Hey Adam! I found the Insignia demo after watching some of your pixel-art tutorials on Youtube. Great stuff! The Insignia demo is really cool, and as someone with a burgeoning interest in game-design, I find it really inspiring to know that this game is being developed by a single person.
I just finished playing through the demo -- I guess it was v1.5.4. The artwork in the demo is beautiful, the music is really nice in a fittingly retro way, and the sense of world-building is palpable. It also seems like the story's probably gonna be good, although we only get to see a tiny bit of that. However, I ran into some snags with the gameplay, so I was compelled to offer you some constructive feedback.
1) The single biggest problem I had involved this jump-spider puzzle:
I intuitively grasped that I should wall-jump up and strike the spider with the -> arrow to get past the wall. But man, try as I might, I just couldn't get past that part for the longest time. Eventually, I became convinced that either I needed to find an item to help me jump higher, or I needed to find something which would unlock an "overhead strike" ability. Because, you know, your sword-strike animation never actually reaches up as high as that spider is. In whatever case, I left the area and searched around for 30 minutes, found nothing, and almost just gave up on the demo entirely, figuring that it had some kind of bug which rendered it unfinishable.
The only reason I didn't give up is that I found a walkthrough video on Youtube, which confirmed that my intuition was correct. After seeing that player wall-jump up and strike the spider, I went back and tried again, over and over. When I finally did get past that area, after probably 100 tries, it didn't feel like it was because I suddenly mastered the timing or anything satisfying like that. It just felt like a fluke, almost a glitch.
The spiders in general are challenging, although I like the kind of challenge they represent, at least in theory. This spider in particular, however, was too difficult by half. It would have made me quit the game had I not found that video. My advice: Lower that spider-track and/or the ledge a bit, or set-up another spider which will launch you into the -> spider. This is a weird place for a player to get stuck and not know how to advance.
2) I was gonna mention a few other things, but I think they could basically all be described as "issues with the control mechanics." I feel like you've designed a game around platformer action-challenges which require careful movements from the player, and a keen sense of timing -- only, the game's control-mechanics, as presented in the demo, don't seem very well-suited for those kinds of challenges. Let me describe a few of the gameplay areas I'm talking about:
2a> The combat. I like the animation, but its stylistic "low-framerate" quality doesn't marry very well to fast-paced action. The movements always felt a little laggy to me. Therefore, combat never quite achieved the twitchy "strike/parry/dodge" feel I think you were going for. Instead, I often felt like I was being thrust into a battle where quick and precise actions were expected of me, but the control-mechanics were incapable of delivering such actions -- and so, every fight just degenerated into me pressing my attack button as fast as possible, rolling away whenever I actually had the energy to do so, and eating every time my energy got low. It never felt like fluid or elegant fighting might be possible, and it never felt like it might be possible to fight without getting hit. So, this was frustrating. I wanted to enjoy the combat more, but it just felt kind of sloppy.
2b>Jump-puzzles. The jump-puzzles generally felt far more difficult to me than they should probably feel -- and not for good reasons, but for "I can't do this with these clumsy controls" reasons. The stylistically-choppy animation of the character is probably largely at fault here. Wall-jumps, in particular, never quite worked right for me. There are a few sections where you ask the player to ascend up a narrow passage by wall-jumping back and forth. In these moments, I never could tell whether there was supposed to be any particular timing involved or not. The only thing that ever worked for me was just to rapidly press the jump button as fast as possible as I bounced back and forth between the walls.
2c> Wall-grabbing is frequently too sensitive. In some areas, one has to stand atop a narrow ledge and drop-down to another narrow-ledge to then make a jump. In those cases, I often found after dropping down that my character would keep grabbing the ledge behind me, from which I had just dropped-down. That caused me a number of frustrating falls, as I fought to keep him from grabbing the ledge and to turn the other direction.
Lest that seem like to much negative feedback, let me tell you some of the specific things I did like:
> In general, I liked these characters and the world they inhabit. It feels alive. It feels like the kind of place I'd want to spend more time.
> I liked the way that the game's backstory appears as "panels" of graphics that appear in the background as you walk toward town. That's a neat little device.
> Despite my quibbles about combat, I did actually like the Parry technique, and I really enjoyed the little vignette in the tower where Wilhelm teaches you how to use it. The timing of this technique was tricky, to be sure -- but it never felt like you were asking me to use Parry in a way that the controls couldn't handle. The Parry challenges always felt pretty fair.
> I did actually enjoy the fight with the Librarian. My quibbles about the stiffness of combat notwithstanding, this boss-fight was really creative, and I enjoyed the way that it asked me to occasionally parry an arrow in order to proceed. It felt like the best kind of boss-fight -- the kind that forces you to use a new move, and thus helps you to get better at using it.
Ultimately, I liked the Insignia demo a lot. It just seemed a little rough around the edges, in the control-mechanics department. I hope you're able to iron those issues out. This game looks great. I'll be following this project, and I hope to see it eventually released for real. I'll happily purchase it when it's released.