I'm impressed by how many mechanics you've programmed into the game at this point! In the harder combat challenges (I got to the one with two polearms, two bear claws, and two mages) it feels hard to ever get a hit in. I guess I need to git gud at dodging?

I know that your demo is in an early stage of development, and some of the problems could be just you didn't have enough time for this, I'll just list you problems I encountered, don't mind it as a hard criticism.

Controls for the menu and inventory are weird, I think, it is better to use just a mouse.
It's cool that there is a focus on the enemy, although on the next battle already I forgot what this button was, lol.
Any combat activity eats TONS of stamina, either try to make it cheaper or at least make some basic things free, like weapon swings, those are slow as a snail truck but eat so much that you can run out in like 4-5 swings, and you need stamina for everything besides sword swings.
After an attack, if you hold down the right mouse button, then blocking with a shield will not work.
It is cool that the run is a thing, but, strangely, you can't just run holding the shift.
Oddly, the equipment can only be changed in chests.
There is no pause on the Esc menu.
Heals are spent, even if you have full health since nothing can be done when you hit, or when you are beaten, you have to quickly press heals and spend extra ones as a result, and attacks with a sword, on the contrary, are buffered too much and occur when you no longer expect them.
Combat controls are uncomfortable and unresponsive in general.
Monsters have interesting attacks and abilities, but the battle process itself makes you frustrated.
Also, it seems that the health bar and other ones are displayed inaccurately, seemingly, part of it is hidden behind a huge panel on the left.
When enemies killed me and it threw me back offscreen, I had about a half of my maximum health reduced, above which I can't heal, this is very punishing and limiting, I suppose you will have some ways to handle it later in development?
The cool bleeding effect you have, when low on health.

Mom I want to buy dark souls. We have dark souls at home

Dark Souls at home:

I played the game on linux with default wine and I didn't have any issues, except that my screen automatically went dim every 5 minutes as if I was AFK even though I was playing the game.

Someone said already this but it was annoying for me as well that I couldn't use the joystick for the menus.

When fighting the "tough enemy" he fell into the water and he was having a really hard time getting out of it. I murdered him as he was slowly trying to swim back. I felt pretty bad afterwards.

As for the combat mechanics, I don't know how much of it is placeholder, but here's some feedback anyway:

- The input buffering for attacks seems way too high. I don't think that double-pressing attack should result in a 2 hit combo. Especially with such slow swings the second press should be only registered if it's reasonably close to the end of the first swing. Maybe I'm just too much of a casual to understand this though.

- I don't like the running, I don't think it should be so much faster than walking. The whole dash->run->drop system as it is feels a bit clunky and I don't think it's much of an improvement over just spamming dodgerolls.

- The poison wizard guy needs some clearer windups, otherwise it's hard to guess what he's doing and it's annoying to have him shoot at you point blank when you try walking in.

It's pretty promising all things considered. I can see the combat being very fun with some more polish.

Didn't enjoy it at first until I turned on my gamepad; it was a MUCH better experience after that. Had a lot of fun bullying the enemies and getting my ass handed to me at certain points. I kept pressing L1 and expecting it to be a shield bash attack, lol.

Excellent base for a game right here. Good controls and mechanics, all fluid, functional and responsive.

Here are some points I made while playing:

• It'd be good if you could have your shield up if you're holding the button after an attack ends. And also attack even if holding the button to block with a shield (maybe even with a unique attack).
• I think this game would benefit from parries, stunning enemies when you block at the last second, and maybe some sort of action-cancelling action, like if you press the dodge button while not holding any direction you do a quick dodge that can be used by skilled players.
• It's fine to have a permanent damage system to avoid potion-spam face-tanking, but please don't let players use their potions if their life is as high as it can go with them.
• I don't want to make  too many points on the art, as it's WIP, but I think the menus need some work as to not be as confusing, damage numbers should be colored to differentiate between your and the enemies' damage, and also consider zooming things in, as your animation system and gameplay would benefit a lot from larger character sprites. The controller on the side also seems unnecessary, unless it's only for testing purposes, you'd be better off with a handy button guide.
• Also, game doesn't pause while on the menu. This is fine if intentional, but you have to show at least a bit of the screen if so.

Good luck and hope you make it into a full game!

Delay between button press and sword swing feels bad. Even just a windup animation would help.

Crossbow/poison kiting feels much easier and less risky than trying to melee

Shield doesn't raise after swinging if you press and hold the shield button during swing

Auto sprint after dodging leads to accidentally running out of stamina during fights

I really, really like this so far. Killing the hard enemy felt great, and you've really nailed that feeling of soulsy combat in a way I don't think a 2d game really has before - I've played a shitload of soulslikes, and I honestly think this is the highest praise I can give.

The weapon trails really make it feel obvious when things are dangerous, which is fantastic. I kind of wish there'd been music/atmos but totally get that combat has been the priority so don't begrudge there being none yet.

I love the style of the little fella - I hope he looks like that right up to release.

The game has great conveyance - when I entered this room I immediately was like "what is the best way to deal with this threat", which I think means you've done a great job of conveying exactly what's required of the player and what the nature of the threat is as well as the toolset available.

I finished the demo and gotta say that I think all of my feedback at this point would be in the areas of presentation and inventory management. Once I got how it worked it was fine, but I was playing with kb+m and it felt a bit counterintuitive to figure out at first.

Presentation feels like it hasn't been a top priority - in terms of function over aesthetics it's instantly groccable and fulfils its function perfectly, so maybe giving feedback in that area is unwarranted right now.

Gonna be watching this project with EXTREME INTEREST. Keep it up, man. Stonking game!

Cute Sprites for the Player and the Enemies, I like the facial expressions on getting hit a lot!

Game immediately recognized my Controller which is nice, but Main menu didn't recognize Joysticks, only dirpad.

I like that the second dodge in row knocks you prone as a way to prevent dodge spamming.

The Controller picture in the bottom left doesn't necessarily match the picures in the tutorial signs.

Combat sounds like it has some nice depth, but I found myself just circlestrafing and shooting my Crossbow until each room was cleared without loosing health or getting punished in any other way appart from probably taking a bit longer.

At the Moment I can only equip/unequip Armor at the Chest, but it doesn't go into the Inventory, and I can't move it around or anything, only weapons and potions ( and I can't open the Inventory outside of Chests, probably because start opens up Steam instead)

Would like weapons to be equippable to the belt instead of cycling through all the ones in the Inventory, so I can choose which weapons to have quick access to.

In the Room with the 3 Fistguys, after a while all 3 of them just ran up to the upper left corner and stayed there.

When going prone the floorsprite doesn't wear Armor.

Whats with the 3 Guys walking on the Water that have Tons of Health?

The combat is shaping up to be really solid. Moving around, aiming and attacking felt very responsive with a gamepad. The pad image in the corner helps with identifying that your input is received, you could probably keep it in some form in the final game (have icons on the buttons for potions etc. as a reminder for what the button does). The inventory/chest screens can be confusing but it's clearly work in progress. The AI is fantastic.

Combat mechanics will need to be communicated clearly, such as how poison or bleeding affects your health. While the controls were quite snappy, it sometimes felt like my shield wasn't coming up when pressing the off hand attack button. There's definitely some instances of getting hit or accidentally doing the dodge jump where it feels like you have to wait for too long before being able to act again. The automatic running feels off, I had to constantly make sure to actually stop running so that I didn't drain my stamina.

How much of the graphics are placeholders? I'd recommend making the grass tiles less noisy. They currently look too distracting, and they are also very close to a hue that hurts my eyes (I have deuteranomaly).