The game is hard, so let me comment and rate it now because I feel like if I reached boss I can. I'll try again later but don't know if I'll succeed. Is there much content after it?
So high praises to the overall graphics. Maybe the hm... shadowy realm noisy background is not my thing, but okay it does the mood correctly. The others were great and I especially like the glossy parallaxes, cool. Combined with nice animations, effects, these monsters with 3d-like arms (one of the screenshots), hair physics etc. Its really detailed, very nice!
The music is also great, its not some bombastic noise, its moody and correctly scores the tone of whatevers happening. Great!
The story introduces quite a bit stuff, the school, presentation, the club, few characters... I don't know if this is relevant later: if it is, its great, if not then well its probably a bit excessive. To me it was mostly okay.
The actual gameplay... although the feel is really awesome, one of the best I saw this jam, everything where you have to use it - honestly its sucks a bit compared to the rest. I understand that this is a nod to the japanese games and its over the top difficulty. I think the hearts were red, but when you die they become gray to signal that this is no longer a deathless run. I think I got that right?
But I dunno, maybe its me, but the game features almost no helpers from those games? Where's the I-frames? The boss can dash forward and you can loose a heart in one second! If you hear 5 times the hurting sound by just one attack its not great! Where is controller support? It would be much easier to aim with it... The boss has no patterns I think and I guess that's okay, but it increases the difficulity too! No items to help, no exp to grind, no humanity to invite another player... And really no skills either, you suddenly get "light attack". Its an attack that cost mana, but deals 2 hitpoints instead of 1. And the pitfalls... Which when the boss pushes you into them, it will respawn you... near, in front of the boss, just to push you again. Yeesh.
The platforming seems okay, though something about dash breaks this perfect flow of the character, can't find suggestion for this. I saw you had problems with camera, but when you die, camera should just position on the character, not slide slowly at it. I appreciate the attempts that it was attaching almost parfectly in other places, most of the time something was breaking only when going backwards. Ah, details, either way its much better than in my game.
The wallgrabbing mechanic is also not that well implemented: it just lacks coyote time. The problem is that most of the time you are expected to jump and grab the opposite by switching key left/right. But if you slightly miss and move first, jump later you just fall. Ehh... And like just to punish you further there's a endurance bar like in Celeste/Botw but expands on this idea: botw lets you do this sweet final leap when the bar is almost gone, here the more you climb the worse you climb, you jump lower. And lower... and fall... Aaaand it all comes at ya on the boss fight at that pitfalls of course;)
I know this sounds like I hate the game, but honestly I would only like it to be less punishing, other than that its great. When there's one/two "bullshit" parts, thats fine, git gut, move on, but when all the game seems like designed just to mess with you... and as you saw i made quite a list... it... I dunno, you win game. Please read it as suggestion, I don't know if you want the game to be more hard, or less hard;) If the goal is to be more hard maybe I can come up with suggestions too;)
I suppose I should end with a compliment, then let me praise the level design. I always like the simple dual split design, it lets you explore a tiny bit for those two keys. Very nice beginning of hopefully longer metrodivania. Just that damn boss... Give me a hammer, bow or a button for curses, it will be much better:P
Ah and naturally kudos to all the assets that were made in-house:) I will try to finish the game, just can't promise on that eh