Why do spikes instakill you. Why does dying boot me all the way back out to the main menu. Why does said main menu default to selecting new game instead of load. Why am I being put in immediate danger of accidentally deleting my save with one bad key press every time I touch a spike. Please change at least one of these things. Preferably all of them.
Otherwise this overall seems like a decent game, but I did have a good few issues with it. A lot of the enemies are just too fast to reasonably deal with - the ones that drop down from the ceiling end up making basically the entire surface they land on impossible to be on because of how fast they move, and then the projectile shooting ones feel basically impossible to dodge with any reliability - their shots are too fast to weave between, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get them to stop shooting after they start, so I ended up just tanking the damage almost every time I aggroed one. I also had the teleporting enemy straight up teleport on top of me one time, which seems like something that needs to be fixed.
In general I found the combat to be kind of just uninteresting or even frustrating most of the time, though looking at these other comments it seems like I'm in the minority? Maybe it's because I found the bubble stacking to mostly feel janky and awkward rather than satisfying. I feel like the game could've used some more meaningful platforming challenges or mandatory puzzles to pick up the slack from the combat, as I enjoyed the few challenges of that sort I encountered a lot more - the puzzle to get the pig plush was really clever, and the one platforming section with the falling platforms was a lot of fun.
I did really like the theming on this one. It's not the first game in this jam I've seen to take the "side effects" theme to mean that your abilities all have drawbacks, but I think the execution here is the best I've seen so far - designing the game around abilities that are just fundamentally sidegrades makes the drawbacks feel really natural and more interesting than being an upgrade and a drawback tacked together, and all of the upgrades do a good job of feeling like meaningful new powers while still having good reasons to turn them off and on at various points.
The world design was just a little bit off I think. It's mostly fine, but there's a few odd decisions - checkpoint placement was a big one, there's a lot of big stretches with no checkpoints followed by areas where there's a checkpoint what feels like every few paces. The checkpoint droughts are a really big issue as with the aforementioned instakill spikes they lead to some very frequent runbacks, and frankly with how basic both the character controller and combat are the game's general traversal just isn't very interesting without the allure of exploring somewhere new, so these runbacks ended up feeling a bit tedious. There's also a lot of one-way pitfalls in the world that make backtracking feel similarly tedious - you end up having to do these big circles through several already cleared rooms just to check one of them.
I was never able to find my way to the final boss or ending. I'm not really sure where I missed - I tried going back over a couple locations, but I don't really want to comb over the entire map. Maybe a map screen would've helped. I also got stuck for a bit early on because I couldn't figure out how to get through the gate before the first boss - the keyhole on the gate made me think I'd need an actual, physical key to get in, so I just assumed the green circle was decoration and it never crossed my mind that it could be a switch - I think I ended up pressing it on accident while spamming bubbles on like, my third trip to the room and that finally let me move on. Maybe the visuals on that could be adjusted a little to be clearer?
Couple more minor nitpicks:
- The camera being locked to the player is... serviceable, I guess, but doesn't feel particularly great. Something a little more involved might be nice.
- Feel like checkpoints should just heal you to full on interaction rather than healing you slowly over time. The current system felt a little like it was just wasting my time when I needed to heal - it's not like there's any checkpoints in dangerous areas where the difference between those two things could be important.
I don't have a lot to say about the visuals or music. They're alright. I like the cutscene art, and the sky permanently turning to night after you beat the sun boss is a really cool detail. Music also still hasn't gotten grating even after leaving it playing the entire time I've been writing this review, so that's a really good sign. I feel like the game still could've used one more general level theme to add variety, but oh well.
I am rather ironically getting too tired to think clearly so I'm gonna stop here :p. I know I complained about a lot, but I hope I said enough about the stuff I did like, because there was a lot of good here! Definitely one of the best uses of the theme I've played so far.