I beat it! :) (endscreen)
This little blast from the past got me excited to dabble in chiptune composition (I did sound for another submission) and it was really refreshing to bust out a gameboy emulator for the full experience somehow.
If you want the bread and butter of it:
You bring creative and interesting gameplay communication with a nice sense of charm and cohesion and engaging, cryptic puzzles. Polish up your feedback systems, sounds and sprites to indicate player control, so the player is less unsure whether they performed an action right or not.
Things you can do/fix right now:
* Communicate amount of bombs and arrows held
* Player randomly looses all bombs and/or arrows, often after screen transition
* Coins sometimes cannot be picked up, fixed by screen transition
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Up next is a recount of my experience with the game. This might be a lot so don't get overwhelmed, focus on the above stuff. :)
Here is how my experience went:
At first the controls felt a little offputting, too grid-like. I am fairly certain this is webGLs fault though, as the game felt way better on emulator. The sword is kind of hard to see sometimes, especially against a white background. This makes me feel weak as a player, promoting careful play .
After adjusting my playstyle to be a little more cautious, I paid closer attention to the oddities in the overworld, starting to crack the puzzles. I felt super smart for figuring out the knight movement and the floor indicator is a sweet touch. It feels a bit awkward to be stuck while the knight is moving though, maybe some visual feedback could indicate that you are scared and frozen in place while the knight is moving.
Getting stuck on the X-block I started buying hints. I wanted to know how many there were since I was starting to get a little frustrated. I was in the middle of working on our submission and would have otherwise given up, so it was good the hint was there because it kept me in the game. That puzzle taught me that blocks can be interactible, which helped me complete the other puzzles.
The skull-puzzle could benefit from audio/visual feedback for spawning and de-spawning to communicate to the player that they are controlling something. As it stands, the skull feels a bit glitchy. Also the roman numerals in the overworld-puzzle made me expect something similar for the dungeon-puzzle, but you solve them differently. This teaches the player that concepts are maluable, which might be where you want to go, asking the player not to get too tight with their expectations. In this context, it felt like you were teaching me a trick and then expecting me to perform a different trick on the same cue.
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I hope you continue on with this game, I will be checking in and would love to see updates. :)