An excellent entry that looks good, is fair, and fun to play.
PROS:
- Love the pixel art, both style and animation is quite good. Even the tutorial has a lot of character in the presentation.
- The projectile movement creates a nice smooth ramp of difficulty escalation and they're very forgiving.
- The audio was appropriate and unobtrusive so it set well into the world.
- I actually quite like the "other world" mechanic that lets players brain-switch between attack and dodge mentality.
- IFrames when hit are nice and forgiving and definitely got me out of a tight jam towards the end of one of my sessions.
- I actually love the monster push keeping players in line in terms of where they can and can't go.
CRITIQUE:
- The "other world" could probably use more feedback about when a transition is about to occur. Possibly the boss flashing for a couple of seconds and/or playing an animation to give a nice little warning.
- Before the diagonal projectile patterns there are definitely cheese spots on the sides where the monster doesn't manage to hit even in the "other world" projectile spam.
- Some of the latter patterns with the large amount of diagonal projectiles seem impossible to dodge, but I didn't dedicate a ton of time to figuring that puzzle out and it does ramp difficulty to 11.