itch.io

Alright, went back and actually beat the game. Ignoring what I said about softlocks that turned out to just be me not getting the controls, all my other gripes with the room rearranging mechanic still apply I think - I'd also sometimes have rooms just, refuse to be placed in certain positions? I thought maybe it's because there wasn't a valid entrance to connect them to at the position I was trying, but since I can't actually see where the valid entrances are it's really hard to tell.

The roc boss wasn't very fun honestly - its fast movement and large arena meant it spent a lot of time offscreen where I couldn't really see what it was doing, and its claws moving really quickly with little telegraph made them really irritating to avoid. The claws hovering around it also made the bite feel unfeasible, so I tried to use the beam attack, which also felt really difficult to use... then it turns out that in one of its resting positions you can just get above it and spam bite anyway, which lead to a very anticlimactic ending to the fight from doing that. Though, I'm realizing after saying all of this that I completely forgot the parrying shield existed, so it probably would've been more fun if I'd actually remembered to use that to block attacks :|. Once again maybe it's just on me this time.

I will say the base movement felt even better once I found the dash, you did a good job there.

Oh I looked at another comment and saw that you can sprint -.-  I probably wasn't softlocked after all and just needed to do that. I think that needs to be mentioned in the controls on the page somewhere as I had no idea I could do that - it's been a while since I played any old kirby games so double tap sprint wasn't intuitive to me either!

Thank you! I do need to test out those riding sequences a little more, they were a last minute addition so I'm not surprised there's a bug or two I missed. Several people have reported that other bug too, seems related to screen transitions but is really hard to reproduce, I'm not sure what's causing it exactly.

Thank you! Glad to see that someone appreciated the more deliberate movement, at least :p

The gimmick of this seems really cool, but I very quickly ended up softlocked - the blue room has several jumps that seem to only be possible when going left, so after entering that room with what ended up being a dead end past it, I could not get back to the start room to change the layout, and had to alt+f4 the game (which, shouldn't be necessary, if you're going to put your game in fullscreen by default you need at least a basic pause menu). In general the fact that you can only rearrange the rooms at the start room and inability to easily reset to that room seem like a perfect recipe for rampant softlocks - I'm honestly more surprised that other players seem to have actually been able to beat the game without issue, I guess most of the levels must be better designed about making sure you can actually backtrack through them without upgrades.

Even disregarding the softlock the rearranging felt a little finnicky? The interface for doing so wasn't immediately intuitive, and not being able to see any information about the actual internals of the rooms (even really basic info like which directions they actually connect in!) made the process of actually finding the right rooms to progress feel like tedious trial and error. I think other game's I've played with similar gimmicks show you at least a vague outline of what the room looks like as you're rearranging, which helps make it feel more like an actual puzzle and not something you have to brute force until you've memorized the layouts of each room.

While I didn't get very far the actual main gameplay seemed pretty solid - the controls have just enough retro stiffness to match the NES aesthetic while still feeling smooth and responsive enough to be comfortable, the visuals and music are appealing and cute (even if the status bar maybe feels a bit too directly lifted from kirby :P), and the zoomed out view is fun, even if doesn't serve much of a practical purpose. It's just the central gimmick that feels a bit half baked to me, which is understandable as it's a pretty ambitious gimmick to implement while also trying to make a competent metroidvania in the time limit, but it did leave me a little disappointed.

Pretty fun game. The teleportation gimmick is really cool, and utilized pretty well. What doesn't feel well utilized is the theme - the cooldown mechanic never really comes into play in an interesting way as the side effects are extremely punishing and there's never a lot of urgency to using the teleport, so it's always best to just, wait out the cooldown, which is boring. The game only starts to do things where the cooldown would get in the way... after it hands you an upgrade that gets rid of the cooldown entirely. In general I found that to be a bit of an issue with the game's structure, at least as far as the expectations for this jam go - it doesn't feel very metroidvania-y, since you always gain the required abilities for a room before ever actually reaching it, so there's no real ability gates in the game. The one gate you can actually reach before it's opened is an arbitrary one that only opens after collecting all the shards.

Visually the game is quite nice, I like the use of darkness and the moody color scheme. I think the game's sounds might've been broken for me? I see a lot of sound effects credited on the page but the only thing in the actual game that made noise was jumping. Though, I've had sound issues with a couple of other browser games at this point (including my own), so I'm starting to wonder if this is just an issue on my end somehow.

Another expected Zahran banger :P I'm struggling to sort through all my thoughts on this game honestly, its incredibly impressive as a jam entry. Were it just a little longer this feels like something I'd be paying for.

I tried to go for 100% completion, but I filled out the entire map without finding health upgrades II and V. I guess maybe I entered their rooms earlier, but couldn't complete them?  I didn't have any memory of unfinished rooms though, and didn't want to comb over the whole map for them, so I guess I'm leaving this off at 87%.

I had only a couple nitpicks with the game - the first was that it took me a while to get used to recognizing the tiles that you can't grapple to. I wonder if giving the actual cursor some kind of indicator as to whether you can grapple and not just the grapple point itself might make it a little more obvious when you're pointing at something ungrapplable? That'd also be really helpful once getting the upgrade that lets you grapple things offscreen, as right now it can be a bit hard to tell where to aim for those grapples. It also took me a while to realize that some fish were friendly and could be talked to - since plenty of hostile fish stand still I started assuming pretty much everything would kill me if I touched it, so I missed a lot of fish dialogue on my first pass through the early areas (though I think I saw it all by the end). 

I didn't find the map until really late in the game, which lead to a lot of frustrating running in circles. I like the map being optional, but I wonder if a little more could be done to nudge the player in its direction - granted, it seems like there *were* several clues to it that I just, missed, so maybe it's just a bit of a skill issue x)  (It also seems like the NPC who grants it was a reference to something, but I couldn't tell what...)

There was only one thing that definitively felt like an issue or bug, which is that one of the rooms in the shallows didn't get flooded after lowering the superstructure. What made it so odd was that the room next to it *did* get flooded, so there was just, an inexplicable vertical wall of water across the room transition which felt really jank. Considering the room in question is on the required path out of the shallows after opening the blast doors, it feels really odd that this wouldn't have been caught before release, but it'd feel even stranger for it to be intended just due to how janky it feels, so I'm not really sure what happened here.

That's enough on the issues though, onto the good stuff: I kind of love how underpowered the player feels for so much of the start. The grapple is such a good solution to the initial slow movement and feels so fluid and fun to use, and having to unlock the HUD as an upgrade is brilliantly devious. That initial underpowered state also does a nice job of selling the "defective" part of the theme, and makes the final moveset feel that much more powerful by comparison. The world design also felt really good and had a lot of really clever ability gates, as well as some really fun and atmospheric execution of the overall "inside a giant robotic structure" theming. The whole game does such an excellent job of perfectly capturing the classic metroidvania ethos with a very non standard controller (and achieving it under such a short time limit too, though that's perhaps a little less surprising coming from the same duo that made Moonlit :P)

Visually the game is absolutely gorgeous - I love the swaying kelp in the Wound area (which, also, is just such a cool name for an area). All the objects are super clear, each of the areas feel nice and distinct, it's all super well polished. Sound design and music are similarly well polished, everything felt like a perfectly natural fit for its context. I also liked the writing quite a bit, though I feel like I'm missing just enough to not really be able to piece together what actually happened to this place (it doesn't seem like anything particularly points to what actually damaged the structure and caused it to sink, though maybe I just missed something?)

Not sure what else to talk about, honestly. All of the weapons feel really nice to use, and it's neat how the upgrades all feel like full variations rather than strict linear upgrades (though I think the second sword level ended up feeling like a downgrade because of it, the delay on its swing makes it less useful as a shield which was the main purpose i used that weapon for)

Really good game, kudos.

Boss seems waaaay too tanky. I slipped off the platform when it was at about half health and don't really want to try it again as it already took what felt like forever to get to that point. Dunno if I'll come back to this to finish it out properly, I'd like to see the other weapons but I don't really want to do that boss.

Up until that point I was having fun, though - this is a pretty solid little fps. The movement and shooting were simple but all felt plenty fluid and engaging. I did experience a bit of stuttering but that might just be typical web build lag. I do agree with the comment on the page that moving the platforms around would probably make more sense to be bound to WASD, since you can't move the player while doing that anyway - would save having to move my hand over to the arrow keys. I also thought the glitch effect as a damage indicator was neat in concept, but in practice I found it really hard to distinguish how much health I had, and even harder to tell when I'd just gotten hurt - I think some extra indicator at the moment you're hit might help.

I don't have a lot to say about the visuals, they're alright. Polished enough that they caught my eye from the submissions page. The sound design is really good, the shooting sounds are nice and satisfying. Music is a bit of an unusual choice but it did end up working! Good job making that fit.

Dunno how I feel about the theming, interpretation is a tad trite and from the one upgrade I got it didn't seem like the side effects had much of anything to do with the ability itself. I guess it's possible they get more interesting from there, but I wasn't especially feeling the "absurd" part from that one :P  I'm giving the benefit of the doubt for my rating in that category for now though, since there's clearly a meaningful effort to incorporate the theme.

Could not get anywhere in this game. I genuinely cannot tell what exactly is going wrong with the combat, all I can tell is that it's incredibly broken. I have absolutely no idea what's even damaging me half the time - it sometimes feels like I just suddenly start taking damage anytime an enemy is so much as on screen. Interaction prompts also regularly break and require me to leave and reenter the interaction region to work, which was extremely frustrating - it seems like the idea is they're supposed to deactivate if you're facing the wrong way, which would probably be fine on its own - but they don't seem to reactivate when you turn around, only when reentering the are entirely, which makes it obnoxiously finnicky to actually interact with anything. Might be best to just ignore facing direction entirely like someone else suggested, would easily fix that bug.

Camera lagging behind the player was a bit annoying. Generally you want to do the opposite so you can actually see where you're going. Screen transitions seem to awkwardly flash the last image before entering the transition around the screen a few times - I don't know if this was an intentional effect, but it really just looked like a bug. I think it needs more refinement if it's intentional.

Core moveset feels vaguely interesting, I really would've liked control rebinding though. The existence of a seperate dash action when your attack already seems to be a sort of dash felt awkward and made me think the attack button was broken for a second as it looked like it was just doing the dash move again. I like the varied uses of the orbs in theory, but they felt a little awkward to use with the current control scheme (and then with the enemies being as busted as they are I couldn't really use them effectively in combat anyway)

I did at the very least really like the art. It's a really appealing style, it reminds me of old flash games a bit. It's very appealing and well refined. Good work there, I just wish the mechanics had a similar degree of polish.

Feels very bold to submit a game about biking around a big empty desert to a metroidvania jam less than a year after Metroid Prime 4 came out :P  (which I never actually played tbf, so I can't really speak to how this game compares to the infamous desert section in that game, but it's very funny theming that I can't imagine is a coincidence)

This is a pretty nice concept though, the bike was indeed really fun to drive as promised. I liked the camera zooming out as it accelerated, gave a really nice sense of speed. The initial player did feel really painfully slow compared to the size of the environment, but it sounds like you were aware of that and just didn't have time to refine it better, which is fair.

Bigger issue I had honestly was with the control scheme - needing to press and hold a stick and move it at the same time felt really bad (my thumb's still a little sore from it!). I guess that could always vary depending on the controller, but I used a pretty standard Xbox controller so I can't imagine my experience would be uncommon. Adding control rebinding would let me fix it of course, but I'd rather just have the boost be bound to a different input by default. (ig i could've also used the keyboard controls, but seeing that those used the arrow keys for camera control made it seem pretty clear this was meant for controller first)

I also found the flat, unshaded appearance of the sort of temple area where you get your first ability to be really confusing - it makes it really hard to tell where the floor ended and walls began. There was also a lot of camera clipping awkwardness around the walls in there.

Outside of that area the game was visually fine, if obviously unrefined. Though I did have a kind of funny visual error at the ending where the end screen didn't properly scale to fill the window, so it just faded into the corner while the gameplay kept going on the rest of the screen and I watched the bike just keep driving until it fell off the map x).

Don't really have a lot else to say, it's a prototype that's aware it's a prototype and was decent fun to play around with. Some sounds would be nice I suppose, feel like some engine noises would've really enhanced the feeling of speed while driving the bike.

Pretty solid little metroidvania. The ceiling cling ability is really clever and I really like a lot of the ways it was used. Other abilities are pretty standard so not as much to say about them but they were competently implemented.

As far as the basic player controller goes I feel like they were just a little bit slower than I would've liked, and that they could use some inertia on their movement to make it feel a bit smoother. Both of those are minor nitpicks though and the game felt perfectly fine to control.

Combat was pretty lame honestly. The player's attack is really annoyingly short range and made it hard to avoid damage, and every enemy including the bosses having the same AI made it feel a bit boring, especially for those bossfights. Though I feel like that's kind of an obvious flaw that you're probably aware of and just didn't have time to do any more with.

The art is nicely done, though some background elements would've been nice :P. I also feel like the tileset kind of clashed with the theming of the other objects - the blueish stone looking bricks gave me more medieval dungeon than modern lab vibes, which made it look a bit awkward next to all the very modern looking doors and scientists.

Music was good quality but honestly didn't feel like it tended to fit the scene very well? It often felt uplifting while the visuals and writing were trying to create a desolate, derelict kind of vibe. Feel like something a bit darker would've fit better, especially in the room where you first encounter the possessed scientists.

Overall, decent game here, had fun playing it. Pretty solid entry.

Really cool little game! You did an amazing job of selling the scale of the monster, the ships looking so tiny next to it and the large amount of screen space taken up do such a great job of making it feel unimaginably huge. The minimalist visuals work really well for that too I think, the monochrome black on blue makes it feel like you're just watching shadows under the water which gives it a really nicely ominous mood.

Controlling the monster is a lot of fun - I like that every part of it is able to deal damage, slapping down ships with the tail was really satisfying and the most fun I had in the game. The boss took me out of the immersion a little bit with its long invincibility periods and ridiculously large flamethrower blasts, but it was a fun fight gameplay wise, so I think I'm willing to overlook that :P

I only really have two nitpicks - the first was that the really long chargeup on the breath attack made it feel a bit infeasible to actually use in combat, especially with how easy it was to sink ships by just ramming into them. I feel like it should be reduced a little so the attack actually feels viable to use outside of its arbitrary gates. The other nitpick was that the radar ping sound got a little grating by the end, though that one really is a nitpick as the sound design was in general absolutely brilliant and really helped create this desolate feeling. The kind of ominous pinging is definitely helping to contribute to that, so I wouldn't say to remove it completely, but maybe it needs a little more variation, or to be used a little more sparingly, if the game gets any longer.

I'm honestly not sure where this could go as a longer game - even as short as it is, it feels like a really complete and cohesive package as it currently stands. I suppose a bit more narrative could be interesting? Idk, I'm curious to see where this goes. It's definitely by far my favorite game I've played in this jam so far, really good work.

Why do spikes instakill you. Why does dying boot me all the way back out to the main menu. Why does said main menu default to selecting new game instead of load. Why am I being put in immediate danger of accidentally deleting my save with one bad key press every time I touch a spike. Please change at least one of these things. Preferably all of them.

Otherwise this overall seems like a decent game, but I did have a good few issues with it. A lot of the enemies are just too fast to reasonably deal with - the ones that drop down from the ceiling end up making basically the entire surface they land on impossible to be on because of how fast they move, and then the projectile shooting ones feel basically impossible to dodge with any reliability - their shots are too fast to weave between, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get them to stop shooting after they start, so I ended up just tanking the damage almost every time I aggroed one. I also had the teleporting enemy straight up teleport on top of me one time, which seems like something that needs to be fixed.

In general I found the combat to be kind of just uninteresting or even frustrating most of the time, though looking at these other comments it seems like I'm in the minority? Maybe it's because I found the bubble stacking to mostly feel janky and awkward rather than satisfying. I feel like the game could've used some more meaningful platforming challenges or mandatory puzzles to pick up the slack from the combat, as I enjoyed the few challenges of that sort I encountered a lot more - the puzzle to get the pig plush was really clever, and the one platforming section with the falling platforms was a lot of fun.

I did really like the theming on this one. It's not the first game in this jam I've seen to take the "side effects" theme to mean that your abilities all have drawbacks, but I think the execution here is the best I've seen so far - designing the game around abilities that are just fundamentally sidegrades makes the drawbacks feel really natural and more interesting than being an upgrade and a drawback tacked together, and all of the upgrades do a good job of feeling like meaningful new powers while still having good reasons to turn them off and on at various points.

The world design was just a little bit off I think. It's mostly fine, but there's a few odd decisions - checkpoint placement was a big one, there's a lot of big stretches with no checkpoints followed by areas where there's a checkpoint what feels like every few paces. The checkpoint droughts are a really big issue as with the aforementioned instakill spikes they lead to some very frequent runbacks, and frankly with how basic both the character controller and combat are the game's general traversal just isn't very interesting without the allure of exploring somewhere new, so these runbacks ended up feeling a bit tedious. There's also a lot of one-way pitfalls in the world that make backtracking feel similarly tedious - you end up having to do these big circles through several already cleared rooms just to check one of them.

I was never able to find my way to the final boss or ending. I'm not really sure where I missed - I tried going back over a couple locations, but I don't really want to comb over the entire map. Maybe a map screen would've helped. I also got stuck for a bit early on because I couldn't figure out how to get through the gate before the first boss - the keyhole on the gate made me think I'd need an actual, physical key to get in, so I just assumed the green circle was decoration and it never crossed my mind that it could be a switch - I think I ended up pressing it on accident while spamming bubbles on like, my third trip to the room and that finally let me move on. Maybe the visuals on that could be adjusted a little to be clearer?

Couple more minor nitpicks:
- The camera being locked to the player is... serviceable, I guess, but doesn't feel particularly great. Something a little more involved might be nice.
- Feel like checkpoints should just heal you to full on interaction rather than healing you slowly over time. The current system felt a little like it was just wasting my time when I needed to heal - it's not like there's any checkpoints in dangerous areas where the difference between those two things could be important.

I don't have a lot to say about the visuals or music. They're alright. I like the cutscene art, and the sky permanently turning to night after you beat the sun boss is a really cool detail. Music also still hasn't gotten grating even after leaving it playing the entire time I've been writing this review, so that's a really good sign. I feel like the game still could've used one more general level theme to add variety, but oh well.

I am rather ironically getting too tired to think clearly so I'm gonna stop here :p. I know I complained about a lot, but I hope I said enough about the stuff I did like, because there was a lot of good here! Definitely one of the best uses of the theme I've played so far.

Damn, the theming on the menus and page was really charming and had me excited for this one, kind of disappointed to see there's not much here. I don't really know how much I can say about the game in it's current state, I hope this gets worked on more I guess?

Thank you for playing!

The idea behind that one tutorial prompt is that for the previous screws in that room, it's possible to get them into a usable position by just pulling them as far as they'll go, which automatically detaches you without needing the button. That one arrangement with the prompt is designed to actually force you to use the button instead, but yeah it's very much possible to just figure it out on your own without interacting with that prompt.

"Demo" kind of is a bit awkward for something that's not clearly a demo for a bigger project, yeah. I definitely would like go back and finish this, I'd really like to actually implement the other two abilities that are missing, but I don't actually have any guarantees  - I mostly just couldn't think of a clearer way to phrase that text when scrambling to block off that unfinished area before submitting.

Lot of people are complaining about the head speed, I meant it to feel very deliberate to move it but ig it should be a little faster.

Impressively expansive for a jam game! The grapple was a lot of fun to master, though it felt like at around 10 or so grapple charges the limit started to become basically irrelevant and at that point it made traversal a lot less interesting - I found it to start getting a little tedious towards the end which was kind of disappointing. It also allowed you to pretty easily skip past some of the more specific item gates - I ended up never really getting a chance to use the umbrella in particular, despite it looking pretty neat. I also ended up skipping the intended gate for the bubble blower, but that ability was still a lot of fun to use for general traversal after getting it so that one didn't feel as disappointing.

I had an issue where the gameplay sound completely cut out a short ways into the game - the menu sounds still worked fine so the game was clearly still able to produce sound, but the actual game turned completely silent. Was disappointing as I'd really liked the sound design up until that point, and the rest of the game ended up awkwardly silent. Were there a saving system it probably wouldn't have been a big deal as I bet it'd be easy to fix by restarting, but I didn't want to lose my progress to do that. I think the music also cut out even sooner, as I didn't hear any music after the main menu at all.

The visuals weren't the most refined, but they're coherent and create a pretty appealing world. I like the parallax backgrounds and the slime characters, they're very charming. Writing was also very charming and again impressive to have so much of it in a jam game.

With the lack of saving it's really annoying that the ending just boots you out to the menu, I might've liked to go back and try to grab a couple of the items I missed.

Overall, very good game, very strong contender for this jam. Good work!

Thank you!

Thank you!

I did make three attachments, which is why there's three listed in the controls menu,  but I only had time to actually fit two of them into the level design, so you've found all the accessible abilities. Sorry for the confusion about that, I didn't have time to clean up the scraps of stuff intended for the unimplemented abilities.

It was mainly before I got the green gem - it's very easy to make your way over to the yellow area towards the left of start with just the red gem, fall down the pit there, and then be unable to get back up as you can't climb infinitely without a second gem.

I think I also got softlocked by getting somehow boxed in on a flag somewhere in that region? I don't remember the details of how that happened though

This is a really cool game but it seems way too easy to get yourself softlocked in the game's current state - I regularly had to reset to spawn and it always felt a bit jank.

I did end up kind of giving up after getting the red and green gem - I couldn't find any way to progress after that. The fountain riddle seems like the only accessible lead but I can't make heads or tails of it - the only "pinkish bank" I can think of is the piggy bank, but there's no arrows in that room, and I can't figure out any meaningful way to use the other arrows in a way that "starts from" the bank? I might try coming back to this later as it seems cool, but after a lot of running in circles with no real direction and finding no more leads or clues I just lost interest for now.

Rereading this I feel like I was a bit too negative for a game that I think has a really good core, so I wanna add that I did find smashing through blocks in the air with the hammer to be really satisfying. The standard hammer move in general feels really nice, it's just the rest of the game's movement needs a lot more polish to bring it up to part with that.

Thank you!

I considered a quick retract button at some point but decided against it for some reason that I can't quite remember? I'm not sure it was a very good reason though, and it'd probably be at least worth a try to see if it works out well.

The idea of a metroidvania centered on absorbing abilities from enemies is interesting, but I don't think the execution here sells it at all.

For one thing there's... not really any incentive to change your ability at all after getting the double jump, since the base attack is already way better than anything you'd get from an ability anyway and the double jump is required for all the platforming, so the gimmick just, barely even comes into play at all. I spent probably a good 75% of the game playing as if it didn't exist. I think a significant part of this is the design of the abilities themselves - why is there an ability that does nothing but give you a double jump in the first place? With the current very limited suite of abilities, they don't feel like stealing powers from my enemies or switching between different movesets, it kind of just feels like I'm playing a stock metroidvania character, except I can only use one upgrade at a time... which just eliminates the feeling of growth that a metroidvania gives without much benefit in exchange. It ends up feeling strictly less satisfying than a formulaic metroidvania without the gimmick would be.

The abilities also just, don't do much to differentiate themselves from the base moveset. Like, again, the base attack is already way too good - it's range covers half the screen, it deals as much damage as the projectile from the one available offensive ability, and it straight up heals you when you use it. I think toning this down would give a lot more room to make distinct and valuable feeling offensive abilities. I also might suggest taking a more direct page from Kirby's book and just straight up replacing the base attack while you have an ability active, so it feels like a more complete transformation of your moveset, though this would obviously be a much more significant change to how the game works. I think it might help with making the abilties more interesting, though, since it would mean that a platforming oriented ability would still need to have offensive capability - though perhaps not as much offensive capability as one with less platforming utility, which could an interesting tradeoff that just doesn't currently exist when every ability has access to the same overpowered base attack. It might also help to just, make the abilities easier to lose - only losing them at fatal damage in a game this easy means they might as well last forever, so there's never much of a reason to adapt to what you find on the fly.

Arbitrarily locking the power to actually absorb and use abilities from an enemy you've already encountered behind a boss also felt really lame and maybe the worst way to gate progress in a game like this. It actively discourages your from experimenting with each enemy you find and seeing what abilities they grant since most of em just won't grant anything until you hit an arbitrary progression point and get told you're allowed to absorb something now. I'd genuinely prefer it if the enemies just did not appear until after the point in progression where I'm allowed their ability - it'd make things feel much more consistent and give an actual sense of discovery and excitement to finding a new enemy and wondering what ability it grants, which in the current version i only felt for the first few minutes before beating the first boss and seeing that  "You can now absorb new abilities" popup. Granted, removing that system would make it harder to have the ability readily accessible when backtracking in earlier areas, since you can't just put the enemies that grant it there without giving the player access to the ability too early, but I feel like there's lots of more interesting ways to fix that than the current system (have new enemies appear in old areas as the game goes on? have a later game upgrade or consumable item that lets you access the ability at will without an enemy nearby? have the same abilities shift and upgrade over time, so you still gain new powers for them over time but will actually be able to know if an enemy grants an ability when first encountering it?)

Aesthetically the game again feels conceptually interesting but flawed. The protagonist's design looks really cute but her sprites just feel kind of off? I think there's some jagged edges and weird shading here and there that needs to be cleaned up. The intro art was really good though, kudos to pie for that.

Level design was really awkward, there's a significant amount of rooms and alcoves that extend for a long ways only to turn out to be empty dead ends. The player's movement also feels just a little too slow for the scale of a lot of the hallways and it was feeling frustratingly sluggish by the end of the game. 

The music was very nice, fits the game's tone very well. Don't have anything bad to say there.

Overall I just feel kind of frustrated with this game since the concept feels really compelling but I just did not find much to appreciate about the game. I feel like beyond just more polish and content the game needs more thought on what its central gimmick is actually trying to do for the game design.

Thank you!

I might look at increasing the speed a bit, yeah. I wanted the extending to feel very deliberate but it might just need to be a little faster if people are finding it sluggish.

Thanks for playing!

There is actually an ending, it's off on the other side of the map from that locked off area ;)

Thank you!

Thank you for playing and all the kind words!

That does sound like a really nasty bug, could you elaborate a little on what you were doing when it happened? I'm not super surprised something like that happened as the player's physics are a bit hacked together but I'd like to fix it if possible

This has some cool concepts and the general controls feel really satisfying, but it just feels too janky in its current state.

One big issue I had with just general controls is that the player seemed to bounce of walls in a really inconsistent way - sometimes they'd get launched backwards if I ran into a wall, other times they'd just walk up to it normally. It didn't feel like it was based on the player's speed or anything intuitive like that, and with how many small steps there were throughout the level that you constantly run into it was extremely easy to get messed up by these random bounces and made just getting around empty parts of the level feel more frustrating than any of the actual platforming.

Other big issue is the near complete lack of feedback when getting hit. No sound, no knockback, just a brief red flash that's easy to miss. I regularly wouldn't even notice I was at low health until I was teleported back to my spawnpoint at what felt like random.

The idea of using the combo system to gate doors seems really cool but since all blocks and enemies respawn as soon as they're off screen right now it feels like the best way to get past those doors is to just move back and forth breaking the same blocks over and over again which isn't a very satisfying gameplay loop. There was one section that seemed to be designed with a more active and specific combo in mind and wasn't able to be easily cheesed but with the finnicky movement I wasn't able to actually keep up the combo for the entire stretch and never got past that gate.

If you're going to have death respawn you back in the same room, you need to make it not take your items. The game seems basically unbeatable in its current state - I died in the first room after getting the final artifact and had both the artifact and the key to the final room disappear and I have no interest in getting them back, if that's even possible which other comments suggest it might not even be. Don't understand how this wasn't caught as it seems like an inherent and massive flaw in how the respawn system currently works.

The game was pretty fun up until that point. I liked the gimmick of collecting different items with both positive and negative side effects, but that gimmick completely disappeared in the back half of the game which was really disappointing. I also don't think it really counts as a metroidvania - you never actually gain any permanent abilities over the course of the game, and in spite of its ostensibly interconnected format in practice the world is just a linear sequence of discrete stages.

I encountered a bug at one point where, after dying and losing a key in the green area, I tried to turn around and reenter the previous room to try to retrieve the key from that side, but instead it just took me right to the next area despite clearly entering the wrong door? I think that transition might not be set up correctly, though it did save me a lot of pain with that key.

Hitboxes were also really frustrating especially in that final room. I'd be standing directly on spikes without taking damage one moment and then the next one of the fireball things would hit me while there was a visible three pixel gap between us. The movement cycles of said fireballs also felt like they were aligned in an extremely tedious way that regularly required just sitting and waiting.

The visuals are really nice, you did a good job creating something appealing within the technical limitations. The music was also mostly pretty nice, though I found the final room's song to be really grating after only a few tries. All of the others worked great, just that one needed a little more to it I think.

Thanks for playing!

The upgrade stations that were "rejecting" you are actually save points - the upgrade ones are supposed to be a special variant of the save points, I didn't consider that someone might take it the other way around! I probably need to give a clearer indication that the game is being saved when you interact with those, and maybe distinguish the ones that give you upgrades a little.

A tutorial for the central mechanic would be ideal, tutorial prompts in general were a last minute addition so I didn't end up having time to make something proper for teaching that. 

That "skip" is the intended way up, if you're talking about what I think you are ;) I think it's cool that it feels a bit unintended though, I don't remember if I intended it to feel that way but I definitely noticed during development that it was a bit off to the side and felt like a hidden path, which I think works well as long as it's not so obscure it becomes difficult to find.

Why does dying clear all your obtained upgrades? This game is long and slow enough that starting all the way from the beginning when you so much as touch a single spike feels extremely unwarranted, and it would've been extremely easy to just... not do that and have dying just send you back to the start without resetting anything else. I died after getting the double jump and second light upgrades, and I really don't want to go through the entire game again with how slowly the player moves.

My thoughts based on what I was able to play:

- The darkness mechanic is really neat. I was a bit worried about the really thin flashlight beam at first, but having that only be an issue for a short, tense little sequence before giving the player a more practical light worked really really well. It made that initial trek through the caverns feel tense and claustrophobic which made them suddenly feel that much more open after getting better lighting, very clever.
- Again, player movement felt painfully slow. It made most of the game's traversal just feel tedious. I think they should be sped up by like, 50% or so.
- I think this might just be a consequence of the overly slow movement but the music felt comically overdramatic for how the game actually played. 
- Having the tutorials pointing you to the tunnel on the right but having the actual critical path at the start be a random chain of moving platforms off to the left felt really troll-y in an incredibly lame way. Felt akin to those bad mario maker levels where they make a hard looking level but have the actual exit reached through a hidden block that lets you skip the whole thing next to the start.

Overall this seems like a solid base with some interesting ideas but had too many issues in the execution for me to really enjoy it in its current state. It does have a few really nice moments, and I could see a game with this darkness mechanic being pretty interesting with a better core controller.

Pretty good mini metroidvania! The gravity orb upgrade is cool, took me a second to figure out how it worked but it was pretty fun to use in the final fight. I do wish there was some indication of how much health the player has left (maybe some kind of visual on the player themself if you want to keep the ui-less style?) but the game wasn't long enough for it to be much of a problem.

Alright, after giving it another chance I seem to have reached some kind of ending now (though after beating only one more boss, Rust) so here's some more thoughts on it:

- Rust is a much more enjoyable boss that actually felt like it was designed with the player's actual moveset in mind. Felt challenging but fair. I wouldn't call it outstanding necessarily but it was good and if it were the first one I'd fought I'd have had a much better first impression of the game.
- Neither the game nor page description mention that you have the ability to... quintuple jump? I wasn't counting how many exactly you get, but its some excessive number. This is a pretty unintuitive ability to have at the start of the game and really warrants some explicit mention somewhere. Would've probably made python a bit more manageable, though I still think it was a really poor choice to make it the first boss.
- I don't think I care for the chargeup mechanic the player's weapon. It didn't feel like it added a whole lot to the combat and mostly just felt mildly awkward? The fact that you couldn't turn it sharply without releasing the button was mildly interesting but I don't think the charge contributed to that in any real way.
- Oh my god please tone down the weapon noise. I am so tired of hearing a million lasers going off every millisecond and drowning out every other noise in the game. It does not need a full volume sound for every individual laser when it is firing this fast.
- Do not like the level design mostly consisting of deep vertical pits designed so you cant climb back up, especially when theres missable content at the top of them. Its another design choice where I really just cant understand what the goal of this was. Aside from making half the content needlessly missable it also just makes the world feel repetitive, uninteresting, and kind of just nonsensical? Like I can't really tell what the setting of the game is meant to be.

- The platforming I attempted felt really bad. Even more than the bosses I fought it really feels like it is not taking the player's high movement speed into account. This is a player controller that feels suited for leaping around a wide open racetrack, not trying to precisely navigate cramped tunnels.
- The visuals in general are solid enough, I like the limited palette, its very appealing. Music also sounds pretty decent, at least when I could actually hear it over the endless ear-shattering drone of laser fire.

Really questioning why it seemed at all appropriate to start what seems to be aiming for a fast paced, high action bosh rush game to with a boss where the optimal strategy seems to be to move as little as possible while holding down the fire button and pray that its obscenely janky ai doesn't just stuff you in an inescapable box anyway.

I don't know that I'll rate this since I didn't get past the first boss, but I was really disappointed with what I played, and especially to look at the jam version comments and see tons of comments about this exact same boss which seems to have been improved in mostly trivial ways - frankly the thought that this was at some point worse in the jam version is just kind of terrifying. The boss just needed a much more severe rework than what it got - the boxes and drones were not the big issue, its the bosses core behavior that is just not fun in its current state. I could see it maybe working with more vertical mobility, so you have the ability to actually lure the boss around instead of just moving back and forth and praying it responds appropriately - so maybe a more complex arena with multiple tiers of platform would be better? That way you could actually make some kind of concerted effort to control the boss' movement and avoid getting boxed in, as opposed to right now, where it feels like a choice between "move slowly and have 50/50 odds of getting stuck in a tiny box of snake and blown up by drones" or "move quickly and have a 100% chance of dying when the floor turns into snake"

Pretty good game, pretty much any issues I had with the jam version have been ironed out. Most of what I noticed was pretty minor nitpicks - the music cutting out for a couple seconds after the jingle for collecting a rune was pretty awkward. Also somehow the shading on the protagonist's dress is slightly different on the save select screen from the main menu screen?

Otherwise I have very little to say about this just like with the jam version. It's a very competent but very standard metroidvania. Combat's not super interesting but also clearly not the main focus and doesn't ever overstay its welcome, visuals aren't especially outstanding but are plenty good enough and set a suitable ambience for each area, and with the adjustments to how spikes and the hair grapple work the platforming is now pretty satisfying and enjoyable. The abilities are nonstandard but also pretty specialized to interacting with specialized environmental elements so there's not exactly anything revolutionary there - worm is pretty fun though.

Thanks for playing!

Resemblance to sea angels is def unintentional, I'm not sure I've even heard of them before... looking them up they are some very cool looking creatures though, I feel like I have to add something inspired by them now.

Leaving the criticisms about the slash aside since they're pretty much echoing what others have said and I do feel like the mechanic just needs quite a bit of refinement and reworking, there is... definitely some questionable level design in places. I think having a few pitfalls that force you to climb back up could be fun, but they're definitely poorly thought out and overused currently. Consequences of a lot of last minute level design and running out of time to implement some more interesting hazards.

Flight ability is def a bit awkward and could use some rethinking. Maybe a flat distance or cooldown more similar to the spell from Specter of Torment I based it on would be better than the current recharging timer system, or maybe it just needs a bit of tweaking on the numbers and nuances of how it functions. It also just needs some proper level design built around it though, I think - right now there's nothing that actually uses it creatively and it does kind of just feel like a wonky double jump, yeah.

Unsure what you mean about the enemy hurtboxes - they are most definitely centered on the body, not the head. I think they're set up to only deal damage when you enter their hitbox, and not when lingering in it, so maybe they were getting "stuck" on you because you were getting hit and then not leaving their hitbox during the iframes.

Having a fully voice acted story in a game jam is really impressive, but unfortunately I really did not enjoy said story. Leilana was incredibly obnoxious and I found myself skipping through every line of her dialogue - her snarky, overly modern dialogue did not fit the rest of the game's tone at all. The dialogue art was well done but I do have to wonder if the game might've been better without the dialogue sequences and with more dev focus on the game proper.

Visuals are fine but clearly unfinished - lot of undecorated rooms, janky animations and a complete lack of backgrounds. I do also just feel like I'm generally not a fan of this kind of high-res pixel art style - this kind of resolution is high enough that it makes pixellated artwork just look kind of crunchy and aliased since you can't easily make out individual pixels.

The platforming felt fine but unexceptional. I feel like I didn't get much of a chance to explore a lot of the abilities since they get thrown at you in big batches and there didn't seem to be many noteworthy platforming challenges. Combat felt really bad though - I can't really put my finger on some of the issues, but I did notice that the cooldown between attacks seemed weirdly inconsistent - I'd sometimes be able to do two attacks in a row, but I'd then have an awkwardly long cooldown before I could attack again, and then other times it would only let me attack once in a combo? It all felt really confusing - I think if there was meant to be some kind of proper combo or stamina system or whatever it was that was blocking me from attacking that clearly wasn't communicated at all.

Boss dying in three hits after being massively hyped up was a pretty big anticlimax. I take it there wasn't time for a proper bossfight?

Played some more now that I actually know how the air dash works:

- The air dash feels great, I wouldn't change how it works. It just needs to be better explained to the player.

- Enemies tended to be really annoying and not a lot of fun to fight. They were prone to getting right up in your face where you don't have time to respond to their attacks, and then kind of just... staying there, because they move as fast as the player even at full sprint.

- Game could really use an aiming crosshair. I felt like I was missing a lot of shots just due to struggling to tell where my gun was actually pointing.

Game was a lot more fun once I was able to experience more of the metroidvania elements, and I think the general idea of tying abilities to temporary pickups that later become permanent is really cool, it just lead to some frustration where I didn't see the ability prompts until long after they were useful. I did just completely miss the bit of tutorial text that said I could press tab to see that info though which would've really helped, though given someone else had the same issue I'm hesitant to say that's all on me.