I like the atmosphere! This game is clearly out of scope for a jam and as a fellow scope creeper I can relate!
Very nice, dark-and-somber mood! Getting a progression system into a game like this is impressive for any jam game and I enjoyed the sheer depressive worldbuilding! That being said, I overperformed the progression cureve and ended up not getting taught how to use the fireball spell or the shield, just straight to the final sword.
There were only very minor bugs across my several playthroughs, but the mismatch between movement speed and animation (and the overall Mixamo-quality of the animation clips) was a bit on the heavy side.
The level design would have benefitted from some more landscape features (rocks, trees, a cultist camp, anything you can do with the assets you already have, really). I had tremendous problems to keep my orientation, since there were hardly any landmarks to navigate by. Given the significant size of the playable area, this posed a serious problem.
Despite my critique, I want to see this project succeed, so I'll stop here. If you want more feedback, let me know!
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I am immensely grateful for the criticism, which was honest and with which I agree and am already aware, but due to the Game Jam deadline, I was unable to implement the necessary improvements before publication.
As this was my first game in this style, and also with a 3D aesthetic, I am open to any other suggestions to improve it and enrich the gameplay.
I returned to the game today and found that the save-system is a bit out of control: In order to get a clean start I have to restart the enitre game, otherwise some of the dialog will remain where it was. Since it doesn't take a long time to load up, I could work around it, but this will become a problem, quickly.
The most problematich thing is the lack of guidance: I got lost regularly, because there are no landmarks. Movement feels cumbersome with the tree colliders - the branches are hardly noticeable, so not being able to pass underneath is puzzling. This is a problem, because there are already very few features on the map. Add some memorable stones, logs, palisades - stuff you can build from your existing asset library. This will also allow you to engage in some environmental storytelling and generally more narrative content. In addition, I would explore a more stylized, painterly artstyle: The current one seems to try and match realistic PBR pipelines, which I don't think is a great choice for the dire setting you are building or the top-down presentation. The actual quality of the 3D assets was fine, btw., you should've just used a lot more of them.
The dialog interface wouldn't allow me to scroll, so if I get impatient reading, I skip straight to the end. Consider breaking dialog down into smaller chunks (a lot of it is set dressing anyway, very little of the text is essential gameplay info you'd have to get out in a single burst) or add a scroll box, so everything can be seen at once. If you want your text to be read, make the speed at which it appears strictly faster than any person could ever read.
Try to match the speed of animation with the movement speed of your character controller. From my own experience I knwo that Mixamo has enough clips to implement both, walking and running in eight directions, plus sprinting, so choose the appropriate clips or go with an animation-driven system that relies on root motion. Both are valid, depending on your use case. Additionally, you chose animation clips made from motion capture. Those usually contain a lot of motion that obscures actual moments of impact and feel floaty and disconnected. That is fine if you are making a game with highly-polished, matching animation where every clip fits the rest and you show the entire combat up close, but not a Diablo-like.
The progression system you've created is in dire need of consistent landing points: If I kill eighteen cultists straightaway, I should not be punished by not getting some of the benefits. If you deem it essential, some sort of counter or indicator would've been helpful, since cultists attack in groups and I have no control over engagements.
This is actually another problem: Engagements where me, walking through relative darkness, until some cultists come in running to kill me. I cannot decide whether to engage (their sensory range is higher, I can't see them and have no landmarks to memorize them by) and I can hardly learn from any encounter, because they just come running and never ever give up. It would be really beneficial if I had some way of deciding whether or not I want to fight. Similarly, I would like to know, what they are capable of before the fight starts (which I could easily guess if I could see them beforehand.
Combat Controls feel extremely sticky, because the character doesn't seem to turn intuitively. I am a fan of matching the character's directional input, but here I was constantly facing the wrong direction and couldn't turn towards the cultists while attacking. For this style of gameplay that felt like the wrong choice. With the complete lack of hit feedback (the impact clips and even the dying animation felt extremely slow and floaty, I would always swing again, just to make sure) the combat was really awkward. The choice of having your shield work on a percentage base added to this lack of clarity: I see that this is more reliable to pull off on a jam time frame, but blocking didn't feel good, more like the cultists were bugging out.
So this is a number of initial problems to go through in a post jam fix.