really really cool game.
the chip damage system is awesome. it feels kinky, fits into the gameplay well, and ties into the final boss in an interesting way. some of my favorite moments in the game were when i just barely (accidentally, often) dodged a whole bunch of hazards and heard the little clicking sound, and was like... dang, that was kind of hot.
i do think it is possibly a mistake to have the meter drop when you get hit for real. i feel like i was disincentivized from trying to farm chip damage early in the game as if i misjudged the distance at all it would have been a net negative. the charge shot itself also doesn't seem thaaat overpowered, so i don't think it would be bad if your progress towards it was monotonically increasing.
that said, i admittedly did play with 7 lives because i felt like i was really bad at the game (i probably could have gotten away with fewer, but i didn't know how often checkpoints would come). on fewer lives, it doesn't matter as much as you really want to avoid being hit anyways.
(edit: played through again on 3 lives. i think losing the charge still seems annoying. also, new random thought: the first level boss might have the hardest patterns)
the other reason the loss of charge felt bad to me is there were a couple "cheap" feeling enemy patterns. when something comes out of nowhere that you don't really feel like you had an opportunity to dodge, losing both a live and some charge feels bad. that said, i do think it is fair enough to have patterns in the game that simply require learning.
speaking of patterns, i really liked the variety of enemies and enemy patterns in the game. funnily enough, i don't think i figured out the horizontal guys coming out of the circle until the last level, and then i was like, "oh, neat design!"
the little story between the pilot and the ship was very cool. i legitimately teared up a bit in the scene where they were floating in space--excellent music for setting the mood. and, it was just a very cool story beat.
i will admit i have no idea what they were talking about with respect to "fishbowls."
i do think that the actual intimacy between the ship and the pilot could have been better represented in terms of gameplay mechanics. i remember a line about your focus increasing, or something, and i think it would be cool to see this reflected in an actual different feeling of gameplay (and even more so when we actually fuse together). of course, there are a million problems with that (e.g. how does the player learn muscle memory for the game if it keeps changing) but i think it's something to think about. (it's also possible it did change in some subtle way i just didn't notice.)
i do have a couple of nitpicks / additional comments.
- this might just be a general bullet hell problem, but: i'm not sure there is any reason to make me hold the N key the whole time. i would almost prefer to just have the bullets firing automatically.
- the game should let me maximize or fullscreen it. if you are interested in more details let me know, but suffice to say if you are worried about the pixel art looking bad, there are ways to make it look perfectly fine at non-integer ratios. (but even just letterboxing it into the maximum integer ratio would be preferred, for me, to no-fullscreening at all).
- this was partially fixed by letting me set it to 2x on the options menu, but i couldn't access this until i got to the main menu.
- the options menu itself has a couple bugs, for example, after i finished the game it listed the resolution as 1x when it was actually set to 2x.
- strangely enough, the game (which i had left running on the main menu) decided to play through the intro cutscene again at some point while i was writing this comment. maybe this is intentional, but i thought i'd mention it.
- i think even just extremely basic blips played on each text character would make the dialog feel way more alive. i'm sure you're aware that more sound effects in general would be a huge polish improvement.
but yeah. great job!