impressive compilation game. This is a long post, but I feel like I should address each section a bit.
The caterpillar hurtbox was a bit awkward, but I think that's a tradeoff when controlling a long character. could maybe smooth it with more animations, but that's getting to levels of polish that really eat into jam completion. Spider boss was about the right amount of challenge, though how to start the fight was unclear at first, and there were points were it would freeze in the middle of the arena and I would have to ground pound again to continue. The projectile reflection section also gave me some trouble. I think locking the enemy so they don't move after getting hit and making sure the location the player needs to stand clear would help, especially since the projectile angles aren't locked. I had luck on the short pillar, but the timing was awkward because I had to hit the projectile after it bounced on the floor. Really liked the animation on the inching motion.
Biggest complaints in the cocoon ToD phase were UI/UX related. I played in browser and had no visible mouse cursor in the window, so finding my mouse was more difficult than the ToD. Small icons in the purchase buttons would have been nice, and showing the range of towers when placing with an overlay would have helped with planning. bomb was a bit awkward, because between the cost and the enemy pathing it was difficult to get a density where the value felt better than just placing more turrets. The cost was too high to act as an emergency button. maybe it should have been cheaper i.e. 3 or 4, with it's own cooldown. I liked the different style of finding space to hang the towers, gave setup a different perspective.
Now I'm not big on VNs so it wasn't a gameplay style I was excited for, but I felt there were some inconsistencies and didn't gel with the choices I was given. For example, I thought that my victory over the spider boss was a secret because of how my character commented on it, but then Richie called me out in the next scene and I had no response. The conversations also seemed to jump around after responding, like there wasn't a strong throughline through the dialog. Many of my response options felt like suck up to or insult, I would have preferred a third option that was more inquisitive, asking the character to expand on themselves instead. When I got to the choice at the end, my options were one that insulted me, one that had just said they were only interested because I was the only option, and one whose conversation was an argument and then focused on a different character. Fully aware this may be due to the choices I made, but without the ability to rewind the conversation I'd have to play through the entire game again to see. I hope this doesn't come off as harsh; it feels like there's a foundation there that wasn't able to fully build up, possibly due to time or split focus among the three styles. obviously fully fleshing out the characters and choices would take a lot more time to write, something in short supply in any jam. hopefully others can get to the butterfly sections to enjoy and weigh in on it.
The VN writing also made it sound like there would be another gameplay section defending the flutter, maybe a shooter section like gradius or galaga. The gameplay feel was so different from the other two sections, it felt like the brakes were being slammed. I did enjoy the character portraits, and maybe including them in the other sections would have smoothed over the change. I also think it would have been interesting to have the color of the caterpillar be based on the final choice in the previous loop.