Hello! Congrats on finishing up as much as you did. Here's my thoughts on the game:
Praises:
- The music was my favorite part of this game. It was very atmospheric and reminded me of Hollow Knight in a good way.
- The game's level is impressively large.
- I enjoyed the writing and the integration of small cutscenes within the levels.
Criticisms:
- The foreground and background art assets are very mismatched; both use different pixel ratios, and the tileset uses nearest-neighbor filtering (ideal for pixel art - keeps things sharp), while the background uses linear filtering (usually doesn't work well with pixel art - makes it look fuzzy). I would have liked to see these assets in the same pixel ratio, with nearest-neighbor filtering applied to both.
- Controller support is limited - I couldn't attack or use menus with controller, and ultimately had to switch to keyboard to finish the game when I would have preferred to play with controller the whole time.
- Combat feels unresponsive, inconsistent and lifeless. Elements such as knockback on hit, hitflashes, stun animations when characters are hit, and a larger weapon hitbox would go a long way towards making combat more fun.
- Sometimes, falling off of a ledge caused me to respawn further back in the level than my last checkpoint, which was frustrating and didn't feel intentional.
- It would have been nice to have a button other than up for jumping, such as spacebar or the bottom face button on a controller.
- It would be nice to have a way to skip dialogue and/or get all text of a dialogue message on screen immediately.
I hope this feedback helps. Good luck with your post-release development!