If the goal was to be hardest game of the jam, this one certainly hit it. The game takes a familiar shmup setup but lumps a Patchouli on you to amp up the hectic decision making. It takes much getting using to, but is actually fun once you start understanding how to accommodate the additional load. The spritework and music assist in setting a discomforting, unnatural atmosphere. The music warping as you get hit and the random NND comments meld together into something unsettling. Controls are snappy and response. Quite appropriate for challenge.
The big question then is if the challenge itself is fair. And after a few hours of attempts at it, I have to conclude it is not. The rapid enemy patterns demand just about rote memorization of every round, and even that isn't enough when the fairies decide to throw curveballs. The game effectively has a single resource that is overloaded in its functions. Your health is the only way to patch up Patche, but also governs your movement speed and your damage output. And, of course, you need it for not dying. When you get hit so much happens at once with the aggressive screen shaking and the sudden change in movement speed that its common to get disoriented and get hit multiple times in a row before recovering. And since health governs everything else, going below half often causes a death spiral where you can't reposition fast enough nor blast away the threats. And when I clutched it out of those situations to survive the round, rather than enter a round I lack resources for I ended up throwing Patche into the wall to reset. Very against the story. From other comments I see these are intentional design decisions, but I personally find this kind of difficulty frustrating rather than fun. It really sapped the enjoyment I was experiencing at first.
I can enjoy a challenge, but if one is going to be presented at this magnitude at the bare minimum I would like a checkpoint. Not to make it easy, but just to escape the tedium The first four rounds really felt like a complete waste of my time while I was trying to get progression on higher rounds . After around my tenth attempt at round 10 I had to call it quits to try other games in the jam.