itch.io

I can understand that you want to hit the boss only in the face, but like the OP said, hitting the boss in the face is annoying because it's just a time waster. Even flapping around the orbs and fetuses, I only got hit like twice, so it's not difficult to just flap there and wait, it just wastes time. If there was some way to manipulate where the boss shot, even if what the shots were themselves were random, it would be better and even allow players to try and optimize speedruns of the game. Well, kinda.

I was more annoyed that hitting the ceiling in the main flapping part hurt you; it's rather difficult to control yourself when you have to go from a bare minimum hole to the maximum height hole, and I don't think I've ever managed to successfully pull that off once without hitting the ceiling. I attempted this three times. The first attempt died while flapping because I intentionally went below 9 lives for the so-called "Bad Ending" right away. The second attempt I got to the boss but also died because I was trying to keep my lives low for the bad ending, but I couldn't figure out what to do besides kick back the orbs so the fight just dragged on too long. The third one was the successful run where I noticed the face changing states. Maybe if you made the boss flash a bit, it'd be more noticeable that the orb to the face actually did something?

Not knowing what to do? - Fine. Not gonna debate that.

But spending 10+ minutes flapping around and not even being sure I'm making progress? - Yeah, that's gonna turn off a lot of people.

The point is that it feels like the player has very little agency in what's going on. Might as well be a slot machine where I can just pull a lever and hope I get the "damage boss" reward. Have you had anyone play-test this at all?

Player skill should trump randomness otherwise it just gets frustrating and people give up, like I did. In the end there are plenty of other games where people can go spend their time instead of yours, so don't give them a reason to think in those terms.