I'm pretty amazed at the scope of this game. It just keeps opening up into more and more rooms! I enjoy that the boss rooms feel distinct with the music change and the platform layouts allowing for interesting dodging/maneuvering. I'm also always a fan of teleportation crystals, that's a nice implementation on a map that's so large. Finally, the room transitions are super slick, near instantaneous - this is a good thing, especially since you maintain momentum on vertical movement into the next room. If there was a brief loading pause, this could get annoying/disorienting.
Here are some suggestions/feedback:
- The movement is pretty sensitive, very small button presses would move your character pretty far in a certain direction. The fall speed was also pretty fast. These two things combined with the tight platforming made for some fairly difficult rooms, especially when you have moving platforms and spikes and flying eyes all conspiring against you.
- The alchemy was a cool addition, but I think the numbers need refinement. Herbs and mushrooms were way more common than gold, but gold was needed for all the recipes. This resulted in two problems for me, 1) I had to go and grind monsters for gold. I'm not necessarily against grinding for rare resources, but the fact that I was getting a ton of mushrooms/herbs at the same time which are essentially worthless without the one thing I need was a bit frustrating, and 2) there were some rooms which would lock you in to them with enemies and if you're low mana and don't have mana potions there's literally nothing you could do but die or restart (you could always make a mana potion, but I was fairly hesitant to do so since Keys felt so important to make in order to progress).
- Finally, I personally had a rough time making out the crosshairs over the background environment. I'm colorblind so this might not affect everyone, but the value contrast between the crosshairs and background was relatively low. That said, using the aiming mechanic was fun and fighting a horde of flying eyeballs was one of the highlights of the experience for me.
Overall a super cool experience, I liked that you incorporated the gamejam's theme in a substantial way and that the world was so expansive, it is a very meaty game. Great job!