Interesting concept, and quite fun to play considering I don't normally enjoy bullet hell style games! The upgrade bug made it hard to proceed, and things went from manageable to impossible very quickly if you lost health and enemies suddenly started appearing all around. Some balancing would make this quite a good game. A lot of work went into it for one week! I enjoyed how the music pitched down as the character lost health, too.

Its awesome, reminds me of enter the gungeon. I liked how I didnt know whether to trust any npcs at the end, really cool idea. I felt like some of the enemies would get too close and it was too hard to avoid them, also the enemies at the start took a bit too long to kill and it got a bit tedious. Great game though, one of the better ones of the jam

Very simple game but still have good details! Easy to understand. Fits to the theme. Rated!

Don't forget to check my game and rating it, please.

https://itch.io/jam/cgj/rate/476599

Rated -  I feel a lot of effort went into this game, good job!  Take others suggestions and tweak this after the jam.  Hope you learned a lot too.  Your next game will be even better!  Please check out my game when you can~ good day!

Great one! It's a bit hard and the upgrade cards would stuck making it uplayable sometimes, but it's overall a really nice and fun game. Good job!

I love the art for all the characters, but I don't think they fit together. I think if you picked any one resolution of these characters and ran with that then it would work better, but other than that its a pretty sick game :]

The primary problem of this game is that it doesn't work. Most of the upgrades cannot be picked because the colliders of the cards that appear on screen are frequently impossible to interact with. Not sure what's going on there. For example, the book in the top right corner of the screen presented me with 3 upgrades. I could only pick the middle one, if I clicked around the edge of the card. I did notice that the icons on the cards themselves were also interactive, however, clicking on them produced no effect. So this bug robbed me of decision power.

A strange design choice is making all of your enemies have a very large amount of HP. I didn't count, but I think it takes between 20 and 30 shots to kill a generic ghost. This is not a good idea for the first enemies in your game. Even notoriously difficult games like Dark Souls give you intial foes that are easy to deal with, so the player can familiarise with the controls and the mechanics a little.

Further, the generic ghost enemy, the first and most common enemy you encounter, has a homing missile that is almost impossible to avoid. That seems to me to be a player unempowering design decision as well.

The music going down in pitch as you die is a nice touch, but I didn't find the music to match the mood and feel of the game, and it wasn't particularly pleasant to listen to from my perspective.

The art is alright, but there are various different pixel densities on display. For instance, when you stand close to a fly, the fly seems like it is a 4x4, or 8x8 at best, whereas the player, about 3 times as large as the fly, has a 32x32 sprite or thereabouts. This make the game look untidy.

I didn't see the theme there. In fact, I think this game would fit Ludum Dare 42 (Sacrifices will be made) or Ludum Dare 43 (Your life is currency) much better.

Overall, not a very enjoyable entry from my perspective. I only played it once, and I didn't want to play it again.

It took me a while to figure out why "a little pain is useful", the purple ui helped. Also, the bullets should be on sorting layer 999, because sometimes they fly behind other sprites and you don't see them coming. I think the bullets should always be seen. You did a fairly decent game all by yourself, so gg! Don't take this personally, the upgrades bug is annoying when enemies appear and they're covering half the screen. That bug should be a top priority before submitting an otherwise fun game!

The game is fun, but maybe a bit hard. 

I choosed an upgrade of healing, and i have been stuck in the wall :/

 Maybe some juicy effects when hitting an enemy could be nice? 

The concept is very innovative, and nice pixel art. Good job for your game, I really like it :)

Really fun game! I think the enemies have too much health and the player's bullet should be faster.

The red eyes in the background were really cool! Good job!

The game has a solid concept and a lot of work done for a week, about the audio it was nice but maybe you can try using some addition to it, like making it faster when monsters are near.

For your first time doing pixel art it was really good, i remember my first ones and they were awful.

If you want to keep going with pixel art i recommend you to start using (if you already dont) a software like Piskel (this is the one i use) or Aseprite and working with layers, that will help you a lot with animations, also try to check out Pedro Medeiros tutorials they are awesome.

Good Work! keep going!

I love how simple the game is, it's very easy to understand. The art is very good, it's simple but I like how you add details, like blood on the wall when the HP is low. The bgm is fitting with the situation, also love the detail with how it got slower the lower the HP is.

The problem I found is for the upgrade, I can only choose the middle one and it's hard to take the upgrade, because the enemy still can attack me when choosing an upgrade.

The game is fun, even though it's kind of hard, especially when the enemies start showing up here and there. Overall, I will play it again if you make it into a full game.

I found that the gun does very little damage, making it very difficult to fight multiple enemies at once. Enemies can also attack you while you're picking one of the book upgrades, which isn't ideal.

It was fun to play. The mechanic that you have more damage when low on hp (and also the walls) is interesting. Except for the part when I chose to get 85hp and was full hp so I had to get damaged almost to 0 again just to get further. So basically a good player that doesn't get hit can't progress except he runs into spikes.

The music is simple but while playing it was not annoying. It suits.

The enemies at the start (and their bullets) are way too fast. I think the first enemies should be almost dummies, so that the player can get used to the controls and so on. After playing it through I was able to not get hit by them but for a new player they might be too hard.

There were some issues like, when choosing an upgrade, new enemies came from somewhere and attacked you, so you have to fight them while having 3 big upgrade boxes infront of you.

Also I had a really hard time to click on the upgrades. I had to move the character and the mouse and search for the hitboxes, sometimes it helped but most of the time I only could click on the middle upgrade.

Overall it is a good game and I would love to play it again when the bugs are fixed and the game has more content. Good luck :)

Really fun and nice game. I had problem with choosing powerups and there were moments that were too challenging for me, but it was a really enjoyable experience.

Damn Id love to play the game because it seems awesome but I cant run .rar files...

1 more small remark

Please add a minimap. I still couldn't find the final boss, but I searched everything I could :(

Very cool game! BUT 2 BIG NOTES

1) Cards sometimes just do not click, it is very annoying
2) At the very beginning, the player moves so slowly that it is almost impossible to dodge bullets

Innovation 10/10