An extremely solid foundation for a Metroidvania. With some of the most beautiful pixel art I've ever seen.
The game just throws you in with no explanation at all. GO WANDER, EXPLORE! Normally that's a bad thing in gaming but when your game is so well designed that it's intuitive enough for the player to learn it themselves without needing to be taught then you know you've got yourself a great design.
Concepts are drip fed and introduced slowly and very well, players are given plenty of time to understand the goal of the screen and just when you think you know everything a new concept or ability is added which ups the stakes further. The progression is perfect.
By the end of the game I was juggling double jumping, wall climbing and switching lantern states to avoid the 2 wolves who wanted to get inside me! It was hectic but in a good way. The only major issue I had was the wall-climb auto-sticking to walls when I didn't want it to. But it didn't hold me back that much.
As I mentioned at the start the pixel art is beautiful, not a pixel out of place everything shines with character style and readability from the well animated character to the clearly communicated platforms and enemies. The ui and crafting screen is simple but stylish at no point was I ever confused about where to go or what anything did.
The audio is great the increasing "tone" of the wolves getting closer/further away is a nice touch and the SFX (especially picking stuff up) felt nice.
I'd love to see more of this game in the future especially if we're going to get some sort of narrative/story to wrap it in. That was probably the only thing missing that I would have liked. Without it though the game still shines in all areas and was an absolute joy to play.