This feels like a cute 3D platformer, and a hard one at that. And just like console games from the nineties, it manages to look good while sticking to the hardware limitations (or look like it does, anyway). I didn’t beat it, as I never got past that spinning obstacle.
Graphics: The art feels authentic for the era, although I’d have preferred if the MC had a face with eyes and a mouth. Either as a texture or by changing the colours of the geometry. Or maybe even have flat eyes in front of the place where they’d be, sorta like glasses. And I’m not really a big fan of the red cap: that feels a bit too Marioey.
And I love that water effect. Vertex lighting feels really nineties. But if I may suggest an improvement, I think it might look even better if the Y coordinates of each vertex were used a bit more directly. If a vertex is further down than the average of its neighbours, darken it a bit (if you use directional lighting, have the “height darkening” affect the ambient light). Unfortunately, getting the heights of the neighbouring vertices can be tricky in modern game engines, so you might want to just use some arbitrary height instead (if the entire water mesh moves up and down, have an arbitrary height plus the position of the whole mesh). I’d also say the shadows on the water are a bit too perfect. The water is made of big polygons, so I’d just manually set some of their vertices to always be treated as in shadow, which would make nice soft shadows and would work on a 32-bit console.
I think if I had to change something about the visuals, I’d probably make it so that the checkpoints change their appearance when the player activates them.
Sound: The music sounds fun, and fits the era. I do feel like I ended up getting a bit tired constantly hearing it while I was typing this feedback though. And the sound effects too add to the fun.
Fun: The platforming was fun, but I found it a bit hard to control the camera. In some places it kept trying to reposition itself, either to place itself behind the MC or to avoid obstacles. Maybe you could move the camera higher up so that it doesn’t have as many things to collide with.
Also, I noticed the wooden slope doesn’t seem to have colission. So if I fall down, it looks like I’m intended to use that slope to get back up, but I just fall through it.
I also think I saw some water go above one of the platforms once. Or maybe I was just seeing things. It’s one of those “I think it happened once” things, that are really hard to know whether to mention in feedback.
And yeah, I noticed I could climb a wall. That was fun, so maybe don’t fix that one, okay?
90’s: The gameplay, audio and graphics definitely fit the era. And as I said above, I loved that water effect.
I guess in the nineties a game like this would have had collectables. And maybe this one had some too and I just never reached them.
Lifes definitely feel nineties. But I think games from the nineties also scattered some through the levels as power-ups.
What I liked most: the water effect and the music.
What I’d suggest changing: I’d probably fix the collision on the wooden slope.