I really wanted to like this game. The production values are very high, and there was a large team behind the game that clearly put a lot of love and work into it. I'm totally on board with the narrative and gameplay concept, too. Unfortunately, there are few major issues that really brought down the experience for me.
The biggest issue is the performance. It ran like cold molassess on a winter's day on my laptop, which is not a weak machine by any means. It's a gaming laptop from 2021, with a mobile RTX 3060. I got between 15-20 frames per second when trying to record and a few more frames without, which is completely unacceptable and borderline unplayable. Honestly, I wish this game didn't have all the fancy lighting, motion blur, reflections, and other fancy effects. Some of it is cool at first, but the novelty wears off fast especially when the game is chugging along at an unplayably low framerate.
I should note I have a 4K display. I have no idea if the game was rendering at 4K, and there didn't seem to be a way to check or change it.
Paradoxically, this is both an extremely polished game and an extremely rough one. There's voice acting, which is always impressive to see. But the voice acting is highly variable in quality, and there are some serious issues with the synchronization between the text and the voice lines. There's a very nice main menu that makes musical notes when you hover over the different buttons, but there's also no options, not even volume. There's an NPC that guides you through the game, but the signposting is inadequate and inaccurate, with them referring to a stack of boxes that is mostly composed of chairs, and telling you all your attacks without telling you how to use them. There are scripted cutscenes, but they are very rough with enemies appearing out of thin air, no camera control, and sudden transitions between cutscene and gameplay. Controls are clunky and sometimes effects don't appear.
To be fair, I think I'm coming down harder on some of those flaws because the initial impression of the game was such a strong one- it felt like something almost professional with a lot of talent and a lot of work behind it. Because of that, it was both all the more surprising and all the more disappointing to see it fall down in fairly basic ways.
Once I figured out the game mechanics, I did have some fun with them. The double jump with the little butterfly effect is very nice. You have a lot of mobility in this game, and jumping around environments is pretty fun. I found the magic hard to understand, but all three abilities had impressive effects. I wasn't expecting to see a shooter in this jam, and this one is pretty solid.
I managed to clear all the enemies in the first area and made it to the storage room with the key. And then... nothing happened. No cutscene triggered, I couldn't pick up the key, and there didn't seem to be anywhere else to go. Normally I'd assume I'd just missed something... but every Unreal engine game I've come across in a jam has been buggy for some reason, so who knows. If it weren't for the severe performance issues, I might be inclined to search more, but the game was really starting to give me a headache by that point.
I should reiterate that this is a very visually impressive game. I'm not sold on the heavy post-processing, but the game does have a distinctive visual style and some very nice looking models. Though... Hayley/Elara is a bit uncanny valley. Everything else looks super nice, though. The magic effects are a step above basically anything else I've seen in any MGGJ. The environments are detailed, compelling, and they even have physics!
I think there's a ton of potential here. A lot of the work has been done; the assets are there, the mechanics are there. It just needs tweaking to address some of the weaker points... and some serious optimization.
EDIT: After editing the config file, I was able to get a playable framerate, at the cost of losing most of the lighting. I noticed that there were prompts for some of the controls, which did not show up before. I was still not able to get past the key area.