This game takes the theme in a more unique direction than most, but one that works. And for a basic hack & slash platformer there's a lot of charm.
First I want to talk about the art. The title screen does a good job of presenting the theme of the game to the player, and contains a nice touch of movement from the rain that helps give it a more complete feeling. On top of that, the logo for the game looks really good and makes the project feel more professional.
That being said, the title screen has a couple issues that weaken your games first impression. To start, the grass, background, rain, title, and UI font all contain different pixel sizes. This results in multiple clashing pixel densities right off the bat, making the game feel less cohesive. To avoid this, make sure any sprites in the scene are not scaled differently from each other, and that your pixel particles follow a similar size (Unity scale doesn’t affect particles so the math to get pixel perfect match is a bit more complicated).
And as a very small note, I noticed the logo doesn’t change with the game's resolution, so fullscreening leads to the title looking really small (Similar issues occur with the rest of games UI as well). I suggest using the “Scale with screen size” setting on most canvases, as it’s much easier to use and safer in most scenarios. This is more noticeable in a web build since the resolution can change on the fly.
When entering the game I noticed that the tilemap felt very out of place compared with the characters and objects throughout the level. I believe this is because of the different pixel densities, but also the different levels of details in the sprites. The characters have saturated colors, simple designs, outlines, and highlights/shadows. However the terrain tiles don’t follow any of these same rules, making your world feel detached from the characters. It’s not always a requirement that the background follows the exact same art rules as interactable objects, but in this case I think it was a bit too far off.
With that out of the way, I do really like the sprite work for the player, enemies, and abilities. The animations look super fluid, and the anticipation frames on the enemy help with the gameplay. I will note that when jumping, the crouch frame lasts very long, making it so the player is already high in the air by the time they enter the floating animation, but simply shortening that frame would resolve the issue.
As a final note, the visuals when landing an attack are perfect. The screen shake, particles, and hurt animations all combine to make landing hits super satisfying, which is the most important thing in and hack & slash.
As for the audio, I think the music on both the title screen and in game fit pretty well. Synths and pixel art usually work pretty well together so no notes there. My only thought is that adding one additional track for the boss fight with a higher intensity would have helped it stand out better. As is, the final fight doesn’t quite have the intensity that the boss design deserves.
As for the sound effects, I think the attacks and hits sound really good and make attacking feel great. However, there are a lot of actions in the game that lack any sound effect, which makes things like picking up potions, power ups, killing enemies, and other things feel less important and weightless. Sounds for enemy attacks in particular would make your combat more intense, and make enemy attacks be easier to parry by giving an audio queue to the player.
Next I want to talk about the gameplay. As I mentioned previously I think the player’s 3 hit combo feels great and gives the combat a very strong foundation. The parry is also a nice touch, giving the player both an offensive and defensive option for each encounter. One small complaint with the parry is that it’s common to parry, but also take damage, which feels bad for the player.
As for the special attacks, I think most of them work well enough. However, since the player only gets stronger throughout the game, but the enemies don’t get any harder, it leads to an upside down difficulty curve until the boss. To address this, it may have been more effective to start off by encountering only small cloud enemies with less health/damage, and then using the larger cloud enemies with scaled up health/damage later on. This way the player would scale with their fights, giving more use cases to the special attack, and making the larger enemies feel more unique.
With that said, I like the design of the boss fight, encouraging the player to use the full moveset. However the arena was a bit lacking, and that combined with no unique music/sounds made the boss less impactful than he could have been.
Overall, I thought this was a very complete game, with a good variety of gameplay mechanics to keep the game feeling interesting. I apologize if this review was a bit much, but I'm doing this to all the games from this jam as I think critiques help us grow.