i beat it! ngl i was pretty scared there at the end that I would have to fight the captain a third time
the art and the music and the story were great; it made the game feel cozy and polished. I especially liked the parrot girl as a character.
the gameplay mechanics were unique. I guess in a sense it's just really complicated quicktime actions, but it's a very interesting mechanic to build an entire game around. I appreciate that the game made a real effort to try and explore the ways it could use the same simple mechanic to build out distinctive encounters and the arcs within them. There were regular length sequences intercut with short but fast beats to keep you on your toes. There were longer sequences at the end of each fight to express more dramatic beats. There were sequences telegraphed through dialogue. Some enemies had a distinct "flows" in all their sequences. The two-line inputs at the end.
despite all that, I do think the gameplay itself was missing something for me. and here i'll just muse for a bit. the input sequences often felt simultaneously not challenging enough and too hard (to not make minor mistakes) - tricky more in the way of not trying to make spelling mistakes on an old-timey typewriter than the way of balling up your ruined manuscript and tossing it into a wastebasket five feet away is tricky. to be fair, "making quicktime actions fun" is a difficult task to start with - but maybe that's the wrong thing to try and compare it against. you could look at combo inputs in fighting games. usually, learning the combos in those games aren't the fun part; it's using the combos, when you get into a flow of chaining inputs to unleash a devastating attack. those are high skill games, but i feel like there could be a way to capture that same feeling in an easier game like this too (see "beat doctor"). In the final boss fight of this game, there was a brief moment where I felt kind of cool because I could really rapidly input certain combos because they felt "natural" (the final boss has a lot of "circular" input patterns). maybe the game could have leaned into that? i feel like the game tried to put a lot of minor variations on patterns to keep up the novelty and basically test the player by seeing how attentively they could not make any mistakes for as long as they can - but i think that worked against it. like, if i weren't being tripped up with deviations on patterns i've learned, i could build on those patterns so that at the end I was tackling larger combos, so that the game feels easy even though it also feels like i'm doing something hard. simultaneously hard and easy but in the opposite way.
I think that's what made the second fight interesting, because it teaches you something that totally helps you kick that specific pirate's butt. in that case, specifically, it was "how to predict the next sequence(s) through dialogue". but it could also have had sequences of short sequences, e.g. AAA always quickly followed by BBB, or other techniques of making the next sequence subconsciously obvious to the player in nonobvious ways. by the final boss, you could bust out everything and make the player do crazy shit and still feel easy.
just a bunch of unsolicited thoughts. ultimately though, I loved the game, and it's an amazing entry to the jam.