Hello! 👋

Overall: ✨ Great visuals and animations for a pixel game. Great job on the submission!

Fun: 🎉 The powerups with ups and downs were a great use of the theme, and my team had a similar approach. The gameplay was engaging, with a well-balanced difficulty curve. However, the hitboxes felt a bit unforgiving.

Visual: 🎨 The lighting was great, but the shadows were a bit odd. The enemies could use some death animations and death sounds. The mysterious background dripping noise was perfect for the setting.

Audio: 🎶 The boss music was a bit off for the setting, and it would be better if the sound died down slowly instead of cutting off abruptly. Overall, the audio was fitting, but adding more sound effects for enemies would enhance the experience.

Theme: 📚 The theme with powerups having ups and downs was implemented well and added depth to the gameplay.

Other feedback: The three-shot powerup was hard to use during boss fights because I couldn't get close enough to the boss to hit with more than one projectile. Great job on making deaths not permanently restart the game, allowing players to experience more of the content. When the player dies, enemies should stop attacking and dragging the dead player. I encountered a bug where enemies would push my dead body into the wall, leading to all enemies (like 50+ that I gathered) being stuck there after I respawned.

Great job on the enemy and boss variety! 👏

A very cute aesthetic. The powerups were a bit lack luster, especially with how short of a time the spread lasts. The boss music was good, but a bit of music/ambience throughout the levels would have been a bonus. I also felt that every enemy was a bit too sponge-y, at least for my tastes.

Great visuals and sounds. Levels are bit big :D 

Music is amazing. All bosses have their own unique boss theme song is something I never thought I will find in a 9 days game jam.

The gameplay is also really really fun. I didn't really collected buffs in time because I was just running for my life most of the times.

The stage 1 boss was super hard for me - especially its phase 2 was harder than Elden Ring :D :D but luckily the HP wasn't reset so I could grind it down.

About stage2:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_yxvr2VCc_GULk5XG9r0OsU-0QdJ2Dhh/view?usp=shari...

This screenshot tells everything :D :D 

The buffs are an interesting twist, I just wish I could see on the screen which buffs I had active. Also I think the monsters have too much health.

Well I might have 100CCed the game ;), yet maybe I actually didn't, I'm quite confident I 1000CCed it. This game is brutal.

The game is fun. I think the bosses look a bit too low-rez but the small enemies look pretty good. The boss tunes are catchy and the game plays well, I like the roster of upgrades, getting invicible with inverted commands is cool. The boss bullet patterns are both nice to look at and fun to deal with, although I can't say I really managed to with the other enemies on their side.

My main caveat is that I thought the hps of the small enemies near the end especially and of the boss to some extent were far too high. On more minor details, I think the lack of sound feedback when hitting an enemy leads to the game being less snappy that it should. I also got a bug during the last boss fight where the enemies (except for the boss, it did shoot) would not shoot anymore.

Overall it's a cool entry, thanks for sharing.

The concept that the life you pick gives you a different upgrade and a downgrade is really interesting

looks super cool but the download isn't working for me :(