This is fucking great dude, I really like it. Here's some notes and impressions as I play through:
- Pixel art looks really good, nice work. Character portraits in the 'talk' section are a bit behind the quality of the rest of it though. Not a big deal. Theme is great. Little touches like your character eating at the noodle stand are good.
- Basic movement feels silky smooth, but the damn camera is too wild. It really makes itself apparent, which is not a good thing. Ideally, a player doesn't ever think about the camera movement. Here, it's flying around too much. Getting the camera right is a bit of black magic, especially once you're good at your own game. Because I'm sure it's fine while you're doing well, but when a noob like me starts blundering around, it is swinging around too much and too quickly.
- The "slide" under things is nice, but its impossible to activate when you're standing against a small opening. I have to run back, then run towards it again. I feel like hitting forward and down, then dash should slide me through it. Why even have a down arrow, I wonder? It's adding another button, but it's not that rewarding or interesting of an input. At best you are just moving like normal, at worst you get stopped up. Doesn't add much IMO.
- Randomly dying if I climb too high, assume this is a debug thing.
- Is there gamepad support? I can't get mine to work, and christ I really want to use a gamepad here.
- Sword dash thing is C O O L. Love it. Feels good.
- "Tight Squeeze" level is a HUGE difficulty jump. Good lord it's frustrating. The first "spike pit" isn't hard, but I hit my head about 10 times every run on the block above the pit on the right. When I get through that one I don't feel good, just irritated. The next pit is just PUNISHING. Once I'm getting hit by those blades it's over. And once I finally got through it, I made a jump forward and went out of the level bounds or something and died. It wasn't very clear. I would be very careful with letting the player jump into a void and then severely punishing them for it.
- Any reason for having health at all? Almost feels like one hit kills would make more sense. Not sure, just my impression. Sometimes I feel like I fucked up but can just grind forward regardless.
- The mailbox goal doesn't stand out very much. Generally I don't even realize I'm at the end of a level. For such an important item, I would make it stand out more. Animate it, change it's colors, size, whatever you have to do. It's important, make it make an impression.
- I don't really like the current "complete level" system. The game gives me no feedback that "You did it, good job". Half the time I accidentally just exit the level because I'm still pressing buttons. Imagine a victorious song playing, giant "Level complete" text sliding in, the character cheering, etc... Give my monkey brain a reward.
- "Stole from Celeste" level gets back to an appropriate difficulty. Meaning, way easier than the previous one.
- There are too many instances where I "save" myself by hitting my katana into the side of a platform, but then during my jump back up onto the ledge I hit my head on some other platform and go back down. That feels really bad.
- Stacks of two sword target things feel way better than single ones. Missing the single ones got me raging.
- "Floor is gone" feels like another difficulty spike. If I could use a controller, I'd want to play farther into the game. With the keyboard controls, I'm getting too frustrated, it takes a while to get used to them.
Overall, really good job. You're gonna make it.