Hi! Played trough your game. All except the bonus level. I was going to look for it but then the game bugged when I entered Credits screen and I had to restart which lead me to lose all progress... Anyway, below you can find some comments and feedback based on my experience playing your game:
- Tutorial level of the game was straightforward: very easy to understand what needed to be done and I felt like I had understood the main concept of the game by just playing that one level. Good tutorial design!
- Nice graphics! Slightly related to that, the game icon/image on the itch.io page looks really elegant.
- The music sounds really good! Was that really AI generated or did understand something wrong? How did you do this? Could you share some experience of the process of creating the music? Do you know about where to find resources if I would be interested in trying AI composition in some project later?
- The game concept clearly fits the theme. Although in most of the levels the main puzzle felt like to be reflecting the rays and dying in order to remove some walls felt more like an extra side task. That's why even though I liked the theme concept it was also bit disconnected from the main gameplay. In this regard the fourth level (if I remember correctly) was the best because there dying actually felt like part of the puzzle (the player needs to first go to certain area to thing A and then restart by dying to get back up to go to another are to do thing B). More puzzles like this where dying is really incorporated to the puzzle and is not just prerequisite for solving the puzzle, would really add more power to the theme.
- Because E (used for item interaction) and R (used for level restart) are so closed to each other I many times restarted the level by accident when I wanted to interact. You could think about whether player really needs to restart with keyboard or would the UI button be enough. I think I only wanted to restart one time during the game and that was because of the bug in third level mentioned by other commenters.
- I would like to somehow see whether I'm currently controlling the character or interacting with the mirrors. Even though I can see that if I just start pressing buttons to see which object moves it would have helped at least me if I would have been really able to tell in which mode I'm in currently. It was sometimes frustrating that I thought I had pressed E already to interact/stop interacting and then when I tried to move the wrong thing moved. This happened multiple times. Maybe you could add an effect to the wheel or the mirror sprite to have them look different while they can be controlled.
- Back button in Credits screen does not work
It was interesting to try it out! Even with only 4 levels, there was enough content to play for a while. Good work for a jam game!
Please consider trying my entry for this jam, if you have time later. It's also a puzzle game in which the player needs to die to be able to continue with their next attempt but otherwise the mechanics are quite different than in your game. I would be very happy to hear what you think about it, be it positive or some constructive criticism!