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Definitely a challenging game to get into, but there's a sense of satisfaction to be had once you get the hang of combat and resource management! The pixel graphics and animations are pretty nice and I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot.

The enemy variety is very nice as well, with the stone throwers being my greatest bane by far. It took a lot of attempts to build up enough momentum to get to the highest level, but the scythe enemies weren't that tough once you got into the right rhythm of attacks. It probably didn't help that while the character in the screenshots seems to be using a sword, I was able to find no such thing myself and was stuck with daggers the whole time. On the other hand, I found a bug (feature?) where you could mash Drink repeatedly to heal multiple times even if it was your last one potion of a certain type, essentially making each separate type of potion a full heal.

Another issue I encountered was that the UI for the various inventories and shops always expected Jump to be "up" and Interact to be "down", which was quite confusing for me since I bound those features to Z and C respectively. It appeared as if you could also select things with the arrow keys and the mouse, but only using Jump and Interact seemed to actually register the item you had selected internally. Lastly, going all the way right on the bottom level seemed to lead to a softlock pit (unless it's some kind of a secret that I'm not aware of).

All that said, I'm not sure if I'd call the game a Metroidvania in terms of this gamejam, since as far as I could tell, there weren't any abilities to unlock. On the other hand, it certainly had a nice sense of progression and growing player power through its RPG elements, despite a relatively small and linear map. Overall, good job!

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Can confirm. All genuine bugs. There are more, but the scythe guys deserve any exploit you can find.

The sword is random loot, dropped by the central enemies, far too rarely as it happens. They respawn if you want to exploit that, when you yourself respawn at negative health.

I did a lot of reading about NES and CV2 and felt bugs were sometimes embraced.

It didn’t fit your understanding of metroidvania. My understanding was such games required retracing your steps once you had items to help (potions, armour, and weapons here). You can level up, which was supposed to unlock more powerful equipment (the strength stat), but I didn’t think anyone would want to play that long.

I thought I made a decent stab at development, and am grateful for you finding a catalog of bugs. I got lost with all the key remapping talk. Maybe next jam I’ll use predefined, established, sets, but wanted to leave the door open for controller players.

Thanks for putting in the time to play and review.