Firstly thank you so much for the feedback and for going into depth with it! Yeah the art is original and I'm really glad you like it, top-down movement is a new one for me but between using reusable tilemaps and the enemies just being recolours of the player model it luckily made the workload doable. I agree that I wish the rooms were able to be much more interesting as well. Unfortunately, time restrictions meant I had several hours remaining when starting on them so they're mostly copy/pasted with only a couple of variations but a big point to improve.
Really useful to hear about difficulty as well and I agree I think I enjoy the rest of the game more than the last level due to the almost singular slower way of doing it. Personally, do you think you would enjoy an actiony and more open version but with more toned down enemies, or staying quite tightknit and puzzlelike? Definitely agree some invincibility on the dash is a good idea so I'll try to amend that quickly before the polish week ends.
Thank you again for playing through it and analysing so much, the point of view is really helpful so I'll try to make some of those suggested changes!
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I believe that despite it's harsh difficulty, it's tightknit and small game space allows for rapidity of play and restarts, the puzzlelike element is there because each restart has the exact same variables and mostly same reactions (Same respawn point, same enemy placements, and the placement of the power you have to get to start fighting back,) it works in your favour for the most part as progressing through these tight levels rapidly is fun and satisfying.
Each level usually lasts a minute or so, and even in that space you can die handfuls of times, it's very nice and rapid that way with it's constrained rooms. The problem is that it makes me feel like each room only has one solution, even if it technically doesn't, I feel that the design needs to be a bit more open in that sense, like having more than just the one power available in the room at start for example.
It's probably just that you needed the time to test out a variety of level types really. Otherwise, it's perfectly fine as is.