Very neat, hope this team is destined for great things!
The art is a highlight here for sure, the main character design is great and I love her transformation sequence and little respawn animation. The backgrounds were beautiful, but at times it felt like they didn’t really mesh well with the foreground. At best this would just be slightly jarring, but at times I thought something was a game object and it turned out to be part of the background. Despite my nitpicks, I think overall the artistic vision came together well, which is impressive for such a large team.
The bit of implied worldbuilding you’ve done was fun too, I like how the upgrades are presented as if they’re marketing leaflets or something, that’s good flavour. I like these kinds of nature-dominated post-post-apocalyptic future concepts.
The gameplay was solid, the jump felt good with the coyote time and the variable height. Combat was a bit simple, but intuitive enough. I think it was a good idea to make your final challenge a movement one rather than a fight, since I think those systems were more interesting. Although I do agree with a previous commenter that I would’ve preferred if the hover was just pressing jump again rather than a separate button.
My biggest gripe gameplay-wise is that there were several occasions where I had to make a “leap of faith”, where the level design expected me to go down, but I couldn’t see what was there. And sometimes it was spikes, and I’d feel a bit cheated, cause how was I supposed to know that? I did notice a few times where the camera zoomed out at a part where you’re expected to jump down, which I appreciated, but I felt this technique was underutilised for how much verticality there is in the levels.
(Edit: Seeing now that there is a pan camera option on arrow keys, oops! I don’t recall if this was ever tutorialized? My bad if it was, and I forgot about it, but since the up and down directions on the movement keys/stick were unused, I expected the pan options to be there)
At one point (at the cliffside) I managed to jump down so far I got out of bounds and softlocked the game, which unfortunately meant I had to restart, but luckily I was still quite early on, so it wasn’t a huge time loss. But if that’d happened near the end, I probably wouldn’t have finished the game.
The world design on a larger scale was solid, I was only stuck for a little bit looking for the sawblade. I like how you’re locked out of the tree and then have to loop back into it through another route for the ending, that was satisfying.
Great job you all, looking forward to see what you plan to do in the future!