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(+2)

Gorgeous looking game and very atmospheric, but über-punishing level design.

I see others have mentioned the jump-dash and here's my take: the jump-dash is a little tricky to use because, unlike a typical jump or double-jump, you have little to no time to do any course correction after the dash completes, especially when jumping to a higher elevation platform.  It means that if you overshoot, you're done. If you overshoot on a jump, you can let off the jump and have some time to move left/right to accommodate. (I did find that I could mitigate that some by simply dashing and jumping at the same time, which in your mechanics creates a sort of boosted jump instead of a jump and air-dash.) Anyway, all that's workable if you build the level around that lack of control. Instead, literally the first time you have the user try the dash, you're forcing them to land on a one-tile platform. Not too much later, you have a similar jump, but it's somewhat far from a reboot station, so you have to do three or four jumps, fight several enemies, then overshoot the dash jump, then do it all again...and again. I'm of the opinion that sort of stuff should be much further in the game after the player has had plenty of time to use the abilities, get used to feel of your game's controls, and have practiced several similar jumps in less punishing situations.

I feel like I've sort of ranted on this, but it's only because the rest of the game feels sooo good that I was upset that I couldn't face playing it. I really want to learn more about the world you've set up, the melee feels nice and crunchy, the post-processing is tasteful despite how much of it there is, and the music and sound design is top notch.

You guys really did a fantastic job putting this together. Just give the level design some more love and you'll have a fantastic piece!

(+1)

Thanks so much for the kind comments! I'm the artist and programmer on the team and my friend is the audio designer. Both of us aren't level designers and I think we also noticed it while playtesting. Another thing that probably messed the level design up is that we were making it hard on our standards and for saying we spent a week playing our game while developing it, we got pretty good at it, skewing the difficulty of the parkour bits. Thank you for pointing this out though because we definitely learnt a valuable lesson for the future.

That's a super common gotcha even for experienced designers. It's really hard to be objective about the difficulty of a game when you developed the movement, know where everything is, and set up the optimal path, especially when you programmed it and know its inner workings. Getting to watch as many people as you can play your game is the best way to gain that objectivity.

Facts, we only play tested with one other person and it was five hours before the jam lol.