This one kind of came out of nowhere but it really impressed me.
The combat in this game is the clear focus, and it's very well done. It looks good, feels satisfying, and plays well. All attacks hitting multiple enemies felt weird at first but makes a lot of sense. The controls seemed a bit awkward at first but I quickly got used to them. I also didn't think the power dash or time slow were useful at first, but I did learn where they were useful and started using them both. Seriously, mechanically this is one of the best games in the jam.
I liked the graphical style, but I can see it being a bit divisive. I think most people will like the stylized characters, but the low-fi backgrounds maybe not. Some things were noticably more detailed than others and I'd like to see that tightened up if you're going to go with this style.
I wish the boss came a little bit earlier; I was starting to get tired of fighting hordes of enemies by the third wave or so. It doesn't get old quickly, because the gameplay is so good, but it does eventually get old. The battle just before the boss was a real drag, and I'm not sure if this is because it has so many enemies, little space to move, or just because I was tired of hordes. If the game were longer it would really need something to break it up whether that was cutscenes or exploration or puzzles. As it stands it's an issue but a pretty minor one.
A healing mechanic would probably be necessary as well. I already wish it had checkpoints; I made it to the boss but then she killed me and I was booted to the main menu.
I actually thought that battle was broken. The enemy was offscreen half the time and none of my attacks seemed to do any damage to her even when she was on screen. I read the comments after and apparently you need to use parry to reflect her attacks, then hit her when she's stunned. This is problematic for a few reasons. There's no indication you need to do it, and I never used parry anywhere because I found it so awkward.
There's a few glitches and prototype-y shortcomings. The one blemish to the combat is that sometimes it feels like I should be hitting and I'm not. The difficulty curve felt a bit odd- the second battle is much harder than the first but the subsequent ones don't continue that trend until the boss. Other than that there's some visual issues with shadows jumping and models clipping, there are some audio issues, the female enemy death animation is weird, and you need to use the mouse to continue dialogue and literally only to continue dialogue. None of these really take away from the game much, though, and they're probably easy fixes.
It was pushing my laptop pretty hard, not to the point of melting it but scenes with a lot of enemies started to slow down. When time was slowed the game felt laggy, but I'm not sure if this is a consequence of the deliberate effects or if there's something killing performance there.
All in all it's not perfect but the core mechanics are excellent.