like a big space, but the rooms tend to be around 12x18 tiles, so there’s only so much you can do with them, you run out of ideas quickly. Here’s the game if you want to play it; it’s short, only 13 easy levels.

https://wiredpixels.itch.io/of-gold-and-blood

Now, what I was pointing out is that my game was ALSO a basic puzzle platformer, but I added a twist. Instead of solving puzzles like every other puzzle platformer, you’d use the bodies of your dead enemies to do it. It sounds creepy, but the theme of the jam was “Death is an Opportunity,” so I used the bodies as an opportunity to solve the levels instead of the classic “push the box, get the key, escape” puzzles.

I hope that helps for your next jam, because you clearly have the talent to make something visually very pleasing and the technical skills to make a platformer, it just needs that clever twist to make it stand out. Good luck!