I can only assume you spent the whole month working hard on this game, because it’s incredibly well made and polished. Your dedication deserves a lot of praise.
The graphics are amazing. The style of pixel art is my jam, especially the characters. The outlines are super characteristic, the colors are beautifully picked, even the animation is very smooth and expressive. Character design is great as well. Paintbrush motif? That’s awesome.
The gameplay and the music evoke the mood of the Streets of Rage games for me. It didn’t take long for me to get into the rhythm. The moves you have available aren’t that many, but it gets the job done and I can’t complain about the animations. The difficulty might be a little easy but that might be a good thing in a game jam. And the boss fights are definitely interesting enough to be fun despite not being super hard.
The story is essentially very good. But at least for me, who hasn’t played the first two games, some things are confusing and not really addressed to satisfaction. Why you are fighting drones, for one. The shadowy cabal doesn’t really seem to have a genuine stake in the story. I wouldn’t call it contrived, but… maybe if you dropped some more hints throughout the game I wouldn’t even have thought about it. Nitpicking aside, I really liked the story, the conclusion especially.
I don’t know what else to say, it feels like I could have paid money for this game. (though if it was a commercial game I would expect it to be longer)