This is excellent. Hack-and-slash, as it says, but really well implemented; the graphics are evocative despite being pixelated, the storyline is good (she got her daughter back! yay!), the music is cool (especially the title screen), the monsters are scary, the fighting is well done, the mysterious spirit between levels that gifts you new weapons is mysterious (why’s it doing this? Not that I want it to stop, you understand). The best of the old pixel art games managed to make their characters expressive even though they were only a few pixels tall, and this succeeds in that too.
A couple of minuscule issues, none of which harm the rating. I didn’t at first grasp that the weapon switcher (from pressing Space, which was very clearly indicated with the little space bar keyboard graphic, well done) needed me to hold space down and then use the arrow keys; I was just hitting space expecting that by itself to switch weapons. Maybe show left/right arrows on that screen too to indicate that? Tumbling/rolling seems to be a bit sensitive to the order the keys are pressed in; pressing z and then an arrow key does a little roll in place, whereas pressing an arrow and then z does a proper roll as expected. Perhaps this could be tweaked? This didn’t matter that much to me because I never needed to roll, or to use the health potion (was it a health potion? I guess so, but I didn’t use it) because of the final small issue: if this does become a real game, the ice axe is waaay overpowered. I loved the implementation — it was clear the ice axe was an ice axe, and I like a lot that you can kill things without having to be horizontally aligned with them which most games of this sort forget to do — but once I had the ice axe, all the battles were super easy. That’s fine because the idea of this is to tell the story rather than being a challenging battle in itself, but that may not apply if this becomes a fuller game.
The developer also is very responsive; I found some technical issues with the game (as in other comments) and they were quickly fixed, which is good because it meant I got to play this.
Anyway, great work.