Right out the gate you hear some amazing chip-tune 8-bit crunchy goodness. The title art is also fantastic. There are a few good options and sound controls, also I like the font, it feels very retro.
The maps and character sprites are super adorable and the whole thing is very pleasing to look at. The menu is simplified and the story is pretty bare bones, but that's enough for what this game is actually trying to do.
This is a really wonderful start, but as soon as you get to moving the main character around, the game goes a bit sour. It's really hard to actually control your character(Quisk, the squirrel). Jumping gives you no control and once you hit that jump button, you're locked into that animation and movement pattern, so you better be sure which buttons to press and when.
The game doesn't limit your playthrough with an arbitrary number of lives which is the way it should be, good thinking. Let the player trial and error their way through it as many times as it takes. Some people will catch onto the movements quick, some slower, and some will never be able to play this game as it's got a rough learning curve given it's limitations in movement.
I keep trying to run-jump off ledges which causes me to fall to my death more than I think it should, but like I said it's a steep learning curve(no pun intended). You basically have to move slowly to the edge then press the jump button without holding any direction.
As much as I love RPG Maker, and I do absolutely LOVE RPG Maker... I feel like this game shouldn't have been made on it. You should have tried this on GMS2, or Godot if you can handle node based engines.
The tile/grid movement of this game can be very frustrating. Pixel movement kind of goes synonymously with platformers and the lack of it is very much noticed.
If you can get over those issues, the controls make sense for the most part. Pressing 'down' will let fall below some platforms to perform a drop down like it should. Pressing the action button will initiate a jump(even though it locks you in a set pattern), the up key will let you jump straight up, it's mostly all predictable. (as it should be)
The enemies look like enemies and not powerups, which is where I've seen some games like this fail in the past. The backgrounds and foregrounds are all very well done, good job making everything look great. Quisk does kind of look like Tails from the Sonic games (Sega) especially when 'climbing' the ladders.
I think instead of the throat clearing sound effects, the "hmns", "eh?", "wow", etc... You should have made text SFX. Like a 'voice' SFX that plays when the text is scrolling, instead. It doesn't need voice acting(VA), while it could benefit from some good VA, it would suffer if the VA wasn't up to par with the rest of the assets. I believe Visustella actually has a plugin that does that(text SFX) so you could just pick the sounds you want it to play and it will loop that sound with variance. It's all setup in the plugin parameters. Maybe add a different one for each character talking and then swap between the voice SFX. (Message me on discord if I haven't been clear enough to describe what I'm talking about.)
Not being able to turn around to jump back on some areas is maddening. If you want to face a direction you literally have to move in that direction. This is another area that the control scheme falls flat. It makes for tedious movements that are not fun (to me at least), and results in several situations where you feel like the game 'jipped' you by your inputs not resulting in the desired outcome.
While I think the level design is very well done in most areas, there are a few spots that I think are just mean. For example after the falling star cutscene,(nice cutscene btw) you have to catch a fly on a map. On that first map it looks like you can walk farther than the game lets you. The branch extends farther than the collision map does. So you literally fall 'through' the branch. Not a big deal right? But these events keep adding up until the player gets frustrated enough and quits playing the game.
Once you trade the fly to the frog and find the piece of wood, then have your squirrel friend chew on it... I'm at a loss on what to do next. None of the NPCs seem interested in any of the items I have and I'm just backtracking on the maps again.
Anyway, let's talk about practicality here. While most RPG Maker users will admit that making a platformer using this engine is an impressive feat, the end user/steam consumer won't really care what engine you used. All they will think about it is how bad the controls are and probably leave a negative review. I say this because it will be placed next to other platformers that have pixel perfect movement and stellar graphics(Look at Ori and the Blind Forest). No matter how pretty this game is, the controls are not good enough to compete with games in the same lane.
This is a great submission to the game jam and thank you for participating. I think you've accomplished quite a bit and to be honest I think you should take these art and sound assets and remake the game with an engine that is specifically designed for platformers. You might even be able to sell it for a decent price, if you can nail down the controls. Good luck in the future! :)