A fun entry! There was a moment at the end which was almost game-breakingly frustrating, but I managed to get past it and finish the game. So we can end on a positive note, I'll start with my critiques:
- The Menu Map isn't really intuitive since you travel through doors. it doesn't lend to a consistent sense of understanding location-wise.
- On that note, being able to exit the map and menu without clicking would have been nice.
- I wish there was a bit more to the echolocation ability. Drawing a rectangle in the area where it could be made it seem pretty easy where I just had to walk/jump around the rectangle until the E prompt came up. Maybe a hot/cold effect would be more engaging?
- Similarly, I think it would have been cool if you had to piece together the solution yourself or if the echoes of the past had more of a mechanical connection to the theme. But I think with more time and polish to make each Echo be a cutscene moment or something, that could make up for that.
- I don't know if something was wrong on my end with my machine or what, but the final Echo glitched out on me. Hovering over the images wouldn't do what it was supposed to, and I couldn't close it because it would make the cursor disappear. But then when I pressed E, it would prompt the dialogue for the evidence I had moused over previously, and lather rinse repeat. But for a while I was frantically scrubbing my mouse and pressing all the key commands to try to get the game to do SOMETHING. Also this was in Room G and for some reason it wasn't showing up on the map? I had a moment where I was running around trying to figure out where the hell the last echo was.
And now the fun part, the GOOD:
- Vibes start well. A tone is immediately set and sucks you in. They may have all been external assets, but they were used effectively.
- The game plays really good! The mechanics felt clean and enjoyable to play. The lack of combat made it a lot easier to play on a keyboard than some of the other entries. The height of the jump feels really satisfying, and the level design complements it as well.
- Despite my complaints about the map, I did find the level design fairly memorable enough to know where I needed to go most of the time, which is particularly impressive with most of the rooms being built by the same assets. Only issue I ever had was the aforementioned final Echo pile.
- The switches not always activating something in the same room and instead corresponding to a symbol that could be anywhere on the map was a cool concept.
- Making the ability to drop through floors and upgrade is novel and fun. It's something that most gamers expect from these types of games and the fact it became something to attain later was incredibly satisfying when I did.
- For as short as this was, you made great use of the backtracking/gated progression aspect of the game to give it that trademark Metroidvania feel. I think the most important part of a successful jam project is understanding your scope and capabilities to make it feel complete in some sense, whether that's 5 minutes of gameplay or 60. And you pulled that off greatly.
You have a lot of capability and ability for coding and level design from what I can tell from this game. I hope you get the chance to work on something bigger and with original assets to make your stuff really pop, because your foundations are strong and made a really fun MVM project!