Hi! Nice submission. Here is some comments from me:
Gameplay and mechanics
- The game concept is nice and the game mechanic is working well. The game has nice difficulty level and I enjoyed trying it a few times with different strategies. To hold attention of the player long time the game would probably need some sort of variance between attempts.
- Visuals are really nice and work well. But it's not always clear if some objects looks different only to add variance to graphics (more on this later.) Especially I like the front screen and the menus. They look almost professional!
- The inclusion of the theme felt a bit far fetch. But that's obviously just a personal opinion!
- Enemies should stop for a while when the player is hit, the player should bounce off or they should gain invulnerability for a second. Currently It's super easy to lose multiple lives in a short time. All the lives can be lost in less than second! This feels unfair to the player and might lead to frustration. Feeling of fairness even in games that are meant to be challenging is important for the players to have fun with a game. Many of the following points also heavily influences the fairness perceived by the player
- As noted by others, the hitboxes of the enemies (or the player?) seem to be quite large. It does not look like the enemies are really touching the player when player loses health.
- If mouse leaves the game screen the mouse press stops being registered which leads the character to stop walking. I died multiple times because of this and it did not seem "my fault" which is why I considered it super annoying. I guess one could say that it is part of the challenge to make sure that the cursor keeps inside the game view but especially when moving at the edge of the screen, this is difficult. Maybe you could help the player with this by forcing the cursor to always stay in the game view or having the player continue moving the to last registered cursor point in case of the mouse exits the screen.
- It was unexpected that the player can enter the forest area. I thought the trees would block movement and determine the area inside which the player can move. Usually in games things should aim to look like what their function in the game is. Because the grass and the trees clearly look like two different things, I expected them also to behave differently. This is not a big problem obviously as I quickly picked up that I in fact can walk into the forest. But you might want to think, was there a specific reason why to have trees there instead of grass if they do not affect gameplay? Additionally, related to the trees I noticed that there is a sound effect playing when I enter the forest. This confused me even further because the sound effect clearly emphasizes entering the forest as something relevant but I did not notice anything change in the gameplay while I was in the forest compared while I was walking on the grass. Did I miss something?
- It was not clear to me if there was a difference between the small and large eyes or if it was only their size and for adding variance to visuals. Similarly I did not know what was the difference between different colored collectables. At some point I thought blue ones give dash uses but then later it seemed that they did not, so I'm not sure anymore.
Bugs & Minor stuff:
- I would like the leaderboard to have names so I would know in what place I have ranked.
- Bug in Fullscreen: the bottom part of the screen does not fit the view
- On Instructions page the last sentence is missing a word(?): "You can pause or stop playing by pressing the..."
- I would change dash to right mouse button instead of Shift. The game is otherwise controlled only by mouse so it feels weird to use just one keyboard button. The whole game could easily be played only with mouse.
Overall the game was enjoyable to play. The main mechanics of the game were easy to learn (even though with some details I had troubles). It felt that I could proceed further in the game with each attempt which is really good thing and kept me trying to get better scores a while. Good job!