Nice combination of mechanics and mood. A pleasure to play!
PROS:
- Ambiance is both relaxing and humbling between the tone of the music and the subtle dialog that makes you feel for the player character.
- Base spear mechanic opens up a lot of platforming opportunities that are definitely realized with what you've got.
- Several unique AI types to engage with that you've placed well to take advantage of the challenge they present. (The boss fights specifically were quite impressive)
CRITIQUE:
- I'm personally not a fan of forcing players to find all of you special items, but if you are going to force that issue before allowing progression then I'd advise marking the special items that players need on the map. I definitely started to feel the experience "get old" when I had to backtrack through every room a couple times in order to find the 2 pieces that I hadn't managed to collect yet.
- The boss fights were impressive, but they did get repetitive. If you want to have the same kind of boss for each of the powerup points then maybe just adjust the movements of each boss to better match the powerup that players will acquire ...
- The bomb powerup boss could spawn exploding bombs along its path while it moves.
- The dash boss could appear->wait a second->dash across the screen->disappear.
- Just based off of the fact that the spear spins as it's returning to the player, I think it would be cool if the spear dealt damage on the return path. It could set up some interesting combat challenges where you're required to boomerang the spear around walls to damage enemies in the expected path.