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(+1)

Like the other person I also got stuck after the spike room - I was able to figure out that having the orange element gave me an air dash of sorts (which felt odd - none of the other elements had extra abilities associated with them, and none of the tutorial text indicated this was possible), but using it would cause me to plummet to the ground pretty quickly so i wasn't able to use it to actually get past any of the roadblocks in my way, which both seemed to require some actual aerial movement. Because of this I was not able to get very far and only experienced minimal metroidvania elements.

The grapple/draining hook is really neat idea, but it felt clunky in it's current state - it was very prone to hitting the ground instead of an enemy right in front of my face, which for some reason would completely nullify its hitbox and cause it to phase straight through the thing. I think keeping its hitbox active when it "bounces" and only removing it when it returns to the player or hits a valid target would feel much more intuitive. I also disliked hitting F to grapple - I think binding either the grapple or drain to just right clicking a second time would work better, so only one extra key is needed for the other action.

Visuals are certainly unpolished but serviceable enough. Music was pretty solid and atmospheric, but the sound design was a bit odd in places - the sound for the base weapon was pretty awkward and there being a different player hurt sound for seemingly every damage source felt really inconsistent and made me confused about what was actually happening at first when a few of those sounds triggered.

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Thank you for playing my game.

I didn't expect the air dash to be a consistent problem. It's hard for me to tell what the difficulty here is exactly, but I would assume it was either one or a combination of:

- It being unclear that you dash in the direction you're aiming, meaning looking straight up in the air and then dashing will give you the most amount of height. I don’t think the ability description says anything about this though, I kinda expected people to just figure it out 😅

- The force provided by the air dash does not replace your prior velocity, but instead combines with a fraction of that velocity. So if you're already falling at an extremely speed for instance, you're not going to be able to gain any height at all even if you aim straight up. The reasoning behind this was that I found it felt more natural if you already had a lot of momentum when you sprint and then jump or when you launch yourself with the grapple, but I suppose it might not be immediately obvious that it works that way.

Originally, the “orange element” was going to have a double jump instead of air dash, which also would’ve been easier to use, but I found the air dash to be more fun so that’s what I went with.

I did struggle a bit with the grapple’s collision during testing, but I never thought much of it in part because there was so much else that I needed to get done. I’ll be looking into making it easier to use.

With the hit sounds, my thinking with that was based on the Metroid Prime games; or, rather, what I remember from those games. As it turns out, those games had more indicators that you were taking damage than I remember, and even the indicators I did recall didn’t work exactly the way I remembered either. I’ll definitely be taking that into account.

I didn't see any description for the ability at all. Where was that supposed to be?

The description appears when you press tab. It should've said so in one of those tutorial popups I believe? It's easy to skim over that though.

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Played some more now that I actually know how the air dash works:

- The air dash feels great, I wouldn't change how it works. It just needs to be better explained to the player.

- Enemies tended to be really annoying and not a lot of fun to fight. They were prone to getting right up in your face where you don't have time to respond to their attacks, and then kind of just... staying there, because they move as fast as the player even at full sprint.

- Game could really use an aiming crosshair. I felt like I was missing a lot of shots just due to struggling to tell where my gun was actually pointing.

Game was a lot more fun once I was able to experience more of the metroidvania elements, and I think the general idea of tying abilities to temporary pickups that later become permanent is really cool, it just lead to some frustration where I didn't see the ability prompts until long after they were useful. I did just completely miss the bit of tutorial text that said I could press tab to see that info though which would've really helped, though given someone else had the same issue I'm hesitant to say that's all on me.