Great game but needs some polish! However, the graphics and animations look gorgeous, and I was a big fan of the music as well!
Took ~5 minutes of gameplay to reach the first savepoint, ~20 minutes to earn the right to save haha. I think the minigame is a funny idea, and a neat lore addition, but shouldn't have a time limit. Eventually I found a way to "cheese" it a bit: It doesn't penalize wrong buttons, so you can simply mash every button and hope you accidentally enter most of the correct combination. (Definitely had a far higher success rate that way than trying to do it legitimately.) But yeah, I think all it really takes to fix the minigame is remove the time limit.
Savepoint shenanigans aside, the game was certainly brutal! I think by far the hardest part was the long gauntlet of floating spike ball enemies and timed platforms before the second boss. I probably spent around an hour slowly inching ahead and waiting for the floating enemies to position themselves the right way so that I could destroy them with their own parried projectiles, but I eventually managed to get into a nice rhythm. I think it might help if parried projectiles re-aimed themselves and gained a bit of speed, to make hitting enemies back a bit easier! That said, the difficulty definitely took a nosedive once the charged attack and the dash made dealing with those sections much easier.
The snappy and accurate controls helped a lot, too, since at least I never felt like the player character was working against me! Blocking was a very welcome addition and a huge lifesaver. Parrying took some practice to get used to the right timing, but it was a cool feature as well, and one that you don't often see in gamejams. And I liked that enemies and even bosses seemed to go down fairly quickly as long as you managed to get a few swings in, the difficulty being more so in finding an opening than the size of their health bars.
I was very impressed by how many bosses there were in the game, and their attack patterns! I couldn't quite figure out how to deal with the first boss's big flame wave attack, as it couldn't be blocked and seemed too tall to jump over. But since the boss's other attack were easily blockable, I eventually managed to wear him down. The second boss had some cool attacks as well, and honestly felt much easier than the first one. The Pong encounter was a lot of fun and a very welcome little bit of levity!
After getting the ranged attack and dash, getting back up and through the disappearing ice area was a relative breeze compared to everything before. I managed to reach the fourth (third?) boss, but sadly at that point I ran into the issue where despite using at least 2 different checkpoints on the way there, the game put me all the way back down near the Pong fight. The boss itself looked cool and not too unreasonable (I liked the wind attack), but unfortunately I was already too tired to climb through half the map every attempt, and decided to stop there for now.
Regardless, a very impressive game to have been made in a month! Great job!