Wow, just wow, this game is insanely well made! The art style is nice and clear, the animation is incredibly fluid, and the sound design is excellent at supporting the animation! This game perfectly combines puzzle and combat elements, the ball and chain crucial to both solving puzzles and defeating enemies. The puzzles and combat would be great on their own, but this game seamlessly combines them into what is perhaps the most well designed and well balanced game I've ever played in the GMTK game jam. The puzzles are simple in design but well executed, making it more fun than other more complicated puzzle games. The combat is very varied and dynamic, with the player's tactics changing depending on enemy placement and the environment, and I always love games where the player is constantly switched between powerful and powerless. But what this games does the best are its levels, each level is different from the last and all of them are well designed and are very well paced. Trying to point out everything I liked about each level would take forever, so instead I want to talk about level 5 just as a way of highlighting the excellent level design of the entire game.
In level 5, the mines are introduced with 4 blocking the pathway of the player, just intuitively it is pretty clear the to remove the mines the player needs to throw the ball and chain at the mines, introducing a new mechanic for the rest of the game without any text telling player what to do. Then eventually the player comes across a gate with mines behind it, and soon an enemy walks into the mines and explodes, opening the gate in the process. This gives the player 2 critical pieces of information: First, that the mines can be used in your favor and do a lot of damage against enemies, this is helpful in later levels when encountering much tougher enemy that can only be defeated using mines; Second, to warn the player that this isn't just a puzzle level and there will be combat. The player continues on until reaching 2 mines blocking their way, when the player throws the ball and chain at the mines, enemies suddenly pop up and the player is forced to get close to them in order to get back the ball and chain. This was really a surprising ambush even with the warning provided beforehand, it sits up a very interesting and unique combat scenario testing the player on their knowledge of the mines, as their ability to recover from a disadvantage.
Pretty much every level is designed with a quality on par with level 5. And I love it. The levels are never too easy or too hard, death isn't frustrating, and trying to speed-run the levels is an ABSOLUTE BLAST!!! The only thing that gets in the way a little bit are the buttons, they can be buggy at times when the game expects the player to use the ball and chain to press a button while the player stands on another button. Throwing the ball and chain often unpresses the button the player is currently standing on, but there aren't really that much buttons so it doesn't really affect my opinion of the game. Another thing I would change is to make it clear that the direction the ball and chain is thrown is based on movement and not mouse, I got a bit confused for the first minute of the game because of this, maybe change throwing and picking up to keyboard keys rather than mouse clicks could help clear up the confusion. But maybe it's just me since no one else seems to have this problem. This game is excellent at everything it does and what makes it even more impressive is that it was made ALL IN 48 HOURS!!! I can't imagine how good this game would be if you had more time to work on it! Well done on everything!!!