I played this game for around an hour, it was my first time trying the game out and I really enjoyed this game, the visual is stunning and I like the relaxing and cozy vibes the game gives me. I think the mechanics of the spear throwing as a platform and boomerang type weapon makes this game interesting and fun for me. 

The basic controls were quite straight forward and easily understood for me, took me around 2-3 minutes to figure out how the spear work. As for the other controls like seed and human honestly, I don't understand what they do, maybe it is some feature that is unlock later that I haven't unlock yet but because they are added in the control scheme in the pause menu it is quite overwhelming and hard for me to find the basic controls like the key to jump. Other than that, the feel for all the movement and jumping felt great for me. 

For the level design I feel that the pacing of the obstacle challenges was good until after the boss 1 fight. The location with 3 moving obstacles and 2 laser beams, for that area I feel that the difficulty of that area is too high and require multiple occasion perfectly time spear throw and jumping, in my opinion the moving saw is too fast, and it forces me to throw my spear instinct on the wrong spot and end up causing me to end up in a bad spot or time my jump wrongly.  Maybe the obstacle for that particular area could be reduce or have the saw speed.

For boss 2 I didn't manage to beat it, I feel that is slightly too difficult for me and compared to the first boss this feel like the 3rd or 4th boss of the game in terms of difficulty.  Boss 1 I remember it is very easy to fight and there is a lot of space I can move while boss 2 I am suddenly required to time a lot of my movement while reacting to multiple projectiles and it very hard not to get hit at least once at the early phase. I think that the rotating sphere around the boss 2 could be introduce on the 2nd phase of the fight instead of right at the get go, because at the first encounter I basically am more focus on trying to avoid getting hit by the shooting projectile and cause the orb is rotating around the boss I wouldn't think of getting to the back of the boss and only realized how to damage the boss at my 3rd try. Also, maybe the boss bum area can be a different color as a form of visual cue to inform player to maybe they have to hit the back of the boss. 

For combat generally it feels great, but I don't see a situation yet where I should do a melee attack over a range attack because for a range attack, I can kill the enemy in a safe situation whereas if I try to do a melee attack, I get to the risk of getting hit, maybe the melee attack could deal more damage and deal a slight stun to enemy upon hit to make it more appealing to use melee attack instead of range. 

For the checkpoint flower I feel that it can just heal the player fully upon touch cause at least for the case of the 2nd boss I reached the nearby checkpoint with 1 health and have to kill myself just to recover the health I lost. or maybe have some of way to health my lost health after going through a tougher obstacle course. 

Visually speaking I honestly didn't notice the spike most of the time I feel that the spike blend with the ground too much and I notice the sound before the spike lol and also like I didn't notice this gold coin rock that I can hit to get coins until the end of my playthrough maybe make it glow a little cause I legit thought it was a background asset.

Some general feedback upfront. You put some great efforts into your game. One can see&feel this in so many places. The amount of details and subtle visual changes and feedback given is really, really impressive!

> I would love any general feedback or suggestions. (everything is a WIP)

I was watching my nephew playing your game, as he is the even bigger fan of us two ;-) He usually plays games like Super Mario and Donkey Kong on a Nintendo console. So he is more familiar with classic platformers, not so much with the Metroidvania genre. He is also used to WASD thanks to some extensive PC Stardew Valley projects :-D 

Playing your game, he had some nice success and progress. The controls on my PC keyboard were quite a challenge - he had to pause & check for the Shift and Control keys regularely. He likes the "Spear as a platform" mechanic, this makes your game pretty special and attractive. It is a good choice to make the player jump that high - so placing the spear "maybe too high" never was an issue.

If I remember correctly, he got stuck at the same place as in our last test play (some month ago). Somewhere after defeating the first flying enemies, there is a new challenge introduced. These moving saw blades. Well, they don't get introduced, suddenly they are just there. And this is where he struggles. It's just not clear what to do. In detail: where to go? up? down? to the left through the small gap? but how? How to overcome the saw blades in general: by avoiding them? by stopping them? (secret, hidden lever?), by being "somehow" fast?

By listing all these questions, maybe you get an idea of how to introduce this part in a better way? Doesn't need to be text, I think. Maybe designing that first level part very obvious, so that players can intuitively learn how to deal with the blades. And then making it gradually tougher?

Hope this feedback is helping you. Please keep it going - you are onto something really nice here!

Just tried your game! I waited a bit before trying because when I read metroidvania I was like "okay I think I need more than 15 minutes to get an idea of this" :P 

Overall, it's pretty cool and very clean for a year of work! :D

Left some feedback below!

Feedback

• I loved using the spear a lot. I found myself tapping it alot (thank goodness I can't kill NPC or I might have ended the poor Moon Priest on instinctually spear throwing when she first appeared)
• What you have done with the spear has already made it pretty juicy! Though I think you could potentially make the sound that the spear hits a surface sound a bit cooler! 
  • I was thinking of maybe adding something to the high frequency like a "ding" to make the sound fuller?
• Small suggestion/experiment to try, maybe it would be better to map the throw button to RMB, attack to LMB and Dash to shift. It felt a bit funny attacking with the center mouse button, which led to me throwing the spear a lot as it felt more instinctual since LMB feels more natural to click.
• Using the spear was very intuitive, and felt good! Got the gist of it even before the small hints started popping up

This was a great game. I'm not sure how long you have been developing it but pretty amazing. 

• You need to add a little tutorial at least saying you can use the spear to traverse with. I was stuck in the first area just jumping around till I figured it out. 
•  I like the art style of the game I see a lot of potential for this game. 

I see you put a lot effor in it and I appreciate it. Using your spear as travelling instrument is a neat idea though it's a little unusual (since most metroidvanias allow you to do melee combat).

As for critics: animations are a bit clumsy. In battles I feel lack of sharpness in movements.

Hello! Interesting game. I am not playing arcade games very often (not because I dislike concept, but because of my pathetic reflexes), so I was not not able to progress very far, but what I saw looked fun. I like creative use of the spear. What to improve? Maybe more information in the tutorial - I did not know what options like "seed" or "human" actually meant.

I really like the fairy-tale picture-book visual design, the character looks very cute and the watercolor-style painting is also very pleasing to the eye. It feels like reading a story book. The movement is smooth and easy to control. Overall, this is a fun and well-made game.

To be honest, I’m really not good at platform games, and I can’t finish this game and give professional advice on this aspect. These are just suggestions based on the few levels I played in the early stage, you don’t need to take these suggestions too seriously 😉:

•  The main mechanic of this game is to use weapons as platforms to jump. This mechanic is actually quite common in other games, it lacks some originality but it is a fun mechanic. If you want to make this game stand out in platform games, it needs more interesting level or interaction design.
• The UI can be more refined and improved, some words are really too small to see clearly, and putting the whole keyboard on the screen doesn’t seem so necessary.
• Some of the key configurations are not very intuitive for me personally, it would be better if they could provide customizable key settings.

I have not played the game before so I can't really comment too much on the improvement that was made as part of this game jam. However, as a whole this is by far one of the best free games I have played on itch in a while. I love the visuals, the UI, the sound the graphics, the audio the controller support, the controls, the gameplay. I would definitely keep playing this game long after the jam is over for sure. I don't think I would be able to provide too much negative feedback. Love the game, hope to see it become much greater in the future.