Hi, firstly I want to congratulate you on trying to include every theme! It is an insane creative task, and I respect the dedication.
Overall, I think this is an amazingly put together game! The art is just superb, it really gives this game an amazing esthetic! I'm not sure what the inspiration was for the talking big bad evil guy, I feel like I should know, and I feel uncultured for it, but the art and the composition really sells this "you are fully under the control of this person, and you are nothing more than a tool" feel. All of the pixelarts are well made, there is nothing more to be said about the art.
I really enjoyed the music, and it did convey the feel that we are inches close to our demise. The map opening sound effect however got annoying really quickly, I'll talk more about why in the level design section of my review.
The tutorial of the game was incredibly well implemented, this should be the standard of tutorials.
I think the idea that scanning only temporarily reveals the treasure, so we have to memorize it is awesome! It fits really well with the tile-based movement, and how we have to work around the monsters. However I have some issues with the implementation. Firstly, it felt like there was a delay between the steps, like if we move, we can't move for another quarter of a second, which isn't a big issue, but it was the first thing I noticed, so I felt the need to say it. Another smaller issue I had is that pressing down doesn't turn us around. I know this wasn't stated to happen, but this control just feels so engraved the the gamer mind that it felt wrong that it was missing. A slightly bigger issue I had is that in my opinion the player should have more than 2 lives. As to me it appeared that the placement of treasure was randomly generated, there are situations where we can't avoid losing a health just walking, so even a single mistake can cost the run. The few lives was a far greater issue though because of my next critique:
It appears that there is a big delay on the grab timing minigame. If there isn't then ya'll have every right to call it skill issue, but I swear it wasn't enough to press it when it was inside the green part. This meant that on multiple occasions, a well timed grab still cost me a life, which made the 2 lives way too few in my opinion.
I foreshadowed a level design issue with the map opening sfx sounding too annoying. My problem was the as there were no visual differences at the different points of the map, combined with the restricted vision and the tile based movement, it was virtually impossible to determine which part of the map we were at just by looking at it. Because of this, I constantly had to open and close the map to see if I was even facing the right direction, so I got sick of the map sfx that by itself was completely fine.
Overall, while this review may sound rather critical, but I think this is by far the best game I played on this jam so far! It is really well polished, the artstyle is cohesive, every feature is fully implemented, the game fits the themes and is intuitive to learn, finished games like this are rare for a reason, and I think this game is a hidden gem in the jam. (get it? because gem sounds like jam and it's funny please laugh)