Hey, I just got around to playing the game a month! I've seen a lot of people say the environmental particles look too similar to the enemy's projectiles and I'd have to agree.
My biggest complaint is, I come from playing a LOT of FPS games and the swords shooting slightly to the right of the middle of the screen makes it REALLY hard for me to aim. It feels unnatural and not having a reticle either makes it even harder to aim.
I think enemies also have just slightly too much health. I'm the type of player that just wants to hold W and keep going while shooting stuff along the way. But I found myself often pausing before jumps to kill enemies and manuevering on small platforms to try not to get shot or stabbed and that interrupted the fast-paced pacing I was hoping for. Maybe that's just a matter of preference or my personal expectations, but I feel the health was just a bit too high.
In the same vein, I often never used the Q and E dashes because the platforms were SO small and if I was between two walls, there was often a small enough gap between the platform and walls that I could fall through it even if I wanted to dash. I found careful movement was super tricky. Especially when dealing with projectile enemies. I was sniped mid-air for a large number of my deaths and since I already committed to the jump, it was too late.
I think the player hitbox needs reduced just ever so slightly horizontally. I often tried to squeeze past lasers only to get hit when I thought I could make it. Also, in one of the levels (I believe the third) I would go straight through some lasers for a bit and halfway through the level, going at the fastest pace I could, holding W the whole time without stopping, there's no safe way to immediately jump to the next platform due to the lasers. I think it's just a timing thing but I often found myself getting impatient because I had to sacrifice a few seconds and stop due to the lasers blocking any potential path despite me getting there as fast as I could.
There were also a good number of jumps where I found myself overjumping on my first playthrough. Again, I had to let go of W and hold S so I didn't overjump. I was doing the jumps at the platforms when they were the furthest away most of the time too, so this confused me a bit. While there is a lot of platforming elements, I feel that should be (slightly) second to the enemies considering they demand the most attention. To me, I feel the platforming should just be an added measure of skill for the player that comes naturally while shooting enemies. Platforming while dodging enemies and their projectiles at top speed would be the most fun for me personally. I want to be able to think about my plan of attack, but I don't enjoy having to focus too much on not overjumping on top of trying to deal with enemies and everything I listed before.
Despite everything I just said, most of those are minor tweaks and "balance" related things or my own preference. I'm not sure what the overall vision for the game was, but I picture a fast paced action platformer where the goal is to focus on enemies while the platforming is an added element of skill to help the player feel more skillful (I especially enjoyed threading the needle between lasers mid-air). Overall, I think the aesthetic and artstyle is great. I'm curious as to how it would look at night with all the environmental particles, I imagine it could potentially look beautiful with all the glowing particles and enemies' eyes. I know you probably won't be working on this much more, but that's what I envision for the game and overall, it's awesome considering you're developing another game on top of this and you did this in just a month. Keep up the great work, Matt!