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People will complain about just about every bit of friction towards their desired playstyle, yeah. There's a certain point where you have to decide who you're actually going to listen to and how, because you just can't please everyone.

For my part though, I think my initial feedback wasn't super well phrased, as I'd be satisfied with just having the option to back out of the fight. It could be a pause menu button, or even require reloading the game entirely - just some way to leave the fight without losing all my other progress. I think it's fine to keep the default behavior throwing the player right back into the action, especially if you expect most players to be mainly here for the bossfights, since that's probably the thing that players are going to be wanting much more often.

What behavior you want very much does depend on the game though, yes. There's a reason I specifically said I don't like it for a metroidvania - in a fully linear game, it makes perfect sense to throw the player right back into the challenge immediately, since there might well be literally nothing else for them to do at that point in the game, but for something more open ended like a metroidvania, when a player gets stuck on a challenge, it's often preferable to leave and go check another path they haven't explored yet rather than continuously bang their head against a brick wall. Death systems that encourage or outright force the player to dive back into the same challenge punish this style of play and tend to hamper the focus on exploration that the genre is known for. Even outside of linearity though you do have to consider exactly what kind of tone and structure you're going for and what role the bosses play in that. Modern gaming culture has a tendency to hyperfixate on bossfights as the main event, a spectacle that can and should dwarf everything else in the game, and from that framing its easy for people to start seeing any amount of runback as a waste of their time. But, this simply doesn't have to be how bossfights are framed - for instance, putting the player back much earlier in the level on respawn forces them to master the level before they can start making progress on the boss, and emphasizes the boss as a capstone on the level rather than being the main spectacle in and of itself. Plenty of successful games use a mixture of these philosophies. The speed at which you get back into the action after a death also has a lot of implications for the tone and pacing of the game - forcing the player to take some extra time before they can jump back into the boss slows things down and can make things more careful and contemplative, though of course that same slowdown is exactly what can make a runback so frustrating after a particularly painful death. Adding any amount of friction towards getting into what the player perceives as the main action is always going to have that kind of tradeoff, no matter how well you design it - which is why eliminating runbacks entirely isn't totally without merit, but throwing the player immediately into action without even the choice to stop and reflect first is inevitably going to make the game much less cerebral, for better or for worse.

Basically like anything else in gamedev the presence and size of runbacks is going to depend a lot on the kind of game you want to make. If you want your games to be focused on high octane bossfights with the slower exploration acting mainly as just a palette cleanser in between, then great - you should keep going in the direction you currently are, and you'll find tons of players eager for exactly that kind of game. Don't worry too much about trying to please people like me along the way, because my tastes are just always going to lean in the opposite direction. (That said, don't completely ignore the advice of people who bounce of your games either, as they still might raise some points that'll make your game better for everyone :p)

For the parry, I actually agree the current length of the window is fine - what I'm suggesting is shortening just the animation slightly while leaving the actual mechanical window the exact same length. That way there's a little bit of a grace period as the knife disappears, so the window feels more forgiving even though the actual timing hasn't changed at all.

As for the jump... some of your comments there make me think I assumed you had more prior knowledge about variable jump usually works than was maybe accurate, so I'm gonna give the full spiel I was originally gonna write on that before I checked your earlier games, but to start by just explaining why I think the current jump feels so bad: Yes, I think a lot of it is just framing. The player looks like they're jumping, sounds like they're jumping, but does not move like they're jumping, and something about that fundamentally just feels wrong. If you were to visually frame the ability as more of an outright hover, or lean into the physical wrongness with some kind of narrative explanation, I think it would immediately feel much better. There would still be some awkwardness with the level design, however, where I think the big issue is with speed - it takes much longer for this pseudo-hover jump to reach its max height than an instantaneous jump would. This could potentially be fixed just by increasing the rate at which the player rises if you really want to commit to this style of jump.

That's all assuming you actually do specifically want a hover type move though, but your comment about wanting holding the jump button to feel meaningful makes me wonder if my first instinct was right about it being an attempt at just implementing variable jump height, to whit: that's not how variable jump works. In the vast majority of games that feature it, controllable jump height is achieved not by adding more velocity when the jump button is held but by reducing it when the jump button is released. This makes it so that you go higher when the jump button is held as expected, but while keeping the initial jump instantaneous. My go-to method for this is to cut the player's upwards velocity in half when the button is released, though this exact value isn't significant - multiplying the velocity by pretty much any number less than 1 will give a similar effect, as long as you're not cutting it straight to zero. Another common method is to increase the gravity after the jump button is released, but I've personally never liked how this feels. I was originally going to write out most of this in my initial review, but I wanted to check that you were actually new to platformers before giving this whole spiel, and found some games that seemed to already use this kind of more traditional variable jump in them that made me assume you were already fully familiar with all of this - if that's correct and you've heard all this before than I apologize for reiterating it all again, hopefully there was still something useful in my take on it.

I do note that in those old games of yours while the difference between holding and tapping the button exists it certainly isn't very large, so if the issue you're having is just making the variable jump feel actually impactful then I would encourage playing around with the parameters of it more before committing to switching to the hover jump. You mention the player not being able to stay above enemy attacks, and the jump feeling too short, but neither of those things have anything to do with which technique is used for the jump - lowering the player's gravity and increasing the velocity given by the jump will make the jump higher and floatier, and even make the difference between holding and tapping the jump much more significant, since the player will have a longer window during which to cut the jump. You could also try directly increasing how harshly the velocity gets reduced if the control's still not feeling impactful enough - either the instant cut method or extra gravity method give you a number to play with there.

All of that said, I do think a game with something more like a hover than a jump as the main way of gaining height could very much be interesting, I just think it needs to be presented as such so the player understands what to expect from the move's behavior, and it also sounds like that kind of gimmick wasn't necessarily the actual goal behind this game's jump design. And regardless of what you decide works best in the context of this game, I'd definitely encourage playing around more with the exact values you use for your older jump mechanic, as I think the usual way of implementing it has a lot more room for variety than you're giving it credit for.

respawning immediately back into the bossfight sucks for a metroidvania. i wan to be able to back out and explore more, especially for what seems to be the final boss where you're thrown into it with no warning.

i didn't actually bother beating said boss. i don't tend to be a huge fan of parry based combat in general and this didn't prove an exception. it seems to be decently competent for what it is and other people certainly seem to like it based on these comments, so i think it's probably more my personal taste than the game's fault, but i just don't find it all that satisfying.

one concrete gripe i did have with the parry is that the particles from the parry knife disappearing look a bit like the knife itself still being in your hand, so i had a lot of occasions early on where i pressed the parry button too early and then got hit while it looked like i was still in the parry state, which was really frustrating and made it take much longer for me to figure out the proper parry timing. i wonder if it might feel smoother to have the knife disappear a little bit before the parry window ends to give a bit of buffer, or to only have the particles appear if a parry actually occurs and not whenever the knife disappears.

as far as non-combat gameplay goes the jump feels extremely awkward - having a force continually applied as long as you hold the button makes it feel more like they're hovering or wearing a jetpack than like they're actually jumping, even though the visuals and level design all clearly treat it like a standard jump. i'd assumed while playing that this was an amateurish attempt at implementing a variable height jump, but glancing at your profile you seem to have made other platformers with more traditional variable jumps before, so i'm really not sure what the intention here is. whatever it is, it doesn't seem like it's being communicated to the player very well, and the jump mostly just felt really bad to use.

visually the minimalist aesthetic is neat, and everything looks very juicy and polished. i also enjoyed the little npc sidequests, even if all the ones i found didn't really involve anything beyond normal exploration. i see mentions of a puzzle in the comments, but i didn't find it before getting locked into the final boss, which is a big reason why i'm so frustrated by how the respawn mechanic works as i'm significantly more interested in finding that puzzle than in the bossfight.

This is awesome. Launching yourself around with the sword is so much fun, all of the platforming was so satisfying, and there's amazingly little jank for such a nonstandard physics based mechanic. The combat felt a bit less developed than the platforming but was still really satisfying - using the sword to block lasers is such a cool idea and really helps go the extra mile to selling the physicality of the whole system. It was also a lot of fun to combo the boss with the spin attack, though the boss was just a little frustrating before I discovered that due to spending so much time offscreen. It's kind of a lazy solution but I wonder if a little indicator arrow for when it goes offscreen would help keep track of it without needing to shrink down the arena or tone done the shotgun attachment, as doing either of those would detract from the spectacle a bit I feel.

The only clear issue I noticed was the save system didn't actually seem to save anything but the player position, and it didn't actually save to file (I was forced to start over when I accidentally reloaded the page - thankfully after only reaching one save point). I don't know if it can even really be called a save system in this state, they're effectively just checkpoints. I also notice you mention crafting in the description, but I honestly don't see what a crafting system would add to this game, especially if its a bog standard menu based system. Keeping the upgrades as simple pickups seems fine to me.

Fun little game. Was worried the attack range looked a little short at first but it turned out to be perfect. I enjoyed the writing a lot, was simplistic but cute and fun and felt perfect for a game with this size and tone. Visuals were unrefined but bright and appealing, throwing stuff at enemies was fun, very good entry.

Giving up on this at the second bird boss - it's just not fun, and having to climb all the way back down and then back up the mountain to get any upgrades means I can't really do much to make it more manageable.

The bosses were a low point here. They start out decent and then get consistently worse over time. The first one is simple and works fine for an introductory boss, the second one is flawed but I still had some fun with it, and then the two bosses I fought after that were both absurdly tanky and fully uninteresting to fight. Every boss attack in this game seems to be either completely trivial to dodge (most of the bird's attacks don't even focus on the player and can be dodged by just standing still for most of the phase), or they're the bird's laser attack. God I hate that attack. The flames appear with no telegraph before the attack proper even begins, so you just. Instantly take damage if you happened to end the last phase standing in the wrong spot, and then the two flame patterns are treated as equal and have a 50/50 chance of appearing despite being radically different in how they actually effect the attack - the horizontal flames make it relatively easy and even decently fun to dodge the lasers by moving back and forth and then dashing across the lasers when you need to turn around, but for the vertical ones I genuinely cannot imagine any way to consistently avoid the lasers there. The lasers are now much more closely aligned with the space you have to move in, so you can't avoid them by just moving back and forth through the lanes like you can with the horizontal beams because they just take up so much more of the space; trying to move horizontally doesn't work because for some godforsaken reason the flames are placed exactly close enough together that trying to dash over one row will regularly faceplant you directly into the next; and when I tried to just repeatedly dash through the lasers I got killed by their lingering hitboxes stacking up over the space. Every time it used the vertical flame pattern I'd come out of the phase with at best a third of my healthbar gone, which meant the fight came down to tediously waiting for the extremely slow and mind numbingly trivial dash and thunder phases where the bird is just... fully invulnerable to damage despite these taking up the majority of the fight, standing next to it and wailing on it with the disc for the like ten seconds the fireball phase lasts, and then praying that it used the correct flame pattern in the laser attack often enough that I could survive. Repeat for cycle after cycle after cycle as I'm left wondering just how much health the stupid thing has, until I inevitably lose most of my health to vertical flame patterns and then accidentally dash of the platform and die. Most of these phases are identical to the first fight against the boss, where they already wore thin after a few cycles - by this point there is nothing even slightly engaging left to them at all, leaving them as soul sucking time filler while I wait for the make or break laser attack.

The third boss had similar issues with being invulnerable most of the time combined with a massive health pool. The fight is interesting at first - you have to work around the walls the boss makes to defeat the towers, the whirlwind attack is genuinely difficult and fun to figure out how to dodge... but within a few minutes the towers are gone, then it takes maybe a few more cycles for me to figure out how to dodge the whirlwind, then within a few more cycles its started getting tedious... and there's still dozens of cycles left to go. That one, at least, was easy enough that it didn't take multiple tries, so I ended up pushing through it, but I had I died close to the end (which I nearly did as I started slipping up from boredom) there's a good chance I would've just dropped the game there.

I'm not sure how much else to comment on. Maybe I should've just given up at the end of my previous session and written a review then, because with this session being just failed attempts at the second bird the bosses are all that's on my mind. I left some other feedback on discord during the rest of my playthrough so maybe that'll have to do.

As far as positives... the mvm references were fun, and the visuals are decent. Wish I'd gotten to see the end of my sidequest. I think the core "platforming" mechanic of dashing over gaps in a top-down setting is interesting and shows promise too, but it's still rather janky and often frustrating in its current state (though significantly better than it was in the beta version I played.)

That was fine. I don't really get what people are saying about it being scary, or stressful, or even particularly difficult. It took me a couple tries but while the orb things instakill they also don't move very fast and it wasn't really that hard to avoid them. The hints also make it pretty explicit where you're supposed to go... which does pretty much eliminate anything remotely metroidvania-ish about this on the other hand, and it was already pretty questionable there.

This is a hard game to review as it feels broadly technically competent but everything just feels kind of off and I frankly didn't particularly enjoy it.

In terms of basic gameplay the jump feels way too high and fast? The slime launches up like a rocket then plummets back to the ground just as fast and its very awkward to control. The static camera also just felt really bad with the extremely fast movement, it really needs some smoothing.

The visuals are I think the biggest thing where it looks solid on a technical level but I just didn't find it to be appealing for reasons I can't put my finger on in general. Some of it might have more to do with the framing than the art itself, with a lot of objects looking too small on my screen to clearly make out and appreciate the pixel art during fast paced gameplay, but it also feels like there are flaws in the art itself that I maybe don't have the experience to identify or describe.

The world design here just felt really empty and bland. Most rooms just feel like big empty spaces with a few enemies haphazardly strewn around that you can pretty much just ignore and run past with how fast even your base walk speed is. There's extremely little in the way of meaningful challenges or memorable setpieces or interesting secrets, just a lot of samey rooms that feel like they're filling space and make it easy to get lost.

Music also has that technically competent but a bit off feeling. The apparent idea of a generic orchestral fantasy soundtrack with goofy slimey instruments intruding on it is interesting and thematically fitting but the execution just didn't click. I kind of wonder if the goofy stuff isn't intrusive enough, as a lot of times while playing it'd just feel like generic fantasy music but slightly worse, and only when I stopped and actively listened to it for a second would I realize I was hearing the kazoo from the main menu theme again.

When I got to the boss I encountered what seems to be a bug where the fight started with me still on the wrong side of the gate, which led to the boss just getting stuck on the other side where I could still reach and attack it but it couldn't attack me. I also was confused for a bit about that gate even being for the bossfight as it looked identical to the walls you can smash through with the dash, but this one just arbitrarily can't be. Had I ended up in the correct position and the camera properly framed the bossfight it might've been more obvious what it actually was but as it stands it just left me wondering why it didn't break when I rammed into it until well into the fight when I realized what had happened.

If there's one positive at least it's that ramming into enemies with the dash and watching them go flying was really fun. Seeing more funny ability interactions like that could be fun, and makes me wish there was more than one ability in this version.

Got to the room with the train, assumed it was meant to be a hazard to be dodged as you made your way through the room only for the other end to not have anything in it, so I stopped playing... but apparently reading the limitation description here it was meant to be a bossfight? I never thought to attack it so I have no idea what it would've looked like as one or whether this game actually has a proper ending afterwards.

Love the character art, and the writing is well done and helps establish the setting very well. The sounds and visuals on the train were also really well done and super creepy... which all the fear then immediately fell flat as the extremely calm and peaceful music from the overworld continued playing the entire time I was being chased by the train, it would've worked much better if the music faded out I think. The creepy screeching sound also stopped after about a minute - it doesn't seem to have been set up to loop correctly. Neither was the music, which very abruptly snapped back to the beginning at a seemingly random point.

The metroidvanianess of this feels a little iffy. There are upgrades, and they unlock new areas... but you don't actually get any of them through exploration, just through grinding out scrap metal to craft them. It left the two halves of the equation feeling rather disconnected and I don't think the end result felt like it achieved that metroidvania ethos.

Couldn't manage to get out of the first area - there's a gate that requires 3 spirit to open before the boss and I can only carry two. I assume there's a mana upgrade somewhere around that would let me get past but I can't find it and I've checked all the empty space on my map, so I don't get where it could be. A bit disappointing as there's clearly more to see here but I'm giving up for now.

The core movement here is decent feels just a little off -  the jump is a bit awkwardly floaty, and while I got used to it it might feel better with a slightly higher gravity. There's also a really odd effect where the player will land slightly above the ground and then slowly sink down - I have no idea what could possibly be causing that but it looks immensely strange.

Combat wise the player's attack hitbox is, for once in this jam, wayyy too big. It seems to extend for like, twice the length of the actual visual, which leads to some very odd looking gameplay of killing rats by stabbing the air three feet above their head. The range of the visual doesn't seem particularly unreasonable especially given enemies don't deal contact damage here, so I'd say just bringing the hitbox more in line with it would work much better.

On the other hand when I couldn't just cheese combat with the oversized attack hitbox I spent a lot of time avoiding it completely because the starting health was just so comically low it didn't feel worth the risk. Once I got one health upgrade the game became a lot smoother and more fun as I was actually able to take on combat consistently enough to keep my spirit charges up - on which note, whether enemies actually dropped those felt painfully inconsistent. The game seemed balanced around them always dropping, and I"d go through regular streaks of consistent drops that made it feel like this was the case... and then I'd get a streak of absolutely none dropping at all which is a massive problem when the charges are required just to toggle switches. I still don't understand how the system works - it doesn't feel uniformly random, it doesn't seem to be tied to specific enemies dropping or not dropping them, and it's certainly not a guaranteed thing, so I was left confused and frustrated every time a group of enemies refused to drop a spirit when I needed one.

I like the Ori 1 style saving, but at the moment it's possible to have enemies spawn in front of your save point and immediately attack you before the screen even finishes transitioning. IIRC Ori saves which enemies you've killed on reload and prevents you from creating a save too close to living enemies or in manually designated "unsafe" areas, which fixes this issue. I could see a few other options working too, though - like you could just have enemies despawn on load if they're too close to a save point.

Visually the player sprites look pretty good but their animations are weirdly slow - I feel like you could nearly if not outright double the framerate while adding no frames and they would look more correct. The environments are a lot more lackluster but in a way that mostly feels like the product of jam time constraints than anything.

The actual level design of those environments often felt kind of aimless. Some of this might just be a lack of distinct setpieces to populate them with, but there was also the occasional odd path that seemed to wind around off to nowhere - in particular there's a looping tunnel near the three spirit gate that doesn't seem to serve any purpose and had me a bit confused while grabbing the switches up there as it looked like a path to another switch, but turned out to just be an empty loop. Some cleanup and refinement of things like that in the level design would help the game I think.

One much bigger gripe I had with the level design is that there were several blind jumps that led directly into spike pits. The game could really really use the ability to manually look down. The camera does also seem to be locked to the player at the moment so it might be worth trying some lookahead for flavor, but unlike some games with more static cameras I didn't find myself taking issue with it while playing so it'd probably be fine without - the manual camera control is the one thing I felt a desperate need for.

The music and sound design was very solid here, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Feels very professional already as is.

Overall this is a promising little metroidvania base with a lot of clear room for improvement and some decent stuff here already. Very solid little entry.

Got 2 pies but gave up on the rest, I can't figure out how to get a lot of the higher up ones with all the jank. I don't know how I feel about the game being intentionally glitchy and janky - most of the glitches and jank just felt awkward and inconsistent rather than funny or interesting to exploit.

Moving and dashing feels decent, but there's some weirdness with the gravity (or maybe just the vertical momentum?) where the player plummets to the ground when walking off a ledge, which pretty consistently felt bad.

Who on earth in their right mind would ever interpret "left" and "right' to mean "backward" and "forward". 

Visuals and sound design were good. A lot of the gameplay felt kind of slow and tedious. The lasso is funny and decently fun to use, but tends to only be used briefly while most of the gameplay consists of just slowly walking around. Which was still fine for the first few minutes as I took in the environment, but backtracking was a huge slog as I had to very slowly walk from one end of the main room to the other while checking every lassoable tree to see if it led to progress. Granted I think a lot of the back half felt worse than it might've normally just because I was still fuming over that puzzle solution - it really was a massive low point that dragged everything else down for me. I get that puzzles are difficult to playtest but oh my god I question whether any player would be able to actually intuit it and not just brute force which entrances the non-vertical arrows are referring to - which, doing so correctly requires that you even recognize the way backwards as a valid option, something that's deeply unintuitive with how the clue is currently written and I tried basically every combination of interpretations that didn't involve that before giving up and finding the solution you gave on discord.

The metroidvania elements felt mostly perfunctory and I got more of an adventure game vibe from this than anything. That's not necessarily a bad thing from a general design perspective but does make me wonder if a format that was either more linear or more open might've worked better for this had it not been squeezed into a metroidvania jam,. I docked it a bit on that category score wise, but not a lot as it does still have meaningful ability gates which is all that's really mandatory for jam purposes.

Thank you!

I ripped this player control from a failed attempt at a more in depth entry, in which I did hope to explore that mechanic a lot more. Unfortunately within the bounds of this game's mechanics there's not really anything I can do to force the player to use that mechanic - any gap that can be crossed with a normal jump into a midair dash jump can also be crossed with a dash jump into a normal jump, and this game doesn't have any hazards I could put in the way to force the player to use the normal jump first.

...those are supposed to jump? i've never seen them do anything but stand still. i got around it by nudging myself into the little gap between it and the edge of the cliff there, which felt finicky but i assumed was meant to be part of the "difficulty" promised in the area's starting narration (and i was still stuck there for a long time as i assumed there was some ability i was missing to get over it)

that room doesn't actually have nothing in it. don't listen to her

Was writing a review then closed the tab without realizing I hadn't actually posted it and now I don't remember all of what I wanted to say -.- you'd think it'd warn you when you do that like most websites but itch has never been very good with its text input

 Sucks that you weren't able to make very much :(  The core character controller here felt good, as did the wall run, but I feel like the ledge grab and wall jump/climb thingy were a bit of an awkward pair - I had a hard time telling if I was in range for a ledge grab or would need to use the jump and missed jumps several times due misjudging this and not using the wall jump fast enough. I like the gimmick of activating the switches, but it was really confusing what the actual conditions to power them on were - visually the player is clearly just sticking a battery in the slot and all of the batteries look the same, so you'd think you just need one battery per box, but there were several occasions where I wasn't able to power a switch despite having picked up more batteries than I'd spent. I don't know if there's specific batteries that correspond to specific switches, or if some require a specific total amount of batteries collected, or if some of the batteries just don't actually count (some of them might've been ability pickups which seem to look exactly the same?) Whatever the mechanic is, it's not communicated to the player whatsoever in its current state, and it made things really confusing.

Mouse sensitivity feels too high, I felt actively nauseous when i first moved my mouse. The fluorescent green grass and pixellation filter don't help with this I think.

Gameplay wise this was pretty decent, its a competent little 3d metroidvania controller. I like the particles on the attack - feels like it could use some screen shake to sell the juice a little more, but it being at the point where that's the first thing I think of is a really good sign.

Level design was less good. A lot of it feels really haphazard and confusing, and there's lots of weird side platforms that don't lead anywhere. The world also doesn't really have any meaningful side paths or optional content that help give it a metroidvania feeling.

Sound design was pretty solid (except for the boulders sounding like bowling pins? that felt awkward) but I would've liked some music I think.

Pretty nice game. The art is gorgeous, the player's base movement feels good, and the gimmick is interesting - making all your upgrades modifiers to one central move is a neat way to put a bit of a spin on otherwise extremely traditional metroidvania upgrades, but it does also lead to a lot of accidental activation that got a little frustrating at times.

Where this fell flat was the level design. There were some really interesting ideas playing with the moving blocks in the first area, but by the third area it felt like every room was a big empty passage designed just to fill space, with interesting setpieces or challenges being few and far between. You mention in the game's description that you threw together a very large map in the last couple days, which seems like a mistake - I think the game would've been better if you put that time into a smaller but more focused map with more thought out level design.

really cool game! found everything but one white puzzle piece (though I was only able to find the final room thanks to the hint in the comments here). the minimalist visuals are really nice and appealing, and i like the central character switching mechanic, though i definitely feel like it was at its best initially when it was just the bunny and spider. you get a lot of fun mid-air switching shenaniganry with those two that never really comes back later, and i started getting mixed up about which button would transform me into what once there were more than two forms. on that note i usually rest my hand on zxc with arrow key controls so having to press v just as often as c felt awkward. considering x wasn't used for anything i don't see why it couldn't just use x and c to cycle transformations instead. 

getting the bird felt like it kind of made the other transformations fully obsolete which was a bit eh as it removed the main gimmick of the gameplay up to that point, though i do applaud you for actually having a significant amount of gameplay using the infinite flight unlike lighthop making it a lazy postgame reward x)   the little puzzle to get into the final room was also pretty neat and wrapped things up nicely.

also despite the fact that you couldn't think of anything for the theme interpretation this was maybe the most on theme feeling game i've played yet. something about the structure of the game makes it feel extra like a journey despite any lack of overt theming to that effect.

unfortunately "without help" isn't really accurate bc i didn't notice those trees until reading the other comment here complaining about them :(  i knew how to get in without help at least x)

The core Necrodancer inspired mechanic is cool and made it pretty fun to move around generally. Unfortunately I greatly disliked the world design - every path loops back around on itself with the key abilities being stuck off in inconspicuous corners making it incredibly easy to get lost since you very literally get guided into walking in circles rather than actually finding the abilities. There could be something interesting to that with the time limit, having to discover the locations of each abilitiy so you can actually get to them in time, but right now the ability locations didn't feel satisfying to discover, they just made me go "what the fuck is it doing over there I already checked this room", and I came off with a bad taste in my mouth that made me not want to try again after I ran out of time.

The music was nice at least.

can't believe deltarune is canonically tomorrow

absolute cinema. my only negative is the ending being so abrupt i need more of this silly star girl and her imaginary bird hater

but like what is a metroidvania though

I think it very literally is just the player moves too slow. There's not a lot you can do to spruce up the level design when the player only moves a few tiles a second, and the distribution of points of interest felt perfectly fine to me in most cases. Adjusting the player speed is also just a really easy thing to do so I wouldn't be afraid of playing around with it and seeing if it feels better at a faster speed. It doesn't need to be drastically faster, just a moderate increase can really change the effect it has.

Really good game. Attack spacing took some getting used to but I actually enjoyed having that bit of friction at the start give way to eventually mastering the combat and the overall the pacing of the gameplay felt perfectly fine to me, I don't agree with the complaints about it feeling too slow. I suppose if one thing did feel a bit slow to me it would be the dash which felt like it could use a little extra range to make it feel more impactful. Art is gorgeous, game is fully featured and well polished, story is... well I'm personally not a huge fan of "death is actually good and necessary" themes as a rule but having a substantial amount of well thought out writing in a jam game is always massive bonus points. Easily a top tier entry. Really liked how the teleport worked too, being able to set up my dodges ahead of time in the final boss was fun and set it apart from just being another dash.

The character switching gimmick seemed interesting at a glance, but it never really seemed to go in any kind of actually interesting direction. The fact that the three journeys never interact with each other in any way makes it feel like three completely seperate metroidvanias stitched together, which seems to be more or less the intent as it does fit with the narrative... but, like, that just makes me question why this is the narrative framing that was chosen, when it doesn't really allow for any deeper mechanical exploration of the gimmick. As it stands, the campaigns could be selected from a menu and it feels like the game would barely change. Alternatively maybe leaning more into the time limit aspect could've been an interesting direction to go in - tightening the timer and forcing you to hectically adapt as you swap around would make the song timer feel more relevant compared to the current leisurely pace.

Gameplay wise the individual metroidvanias are fine. I never actually found any upgrades in Vert's campaign, but it does look like there clearly were some that I missed, they were just never involved in the critical path? Which left it feeling decidedly less metroidvanish. Honestly Alma's was the only one that felt especially Metroidvania being the only one to actually have multiple critical upgrades and a pretty winding path that, like a lot of good metroidvania maps, felt nonlinear while (as far as I could tell at least) actually being pretty linear. Buster's was more middle of the road but did still easily pass the bar by jam standards. Was a bit disappointed that the different weapons for them never actually unlocked anything - particularly because the first one I got was the one that shoots through walls which is a feature that seems like it'd only really be useful for puzzles (it certainly never saw any meaningful use in combat in my playthrough).

There is exactly one big gameplay gripe I have and it's with the camera's vertical scroll. Oh my god it is awful. The camera constantly lags behind you, then jumps around what feels like at random and never in the direction you actually want it to go. It's mainly a problem in Vert's campaign because of... well the fact that it's mostly vertical. I felt like I spent half my time there not being able to see where I was actually going. The manual camera control helps a little bit, but its severely hampered by the fact that it can't be used on semi-solid platforms since pressing down just drops you through those - there's a good reason a lot of games require you to press down and jump to do that!

Visually I like the environment art (at least the spritework - some of its actual placement in the level feels a bit haphazard or unfinished, but such is how jam games go) but was very much not a fan of how the main characters looked. The borders are full of jagged edges and holes (and also just, like, having pitch black borders to begin with tends to be a negative point for me unless you really know what you're doing with em), the shapes are weird and indistinct, and the complete lack of shading compared to the much more detailed environments makes them stick out like a sore thumb and look like some kind of placeholder, but with way too many animation frames to seem like they actually were just placeholders. Its just generally a very odd jump in quality between the environment and characters that never really smoothed itself out in my eyes as I played.

The music was pretty good though, which is important for a game where it's central to the theming! I can't say that it's anything I'd personally put on for a journey, but it's quality enough I could see someone doing so :P Was enjoyable to listen to the whole way through the game.

Overall if there is one thing this game achieved it was delivering on its very ambitious scope - this sure is three metroidvanias in one, which is impressive! But I feel like a good bit of quality was sacrificed to achieve that, and the end result is a game that is often just kind of vaguely decent at best. I feel like more effort put into refining what was here could've given a game with some more memorable environments, or better character art, or just a more fully baked idea for building off the central character swapping idea - any of which might've made this stand out for more than just a passingly interesting gimmick.

Fun game! You really have the metroidvania level design down pat, was a lot of fun to explore and I really enjoyed the secret health upgrades. Kudos for including a map screen, the game's just large enough that it would've been an issue without one, I definitely needed it to find the last couple upgrades.

My big gripe with this is just that the player's base movement felt really painfully slow. I spent about half the game expecting some kind of dash that would maybe help mitigate this, but the only thing to come close was the flight upgrade near the very end and frankly the speed that moves at feels like it should've been the player's base movement speed the entire time. The slow movement made getting around feel pretty much always just a little tedious and I'm not surprised to see other commenters saying they dropped the game because of it, though for me it never bothered me enough to get me to stop playing.

The damage balancing also feels really awkward, I don't really get why there's such a large spread of damage values? The very first spike you encounter takes out half your health if you graze it but the first proper enemy only takes a sliver of health on hit. Felt really strange and inconsistent. Also, because the player always gets knocked upwards on hit and has very very few iframes, I ended up stunlocked when I hit spikes on the ceiling, since i just kept getting knocked back up into the spikes, which strikes me as a bug.

The protagonist is cute. I wish there was some actual art for the environments, as there's not much to say about the visuals overall in this state. Opting for this degree of minimalism was probably for the best though if you didn't have time for good environment art. Music was solid, didn't get old over my time playing it which is about as much as I ever ask when a jam game only has one track.

aaaaaa i think i found the spot where that's possible. didn't even think about jumping up there

Uh. What? No? I'm very concerned for your workflow if you have absolutely no idea what your game looks like until after its submitted.

Ingame descriptions for the gold and withered petals seem to be flipped :P

Fun game, gets a surprising amount of depth out of the core mechanic and narrative based games are always impressive as jam entries

darmicy!

the name and description implies the goal is to take down the count, but poisoning him leads to a game over. how curious

fed the count delicious plates of raw onions until the game just stopped responding to my mouse. game truly is broken, 10/10 for honest advertising

really fun little game, really enjoy the interactions for using the "wrong" tools, adds a nice bit of flavor and thinking to what's otherwise a pretty simple game

feel like the music needs to be a little louder compared to the sound effects, i was struggling to actually hear the songs i was supposed to be playing to the beat of. art is very cute, and the main mechanic makes for a really neat if brutally difficult rhythm game.

Pretty interesting concept! Found that it tended to be more efficient to just play as a scavenger rather than actually fight the other microbes though, which didn't make for particularly exciting gameplay :P

I reallly wanted to add an ominous ticking sound to the timer but I ran out of time :(  Might do a postjam update just to touch things up with some sound and a menu, maybe a couple extra minigame screens as well

very fun game! randomization could use some measures to prevent repeats - at one point I got the same painting three times in a row, and frequently got the same one twice in a row

Could use a forfeit button tbh. Several times where I ended up with no useful moves to make (often barely any legal moves even) and a ton of turns still on the clock.

If there is one thing I've learned from this, it's that I have absolutely no fucking idea how to play go

Control was a bit janky but a very cute game

Ahhhh, I was in fact trying to shoot after the sun stopped, that was probably it x). Maybe needs some more clarity as to when the window is, since I assumed high noon would be the earliest you could draw.

Pretty fun game! There was some glitchy behavior with the screen wraparound mechanic that got in the way a bit, but this was otherwise a very polished and creative entry with a fun gimmick