Quite a cool concept! The idea of managing your air when exploring causes every area of gameplay to turn into a speedrun and that’s really exciting. The video pitch for this game was quite good and one of the better pitches I’ve seen from this game jam. The movement and level design itself is very fun and engaging too and I quite enjoyed flying across the spikes in ways similar to games like Hollow Knight. However, the rest of the game’s execution of this concept has a few design issues. I think checkpoints for a game like this is a must. It can be really disheartening to lose all of your progress and backtrack through the areas. Especially because the player can struggle to run a route only to learn that the route is blocked and they need to go somewhere else. Secondly, smoke not killing the player instantly and instead making it so that the player loses a bar of air is a little weird. It makes it so the game needs an inverse challenge progression because as the player explores more of the game, they will end up having less and less resources to overcome the difficult challenges. If the levels are not designed in this way, players are then encouraged to restart the game after losing a couple points in their oxygen because they know they won’t have enough to clear the next challenges.
As for the art and audio design, the music and sound effects sounded good. The music track never felt repetitive or annoying which I appreciate. The art could definitely be better with more effects and fixes made to the tiling of the smoke, but I imagine you were probably more focused on gameplay rather than the artwork and that’s a smart call to make for a game like this.
Overall cool game and the game name made me chuckle!