This is a very neat game. It's clearly taken the minimalism concept to an extreme I doubt many entries will achieve. My gripes with this gameplay are only that the movement engine was clearly reliant upon how hard the game was chugging. At its highest speed, gravity feels insane, jumping precisely a pipedream. At its slowest, it feels like left-right movement is going through molasses. The sound is another oddity. The music consists of two notes. There are two tracks. They are both 2 notes. This is minimalism gone wild. I just wish it were a bit lower in pitch, the primary track had a tendency to be grating.
Overall, this is a pretty fun entry, and really ran away with the theme. I wish it went further though. There was clearly a plan for more content and more story (this game has more pen-on-paper story than most MVM entries I've seen) and I'd love to see it go there.
This entry works and does not crash or soft lock you, which is great. It's playable to the end and forgiving enough to make you want to keep playing after failing in a particular task (I'm looking at you, teleporting slug monsters!)
My largest gripe with this game is that the attack button was either a mouse button or J. I'm unclear why the mouse button was even an option, or why J was a better option than a key nearer to space or even the optional wasds.
There seems to be one inoffensive and fitting track for the game. The overall length of the game makes this a totally fine solution for music. The SFX on the other hand varied wildly in their output volume and style overall and some of them felt a bit inconsistent. HOWEVER, everything did relate to an action being taken and something happening, the indications exist and are clear, I appreciate that.
The art, while totally serviceable if minimalist(ehrm), is a bit inconsistent. Some things have fine detail, black boardered pixel art and the like, other things have boarderless pixel art that feels starkly juxtaposed against the other. None of it looks bad at all, in fact all of it looks pretty good. The problem I see is just the inconsistency and incongruity. The quality of the enemy art vs the map art itself seems to be the biggest inconsistency.
Overall, I played it and enjoyed it enough to write something. It is certainly a minimalist metroidvanian, and overall, fun game!
