Great game! The progression felt verz purposeful and I loved how much content you were able to get from those repeating levels without it fceelign monotonous. As a composer, I loved how the main level tune adapted to the depth of the cave, morphing from a more atmospheric tune to smth rhythmic and how the mission complete tune felt like an accomplishment. 

Minor criticism: Game feels really pushed on a technical level and not much like a true NES game. Minor quibble though, considering I´d even pay a buck or two on steam to jam this one for an evening. 

This was so fun. Every aspect of the game was great. Good take on the procedural levels and the quest for teaching the mechanicts before the big challenge. Also, thanks for the checkpoint near the boss.

The soundrtrack was perfect

WOW O_O That was sooooo impressive for a jam game!!! It kept me hooked from start to finish. I love the upgrade system and game loop of doing individual missions and earning big rewards.

Loved the characters, the dialogue and getting to know each character a little bit each time I respawned in town. Definitely left me eager for more lore! Loved the water respawn concept... very unique. Everything with the gameplay felt really fluid and satisfying. Great sound design, and that music track really set a good atmosphere of mystery and danger.

If I had to think of one critique to give, the only thing I can really think of is lack of distinct landmarks in the levels. I'm like 99% sure there is RNG and the dungeon is randomly generated each respawn, but because I saw a lot of the same room layouts and sometimes it felt the same, sometimes different, with random enemies, I really couldn't tell you with certainty. A few more distinct landmarks might clear that up, like, "Oh, here's that statue I see every time on Level 3, and the path down is to the right" --OR-- "Oh, here's that statue I saw last run on Level 3, and this time it spawned on Level 7, but I remember the path down is to the right!"

That's just me thinking of something to say, because again it didn't really affect my enjoyment, apart from a few dead ends that I had to backtrack which wasn't a big deal.

I kinda cheesed my way through with grapple+bombs, but I really had a blast with this playstyle :) Here's my full playthrough:

AMAZING WORK!!! This felt really close to a commercial product level of content.

I ended the threat, the boss fight was super cool and fit perfectly.

The game is very fun. I'm not even fan or going back from the start plenty of times but the game looks, sounds and feels great. It controls perfectly with the right speeds (default speed + dash is perfect) and feedbacks, one thing I specially like is that your slash more or less goes above your head, I always feel like I'm doing some weird thing when it doesn't. All the abilities are satisfying to find and cool to use, in practice I almost didn't use grappling but bomb jump + grappling felt great anyway, and the bomb jump is super cool. I like the different upgrades including damage/2 & damagex2 and the difficulty of the game is perfect, I died a couple of times. The enemies are different and they propose the right amount of fair threat and I like the sparse water from floor 13 including the sequence with water, one pink enemy and the double headed one, I died at least once there after completing a mission and trying to go back, that's pretty cool. Once again the boss fight is super cool too and just hard enough that you should not need more than a couple of tries but it's satisfying to beat it anyway. Finally the game totally feels like a NES game maybe just a bit smoother on various fronts which is not a bad thing.