First of all, the music? ABSOLUTELY BANGING. Amazing tunes.
The graphics were also pretty nice. The tilesets were great, and the stuff like the shots looked and sounded satisfying. I do have a pit of a peeve about mismatched pixel resolutions in the UI and game, as well as rotating pixels, but that's more of a personal preference and I think the UI DOES look good, the character portraits are very nice.
On the school of fish boss, it felt a bit unfair or at least unpleasant because I didn't realize I could swim. It might be a good idea to force the player to learn that they can infiniump in water before facing that boss. I did beat the boss entirely on the ground somehow, I was just covered in fish the entire time.
In general the controls aren't clear, I almost got stuck in the first dark patch after the, took the last ditch effort of hitting random buttons to find the flashlight. Not positive about any of the buttons. I THINK one of them is an invisibility mode, and the V key looks down
Alright I read the itch page lol. Still, I think it's good practice to try to teach them to the player in game, or at least provide a control list there. Even just putting the letters the keys correspond to next to the icons so you think to try them, and then displaying "flashlight activated" or something, the same way you show "Insufficient EP" on the screen (which is very helpful thank you). Many options. Not too big a deal though!
I will say, I think making the flashlight cost EP is very interesting. I tried to implement darkness and a powerup to address it in my game as well but I don't think it was as successful as this is, the idea of balancing resources in that way is very appealing. Although I think for the kind of game this is, the EP system in general turns out mostly unnecessary... it isn't fun to have to stop to wait to continue double jumping, and there's not really anything you need to balance your resources against since enemies and timed obstacles are scarce, so you just end up waiting around to recharge between platforms a lot. Even in areas that are dark, the enemies are lit and not chasing you down, so you can just stand in place with no risk of running into spikes or anything.
I don't think it's a bad idea by any means though, and I think the place it DOES work best is in the boss fights where you're constantly juggling survival with firing off enough shots. Although in some cases it feels like the EP is too slow... steel horn felt oppressively hard because I had to waste all my EP double jumping with no breaks inbetween, so I couldn't get my ammunition up. That's a small tweak though. And I did manage to beat him in the end anyways!
I think the smallest change you could add to the EP system if you don't want to change it too much would be to add a move to recharge quickly, at the cost of being vulnerable and stuck in place. Something like hold a key down for a second and EP recharge speeds up or completes. The player would be using it constantly, but it would make the exploration segments have less sitting around time.
Not sure what the cartridges are. Are they just generic collectables or are they powerups? I need an "X Get" indicator so I know what I actually picked up... Looking at the unlockables, I'm not even sure when I unlocked any of these.
Small note, the platform leaving rhino is annoying... you need to leave your flashlight on the whole time to see it, which burns EP, and then when it DOES show up you're either out of EP to double jump or it's just way too fast to land on. Not a huge deal, tho
Last last note, a map would be suuuper helpful, I explored a bunch but I'm not sure how far I made it or what I'm missing. Knowing where I've been and what forks I didn't take would be massively helpful, since all I've seen is dark rooms and leaves.
I am so sorry for this huge wall of text lol. Most of it boils down to "I think the EP system could be iterated on, because it's cool". I really liked the game though, I think it has a lot of interesting ideas and is well done in its presentation!