Just played through this, it was pretty hefty! I think there are a lot of cool design choices in here especially in regards to the powers. There are also a ton of collectibles, and while I didn't find all of the Seeds, I appreciate that they give the player a lot more to do in the game (one of the seeds made me figure out using box pulling to create platforms before it was ever required in the game, so that was cool). The art around the Great Tree was very cool, and the characters that did exist all had unique and interesting sprite work. I also saw that the characters each had their individual personalities, with Apsis and Kitsune being standouts for me (I mean, I didn't like Kitsune's personality, but it certainly stood out).
Some constructive feedback:
- The game provides a lot of rooms and routes through those rooms, especially when your abilities open up, and that was really cool. Zooming through an early room with the rope ability or by wall climbing felt really good. That said, no room outside of the Great Tree room never particularly stood out to me or made me remember it and say "I need to come back here later." The zones each had their own color and sprite art, but I never really felt a big difference between the rooms and zones since they on the whole all seemed to incorporate all of the movement mechanics anyway. Perhaps picking a few centerpiece rooms and really sprucing them up / making them feel special would grab my attention a bit more.
- There is a lot of story here, and a lot of characterization. It's cool that you leaned into the story telling so hard and introduced so many characters, but it was a little bit hard for me to follow just because there were so many names thrown at me all at once. Like I said above, Kitsune stood out because the personality was very strong, and Apsis made me smile, but the other characters sort of blended together because they just woke up and gave me their power.
- It wasn't super clear to me what I needed to get the disabled mushrooms and wall vines working. I already thought that I had the powers for each of those, but then there was a nother power that upgraded the Nurture ability I already had. Trying to figure out what I needed to do to finish the game ultimately ended up being less of an subtly guided exploration and me just opening the map and seeing which rooms I hadn't explored yet. This worked out alright because I ended up getting some extra health and power upgrades, but it made that final power-up feel not as rewarding as it could have.
- I usually only do 3 ieces of big feedback like this, but it was a big game and the other thing that I felt detracted from my experience was the lack of enemy types. There were so many rooms to explore but they all had the same two enemies, and this goes doubly so for the Strength challenge rooms. Designing enemies is a lot of work so I can't fault you too much on this, but it was just a thought I had throughout the experience.
Anyways, it's a very big game with a lot of moving pieces. Lots of writing, lots of rooms and environments, lots of cool and well implemented abilities. Overall I was quite impressed with it and felt like I had finished a complete package when I got rid of that final corruption. Very well done.