The pixel art on this is gorgeous, especially the animation in the ending, very cool! I also really like the concept of everything being on one screen, and the fact that you unlock the “normal” zoom mode later, instead of unlocking the map view later, that’s fun. The “press Tab to zoom in” message never went away until I got my next upgrade, which I assume was a bug.
There’s a lot of cool ideas in this game, but I feel like they get in each other’s way a bit. The parry-absorb thing is interesting, but when you only really have to do it outside of combat, and there’s no penalty for messing it up, does it serve much of a purpose? In sections like the puzzle at the end, I don’t think the game would’ve been that different if the power toggle was just on a button. On the other side of the spectrum, the single screen sort of puzzly item application stuff was really fun, but the fairly simple spammy combat against enemies mostly got in the way of that.
It almost feels like you had two really good ideas, and tried to implement both, when I personally think it would’ve been better to commit to either one and keep things appropriately minimalist.
That being said, I did still enjoy this game, the little puzzlebox was fun to navigate through, and the NPC dialog made me chuckle some times, especially the guy complaining about Godot (that’s me, I’m that guy). Also, I have no idea what some of the items do (what’s the purpose of the camera? why’d I have like two fish?)
Overall, a really interesting game with a very unique vibe and very impressive graphics for how low resolution the sprites are. Nice work!