It took me somewhere in the region of 20 attempts to finish this, goshhhhh that was hard. There's absolutely no chance I can get anywhere near W0ffel's time, nor have I the intestinal fortitude to try:
So, this is a lovely game, with a tonne of polish. The tutorial is absolutely spot on and I have no notes. The whole vibe which encompasses the sound and art direction is perfect, sure there could be a little bit more juice here and there, but it's really nice as it is. I think the simplest thing to really elevate this graphically would be some glow. I can't imagine how amazing this would look with radiance cascades. I did mute the game for my victory run, but that was purely because I was trying to concentrate and remove all extra stimuli lol.
I think the one thing I would change is the movement controller. I think the primary difficulty I had was orienting forward movement with my facing direction. I totally understand this was completely intentional, but I would say 90%+ of my failures were when I was spinning and losing my bearings regarding direction. I think it's interesting, because this style of movement is an important vector for how the game feels and its challenge. Equally it requires a huge amount of very specific spacial awareness, which to my understanding, is not something everyone has or can necessarily learn, so this might completely exclude some players who can't really get their head around it. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, I'm leaning towards the conclusion that games can't always be for everyone. For my own taste I would like WASD to have moved globally irrespective of local rotation, this would make the game more accessible and much easier, so it's a bit of a kiss / curse.
It goes without saying that it's really challenging. I found it really satisfying to break through level by level and develop some strats. I eventually settled on trying to save up as much ammunition on the final enemy and then spray and pray wildly at the start of the next round. I can imagine as it's a jam, many will drop the game far sooner. On that note, the entire spinning to collect bullets is a really novel, and interesting take on the theme; I really enjoyed this entire aspect and how it created some emergent gameplay in how I approached the levels.
P.S. I've just read in the description that this is your first game, wow. This is extremely impressive for a first game. I'm not going to delete everything I've just written and reframe it, but holy shit. It's a huge achievement. I had absolutely assumed you both had a considerable amount of experience; so I can only take my hat off to you both.
Thank you for the game, it's excellent and I had a great deal of fun trying to crack it! Amazing work.