I did not receive either chess or magical girls :( I enjoy soulslikes very much and I think this could be good with adjustments. Enemies attack too fast for dodging to be practical and having to wait for the entire attack recovery animation to end before being able to act is extremely painful. The game progression also broke for me; I was able to open the gate that required the skull key without actually obtaining it, but then I died and returned after actually collecting the skull key, and had no idea how to use it. The door wouldn't let me through. I do hope you continue work on this at some point though. There is a solid core here.

This is a neat game! One thing I have to say right at the top though: It didn't feel like a magical girl game at all. The page here says the antagonist is a magical girl, but I never found her. Otherwise, it just feels like a dungeon crawler. Also, beyond the text on the itch page, I have no idea what the story, setting, or characters are. It's all very surreal and bizarre. That's not 100% bad, but I did feel a little lost in that regard.

Graphically, it all looks nice. The sound and music give it good atmosphere. I enjoyed exploring the dungeon and seeing what I could find! The combat was mostly fine, though sometimes it felt really hard to hit enemies.

I know you have to stop early on this entry, so that may well be the root of many of the problems. Still, this is an impressive jam game that could be really excellent with some additional work!

This is a very strange entry, I really wasn't expecting a souls-like at all, let alone one quite as... almost fully-featured as this? Technically it's extremely proficient, with lots and lots of features; inventories, spells, casting, character control, even camera pans on player actions etc all implemented and working.

The thing is, none of it is particularly fun. Combat is, at most, serviceable. Tutorial text indicates there is intended to be an interplay of sword and shield strikes but in practice there's no sense of action-reaction, or even real effectiveness. Enemies barely react to hits until they suddenly fall over and expire; there isn't any sense that enemies do different things, necessitating different strategies.

Exploration isn't particularly great either. There's a map button but I couldn't get an actual map to show up, and god knows I needed one, since all the corridors are very samey-looking with similar looking assets. It's difficult to tell what switches will do until you labourously hold down A to activate one. I got lost, eventually ran into two giant horses (why were they big?) and died.

That's not to mention the lack of any context, setting or story. Without any particular in-game grounding, beyond the occasional cutesy font and the title screen I couldn't see much of a connection to Magical Girls. I know the end boss is a magical girl, but I never reached her.

I've already left quite a bit of feedback in the Discord but for the record I'll repeat some of it here. This is oddly both a very polished and very rough game; I think this reflects the fact that the creator had to pull out and submit what they had a week or two before the end of the jam. Some things were done, some things were not. Sometimes life happens.

With that out of the way, this game does have the fundamentals down. The environment design is nearly complete and it looks great. It has solid movement, mostly solid combat, inventory and skills. There are puzzles and traps and most of the ones I encountered work.

I was pretty baffled as to why I was playing a muscular cat-person and fighting random RPG enemies in what was supposed to be a magical girl game. The flavour text on the game page clears it up, but if there was to be story in the game itself it didn't make it in.

I found the battles a bit clunky, though it's definitely just something that requires tweaking a few values rather than any sort of major redesign. I also found the UI confusing, partially because it's not quite complete, but the instructions do mostly clear that up as well.

I think the one major omission is any sort of map; it's easy to get lost in rooms that all look mostly the same. On my third playthrough I stumbled across the boss (not implemented) very quickly, though.

Overall it's not a finished game, but still worth giving a try, and I'd really like to see it completed!

What an interesting game. The first thing you notice is the download size, which is pretty inconvenient. But with the biggest weakness of your engine of choice out of the way, I think you've used its strengths quite well. Seeing an attempt at such an ambitious game, executed this well, certainly impressed me.

This is actually a playable souls game with lots of features! The movement, attacks, combos, dodgerolls, it's all there and it feels good on a controller. Nowhere near as fluent as the games that defined the genre, but it does the job fairly well. 

The game takes place in a dungeon, with lots of rooms, chests and switches. The switches are the most annoying part of the game, because there are many bugs related to them. Getting a locked door to open even when you have the key is trial and error. And sometimes your attack buttons stop working, sometimes requiring you to reload a save. The level design is a little all over the place. There are many identical corridors that loop around, creating many redundant paths. Some rooms are pretty much empty, and add nothing to the experience. Now this is probably a case of not having enough time to fill those rooms. I get it, jams are stressful and unpredictable, and the game is technically impressive as it is. The creepy ambience is nice but a little monotonous. My favorite part of the dungeon was probably the optional puzzle room! It gave me strong Ninja Gaiden vibes.

The combat feels alright. Not frustrating and clunky, not perfect and pristine like the best action games of the last 20 years. Somewhere in between. There is overall a lack of feedback with the enemies, which restricts the actions you can confidently execute. The boss fight is a nice addition and there are hints of a nice story, but the fight itself isn't very impressive. The highlight of the game is actually the ambush right before it. There are so many enemies all appearing at once, but they don't simply overwhelm you. To defeat them, I had to use every trick I'd learned, and think carefully about positioning.

Overall: a technically impressive, but unpolished, game with some fine moments and some frustrations.