Been following since April, and just found out that there's an itch.io demo, so I gave it a playthrough. I've been eagerly awaiting this game's release.
For context as to my demographic, I'm a speedrunner for various platformers like Celeste, Neon White, Lumina Rush, Donkey Kong, and so on.
Played it for around an hour or so.
criticisms
- There's no pause button on keyboard (I don't have a controller, so I haven't checked)? You also can't enter the settings or view the credits with a mouse, I think. I'm pretty sure I tried mashing just about my entire keyboard, so unless I'm missing something...
- I really need for the respawn time to be faster. I can appreciate the animation, but with the fast paced levels, I'm resetting after ~1.5 seconds of gameplay fairly often and then waiting around 2 seconds to try again. It's perfectly fine from a casual playthrough perspective, but it'd be a major pain if you were going to speedrun it.
- I'm not the biggest fan of the "tutorial ghosts". I like the idea behind them, but I feel like there may be some way of showing the inputs could make it easier on the player to understand what's going on. A little billboard showing three images of "do x here, here, and here" would likely alleviate some struggles. If you prefer to make it advertised as a more challenging precision game, then it's fine as is. From my understanding, the intent is to make it more speed-runnable than "can you even beat it".
positivisms
- the movement is clearly incredibly in depth. I was not even remotely comfortable with the nuances of gameplay after an hour, and I'm certain the later levels do not suddenly get easier. extremely well designed movement
- the level design is very simplistic, which feels like a benefit for this game. I could definitely appreciate longer levels, but the level of precision necessary to beat the levels anyway feels appropriate thus far, at least.
- honestly just fun
suggestions
- check out how Neon White does their leaderboard; I'd much rather see that than a "global top 5"
- please tone down the sfx for the explosions volume
- I'd prefer if the gems were a little brighter? It was genuinely taking me a second to find where they were on the screen, which is realistically only a minor complaint.
Other than that, this seems really fun! I'll definitely buy it when it comes out.
P.S. Is there a development discord?