Gorgeous visuals and great game feel. Well done!
PROS:
- Environments, parallax, character animations, FX, etc all top notch on the presentation.
- Level design (and second boss fight) really enforced the usage of player skills after they were acquired.
- Cut-scenes were well presented for context to the story.
CRITIQUE:
- The far parallax layer (far off purple clouds) struck me as off. I think it's because it's slowly scrolling, but also adjusting to the player so when moving right the clouds hardly moved, but moving left they were moving faster than the "closer" parallax layer and that felt odd.
- There felt like some control input dead time after taking damage that really hindered recovering from falling onto the spikes in the spider dungeon while attempting to bounce between orbs. I understand the potential need for controller dead time during the i-frames, but might shorten it for the sake of allowing players to get out of the spikes a bit easier.
- Definitely a subjective judgement call on this one, but you might consider handling mana differently. Right now it's easy to just run out during platforming sections and some mana refill stations feel like they were dropped into odd spots to avoid having a player trap themselves. If mana were limited, but recharged itself slowly over time or mana was infinite, but you could only have two ethereal spears out at one time then you could still fulfill most of your use-cases for it right now without needing to squeeze in mana recharge stations. Just a thought.