Couldn't manage to get out of the first area - there's a gate that requires 3 spirit to open before the boss and I can only carry two. I assume there's a mana upgrade somewhere around that would let me get past but I can't find it and I've checked all the empty space on my map, so I don't get where it could be. A bit disappointing as there's clearly more to see here but I'm giving up for now.
The core movement here is decent feels just a little off - the jump is a bit awkwardly floaty, and while I got used to it it might feel better with a slightly higher gravity. There's also a really odd effect where the player will land slightly above the ground and then slowly sink down - I have no idea what could possibly be causing that but it looks immensely strange.
Combat wise the player's attack hitbox is, for once in this jam, wayyy too big. It seems to extend for like, twice the length of the actual visual, which leads to some very odd looking gameplay of killing rats by stabbing the air three feet above their head. The range of the visual doesn't seem particularly unreasonable especially given enemies don't deal contact damage here, so I'd say just bringing the hitbox more in line with it would work much better.
On the other hand when I couldn't just cheese combat with the oversized attack hitbox I spent a lot of time avoiding it completely because the starting health was just so comically low it didn't feel worth the risk. Once I got one health upgrade the game became a lot smoother and more fun as I was actually able to take on combat consistently enough to keep my spirit charges up - on which note, whether enemies actually dropped those felt painfully inconsistent. The game seemed balanced around them always dropping, and I"d go through regular streaks of consistent drops that made it feel like this was the case... and then I'd get a streak of absolutely none dropping at all which is a massive problem when the charges are required just to toggle switches. I still don't understand how the system works - it doesn't feel uniformly random, it doesn't seem to be tied to specific enemies dropping or not dropping them, and it's certainly not a guaranteed thing, so I was left confused and frustrated every time a group of enemies refused to drop a spirit when I needed one.
I like the Ori 1 style saving, but at the moment it's possible to have enemies spawn in front of your save point and immediately attack you before the screen even finishes transitioning. IIRC Ori saves which enemies you've killed on reload and prevents you from creating a save too close to living enemies or in manually designated "unsafe" areas, which fixes this issue. I could see a few other options working too, though - like you could just have enemies despawn on load if they're too close to a save point.
Visually the player sprites look pretty good but their animations are weirdly slow - I feel like you could nearly if not outright double the framerate while adding no frames and they would look more correct. The environments are a lot more lackluster but in a way that mostly feels like the product of jam time constraints than anything.
The actual level design of those environments often felt kind of aimless. Some of this might just be a lack of distinct setpieces to populate them with, but there was also the occasional odd path that seemed to wind around off to nowhere - in particular there's a looping tunnel near the three spirit gate that doesn't seem to serve any purpose and had me a bit confused while grabbing the switches up there as it looked like a path to another switch, but turned out to just be an empty loop. Some cleanup and refinement of things like that in the level design would help the game I think.
One much bigger gripe I had with the level design is that there were several blind jumps that led directly into spike pits. The game could really really use the ability to manually look down. The camera does also seem to be locked to the player at the moment so it might be worth trying some lookahead for flavor, but unlike some games with more static cameras I didn't find myself taking issue with it while playing so it'd probably be fine without - the manual camera control is the one thing I felt a desperate need for.
The music and sound design was very solid here, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Feels very professional already as is.
Overall this is a promising little metroidvania base with a lot of clear room for improvement and some decent stuff here already. Very solid little entry.