This game has a really unique feel / look to it and I think you've established an incredibly distinct atmosphere with this game / world. The mapping is nice, but feels a little too tidy, if that makes sense? Looking at the exterior of the building, I can't help but think of walking through red clay years ago... And the fact that the stains are STILL on my shoes now. For the indoor / lab-esque areas to still have perfectly clean white floors means none of that got tracked inside or blown in. I know that probably feels like a weird thing for my comment to focus on, but it was something that really stuck out to me for some reason. 

I enjoyed your game play mechanics for the most part. Sometimes, it wasn't perfect and I definitely was a little frustrated fighting the boss, but I commend the effort that had to go into creating a system like this in an engine that is very much not made for it. 

I think the overall presentation of your game is very coherent and you have a great direction with this -- I hope you'll add more to it post-contest! :)

Tried this out. Got up to the first (last? not sure) boss. it killed me and I had not saved for a logn time so I left it there.

• The presentation is very clean. The sprite of the protagonist could do with a bit more animations, maybe. I did notice the mapping was very clean. Custom or not, the visuals were nice.
• The game was very easy until the boss, which I felt had way too much HP. He could have had the decency to throw me a medkit at some point or smth.
• I could be wrong, but if what I saw was the boss and the end was after that, the leveling up CHOICE feels hollow, there's barely any margin for error. Of course, if that was not the end, I could be wrong.
• I missed having some sort of skill or consumable on a  cooldown even. Just shooting felt very basic.
• The gameplay was ok, but it definitely helped I did not play too long, as I mentioned it was too basic in its current state.

Overall a neat little thing. If the art was custom (I specially liked the economy and elegance of the maps) great job.

Hey there Britney Pringle Games, I got your game for judging so here are some of my thoughts. Turning MZ into a run-and-gun is impressive! The gameplay worked pretty well, though there were points where MZ's grid-based movement did make for odd misses from enemy attacks. I'm not a major shooter player, so I did have some troubles but nothing that made the game feel unfair. The art is lovely, it would be great to see more details if you had had more time. I did crash the game right at the start though, if the player tries to go left at soon as they start, the game crashes since it is missing map data.

Shooting the normal enemies was straightforward, and it was fun to try to figure out how many grubs I had left to kill to get my next level up. I was disappointed when I realized enemies wouldn't respawn since I was hoping to level up a few more times before the boss battle, but I understand why you'd want to limit how powerful players can get. The final boss kicked my butt a few times before I realized a trick: if I stood in the upper right corner of the arena, most of the boss' normal attacks couldn't hit me. So I hid up there and shot it until the tentacles appeared and then ran like crazy until I got rid or them, and repeated until I won. I don't think I would've beaten the boss without finding that safe spot so it was good for me that it existed, but I'm not sure you meant for it to be there.

Overall, you clearly put in a lot of work to make this game look and feel unique, and that was time well spent. I think with a bit more time this could be a really impressive game, but at the moment it feels pretty short and the level up upgrades don't feel all that worth it when you reach the final boss.

hey, really well made BritneyPringle, and top tier graphics! once the tentacles started coming out during the bossfight it got really difficult for me tho, hehe. But great game :)

52sec before deadline, that's epic btw! :D