The level of polish and attention to detail is amazing. It's small things like the flounder/dab only having eyes when facing one direction that all worked together perfectly. I do have some feedback though:
- There were some input issues at times. I tried on both keyboard and pad, but found that not all inputs were mapped for pads and I had an issue where sometimes (usually upon restarting) where no inputs were registered at all.
- I found the fish frustrating to fight because they'd swim above me (above my character's attack hitbox) and get in free hits. This did add to the challenge, but the lack of checkpoints made me less enthused to restart.
- It felt more like an action platformer than a metroidvania. Granted, a lot of metroidvania games are also action platformers, but the sense of "explore and unlock new things" was missing due to the linearity.
Other than that, the artwork and world is gorgeous. It's clever that all the the octopus's weapons are thing found on the ocean floor (rocks, sticks, etc). Picking up each item was initially cool — I just wish enemies gave exp or items too.