The design of the character looks great, he looks exactly like the kind of person who would have the power to bring the dead back to life. He looks human, but his blue hair and skin along with his dark cloak indicates he’s some sort of mysterious otherworldly being. The stern look on his face gives the indication that he’s been using his powers for some time, and is very used to interacting with mythical entities.
The puzzles were easily the main highlight of this game. It was fun to time my jumps, and the hazards are set up in a way where they’re not overly difficult, but punishing enough where getting hurt is always your fault.
The graphics of the game look great, along with its dark blue/purple palette. It really makes you feel like you’re exploring ruins that take place in an underground cave. One thing I would have liked though is if the bricks had some graphical variety, such as missing bricks, cracks in the bricks, or vines growing on the sides. Doing this would make it look much less like a repeating texture.
The color change of the NPCs going from a greyish-blue to their bright natural colors really makes it feel like you’re bringing someone back from the dead. It’s also a nice detail that their mood graphically changes as well.
The music sounds okay. While the instruments do fit the theme of dark ruins in a cave, it gets kind of irritating hearing the main melody play the same 4 notes repeatedly. I don’t know much about music, but perhaps the pitch of the 4 notes should change in variety as the song goes on, and then eventually overlap a new main melody over the old one which would transition the old melody to a background instrument? I’m hoping I didn’t describe this in a confusing way, I don’t know too much about musical terms.
The pixel text is kind of hard to read with some of the pixels of the letters being larger than others.
I would have preferred if I could see my health and mana up in the corner. Perhaps you could have the option to have the health/mana not appear if they’re completely full?
Using the mana with a limit felt more annoying than as a natural limitation the character had. There were a few times where I had to end up waiting a few seconds before being allowed to use my magic again in an area that didn’t involve having to move quickly. I feel like the mana would work better if it could be used endlessly so that the player doesn’t have to constantly wait for their magic to work again. However, if you wanted to keep the limited magic aspect for areas designed around this mechanic, then perhaps there could be “magic draining” areas that limits the amount of time the character can use their powers. When the player leaves these magic draining areas, they can use their magic endlessly again.
Some of the platforming does seem a bit too precise. You should probably implement coyote time which gives the player a slight delay before determining that they’re not grounded anymore. Implementing this gives the illusion that the controls are very responsive.
It’s kind of immersion-killing to have ascii emojis in the dialogue. It would have been better if the sprites of the characters depicted their emotion as they talk.
The main character would also feel more immersive if he could show his emotions as he’s talking with the NPCs. This would be better than the dialogue saying that the main character responded to the person talking even though his sprite shows no change in emotion. A simple gesture like this would work for a silent protagonist:
Perhaps you could add the feature of interrupting the ghosts’ rambling about being dead by having the option to bring them back to life while they’re in the middle of talking? It would be funny if doing this gives the player slightly different dialogue with the NPC acting surprised.
The boss seems impossible to fight without taking damage. I liked what you were trying to go for, with the concept of bringing the health down while trying not to make spikes appear on yourself. However, since the hitbox of the boss was so large, I could not find a way to avoid losing health. I only managed to beat this boss because its health never recovered after dying. If there were more stacked crates to jump over while decreasing the hitbox of the boss, then it would seem more like a fair fight.