Cool game! Here are my thoughts as I played:
* Couldn't start or restart the game with controller rip
* The graphics are beautiful but well outside the NES' capacity. Sprites with alpha on NES are limited to 3 palette colors, bg tiles 4. This is why it feels like a 16 bit era game to some. Dithering wasn't common on NES but I think that's perfectly legal... the true parallax clouds maybe less so. Same for the color blending on the death screen. The scaling and rotation as well on the game over. Most of the later details are nitpicky and honestly I like them outside the context of this jam; but I gotta point them out since this is a jam with an entire category for being anal about NES-ness.
* Similarly the music, I'm a sucker for breaks but stage 3's music is a little hard to believe for an NES lol.
* I like time as a health system but frankly I think it's a bit unintuitive; from a design perspective I think an easier to understand approach might be to respawn the player at a checkpoint, or have a physical downtime to respawn. The difference between an arbitrary 10 seconds being removed from the clock, and an actual natural 10 seconds you need to make your way back.
* Some feedback on time running low would go a long way. Something like the music speeding up or some flashing red somewhere. Maybe even a "hurry up" type track. Many times I would suddenly combust and not even realize time was out lol. The timer glazes over your brain with numbers the way that a health bar doesn't quite. If nothing else a time bar that you can see diminishing would also be helpful, although I understand that's tricky given how flexible the time length is.
* Could benefit from a retry button given the nature of the game. Sometimes I know a run is cooked, I got 20 seconds left and I took a big fall. Esp on stage 3
* The graphics on stage 2 are GORGEOUS but it is a little hard at some points to distinguish what's a wall and what's a bg element. Especially here:
I think because it's all very dark with low contrast. The gems are a good hint though. Also after that segment you're sort of awkwardly placed with the screen moving up and down a lot.
* It's not immediately apparent that collecting gemstones gives you more time, I legit did not realize this until the end of stage 2. Something like clocks/hourglasses would signal better, or having the gems go up into the clock so the players' eyes follow and understand what they do. Gorgeous art tho.
* I like the core mechanics, I think they were pretty well done. I struggled a little getting consistency especially on stage 3 but I think that might just be skill issue on my part. Am I right that your proximity to the orbs when you grab them matters?
I had to stop after the stage 3 rooms with enemies you need to throw at the wall. I worked my way all the way back up there, broke through, saw there was an EVEN HARDER one with the moon, ran out of time and was like alright I gotta come back to this later I'm too bad at this. I would really like to come back and see the boss before jam ends