Well, that was interesting.
It has a very different feel than I was expecting from the games of this jam. As I found out halfway through the last Magical Girl Game Jam, magical girls are a Japanese thing and you tend to get a lot of animesque games. This one has a very different style and a kind of Norse mythology feel to it. It's kinda iffy on being a magical girl game but I really like the style and premise here.
The main menu theme makes me think of Game of Thrones.
The art is absolutely the highlight here. It looks really good, very polished, maybe not AAA but definitely a big-I Indie game that could be on Steam for $20. The character art looks good, the environment are amazing and the parallaxes really do add an extra amount of depth. There are a lot of good looking games in this jam but this one really stands out because of its style and polish.
I read your devlog and noticed that you used FMOD and spent a lot of effort on the sound design here. To be honest I thought the sound was good but it didn't blow me away as much as I thought it would, so make of that what you will.
I had mixed feelings on the gameplay. Generally I liked the ideas but found it often fell flat in execution.
I think ninety percent of this boils down to the levels demanding very precise movement while the game makes it very difficult to move precisely. I guess I would describe it as bouncy. Your character has a lot of inertia but also seems to bounce off objects, and swinging your sword pushes you around as well. Climbing doesn't seem as sticky as it should be either.
I really feel like either the movement needs to be tightened up or the levels redesigned to account for it. Honestly most of this comment is me being ridiculously nitpicky, but this is something that really needs to be addressed.
I'm kind of on the fence about the combat. The power attack didn't seem all that powerful, and it was kind of unclear how to trigger it. It was hard to get a good feel for this with how short the demo was (or at least seemed to be- I think I hit the end but might have just got stuck). I think the fundamentals are there but it needs some tweaking to be really satisfying.
I didn't like the lives system; I found it both unforgiving and kind of confusing. Lives seem to work more like health. But once you're out of lives, it's permadeath. Between this and the aforementioned gameplay issues it would become incredibly frustrating if the game were a lot longer.
I'm not entirely sold on having to pick up weapons every level. It could make things interesting or really tedious. I think it would depend on how you decide to use this mechanic.
It plays in a tiny window on my machine but I blame Unity and their decision to remove the resolution dialog for that, not you.
Overall I enjoyed this game. There's a really good start here and I'd be really interested to see it continued.