I feel the melee system could be made more fun if the player has just a bit more range than the enemies, but once I got the sword, that was mostly solved.
When I first got to the poison enemy, it was hard to tell where it was because it kept backing into the trees. For situations like this, consider dimming the foregrounds that are directly in front of the player and affected enemy, with almost no exceptions even for ambushes.
I think you should have the "Switch between items" sign near where you can swap them out in the first place.
I appreciated the stab system once I learned it. The game is surprisingly complex.
I think you should work on smoothing out the wall hitboxes to not just being an even 32x32
Consider speeding up the player's speed OR zoom in your camera a bit so it seems like everything is going "faster" because as it is it "feels" slow.
Playing with a KB/M setup it was awkward to even want to use the items besides the healing juice because they don't give enough benefit to justify me remembering to use them. If poison was worse or the stamina potion recovered much more it could be worth it.
It was amusing to see all the enemies die to drowning, but I'm not sure that was intended?
The more systems that were added onto the game the more fun it was and I think that you have just the right number of active combat systems to not be too complex. It surprised me that I finished it because it was hard at some points but I did get to where the sign said end of demo. I explored a bit more (made it to the smithy place before giving up). Overall, good demo. I think it has great potential once polished up a bit.
