* AWESOME art in the cutscenes, well done on the art overall really!
* Dialogue really needed a skip / hold-to-speed-up button / faster type time overall, ESPECIALLY because the game constantly kills you and expects you to start from the beginning. Also for some reason I got a bug where the game wouldn't start. I sat through the whole opening cutscene like 3 times and then didn't even get to play the game without refreshing the page aaaaaa
*INSANE dash effect, I love that, I'm not sure I've seen a dash effect that looks quite like that but it might be one of the best I've seen period. Probably the only thing you have that's too strong for the NES but who cares it looks sick af
* I think given the puzzley nature of the game, you probably could have made it so that last heart jump doesn't kill you until you land, it makes the final heart sort of pointless and it felt unfair when I jumped and could have grabbed a heart that was right there.
* I don't think having lives were necessarily given the extraordinarily high death circumstances and given the game is more of a puzzle platformer. I do really appreciate the generous checkpoints though. Especially in the later stages of the game it started to feel like Celeste tier difficulty but with the risk of starting the game from scratch, the game is hard enough as is!
* Despite that I liked the existence of the 1ups, they felt like extra challenges.
* The music was a bit repetitive: 40 seconds is maybe a bit on the short side, but also it feels even shorter than it is because the first 15 seconds or so repeat before the key raises for a brief moment. I think a B section with a different idea from the A section would have helped a lot. It was also slow and vibey which didn't quite match up to the spooky castle or the constant peril I was in. Some extra instruments could have helped too, it's only the drums and one channel, you could definitely squeeze some bass in there at least! I also find that having extra instruments makes extending tracks easier, because you can let the bass play by itself for a bit before adding the main melody, or add instruments one at a time. Mad respect though, doing every aspect of game dev is a lot of work!
* I really like the idea of the game, and when I discovered I could jump on skeletons I was like wow, that is such a great idea dang
* Because the jump button basically immediately hurts you, I think it would have been helpful to have the buttons written on screen. Many a time I was trying to think of what to do next and then I was like heck... which button was jump again... I only need to dash here I don't wanna press it on accident...
* I liked how you taught the player! I think the disappearing blocks were onboarded perfectly!
* You got a lot of great variety in here! By the time I got to the autodash arrows and the cure I was like wow you've really taken this concept places.
I really really liked this game but god it's just too much to be sent back to the beginning... I made it to the part that was essentially a cage of spikeballs, I hope it was near the end. It was very tense up until that point (and obviously at that point).
For a first public game and first jam game I think you did an incredible job!!