I like the concept of this game, and it's an interesting implementation of the themes, but in almost every aspect it's close but not quite there.
There's a lot of nice pixel art in this game, both for the characters and the world. Unfortunately, some of it is blurry, some of it is quite clearly scaled up or down, and there are some graphical artifacts when scrolling, which gives the whole thing a rough and mismatched feel. Some of the spikes are also halfway in the floor.
While I like the concept of the story, the dialogue is pretty stilted, and the ending is abrupt.
The platforming is pretty basic, but the movement is pretty solid. The camera, though, almost made me sick because it jumps up and down so aggressively. I think it would be better if the camera was zoomed out more, which would also help with the disorientation mentioned below.
The level design is okay. It wasn't clear to me that you had to drop into the cave and I walked to both ends of the world until I figured it out. Afterwards I understood that we were mostly dropping down, but I think that could have been signposted better. It was sometimes hard to see where I was going in general because the field of view is small and the level is made up of the same few tiles. The general concept of avoiding spikes and enemies works well enough, but started to drag and get repetitive toward the end; I think the game would be better if it were a few screens shorter.
Shooting enemies isn't really satisfying and feels like an afterthought. I don't feel it's a bad mechanic, but one that needed to be more fleshed out.
I'm not a fan of the Atari-like sound effects, but that's mostly down to personal preference. A bigger issue is that the bullet sound is glitched and only plays sometimes. The music was pretty good. It could have looped better, but that's a pretty nitpicky complaint.
I did appreciate the relatively generous save points. Although it was a bit of a mixed bag overall, I never really got frustrated with this game. It was a little short for a jam game, but didn't try to stretch out the content it had too much, which is also appreciated.