Wow, this was unexpectedly an amazing game. Would buy/10
The combat and level design are both really really good. So many clever twists everywhere. You've nailed the Zelda 1 system of tiles and no-diagonals dynamics that the later games discarded, which nobody but me seems to ever care about. Lots of original enemies too, and every screen is unique. You've added enough to it that the game does not play like a ripoff, even though it looks like it.
The forest area is incredible. Attacking the trees before they activate feels great. The bloodoaks are absurdly threatening but can easily be played directionally on open spaces, or by getting them stuck in closed ones, which fits the forest theme. The recipe screen there is clever, as is the cave entrance. You have captured the essence of how Zelda 1 communicates secrets without their questionable and inconsistent design language. I felt like I was playing The Witness there for a second. I love that one screen with a tree grid where you have a bloodoak, but you can bait and then run past it (unlike the previous one) or even awaken and kill it at range before it has a path to get to you.
Good job getting rid of pointless ammo resources, too. Those must be tempting as a money sink, but even without it, I never felt I had too much money at all. All items for sale are useful and feel like they are worth the price. The pickaxe is a great replacement for the bomb.
I don't like how close the graphics are to the Zelda 1 artstyle at all. I know the retro spritework itself might be due to artistic limitations, but copying the themes for zones themselves and many tile models 1:1 is soulless. That being said, it's at least nice that they are cohesive and reasonably accurate to the NES itself instead of going for a faux-retro frankenstein style.
The music is mediocre, but so is the original Zelda's. This is the sort of game I'd normally play with sound off, so this is a nonfactor.
The game does a great job of teaching the player without being overbearing about it. The trip for the sword is nice. It's there as a backup for players who don't realize it straight away. Please don't put the NPC in the same room, or you might as well just have it give you the sword.
I like how the tree at the start teaches you about the other ones in that direction the first time you see it, but also serves as a passive target dummy as you come to craft different swords.
The staff book was cool and made complete sense as a reveal within the game's mechanics. It visibly clearly looks like would make more sense to have the jewel at the bottom, though. And the weapon itself is useless. Maybe there could be a secret stronger variant with the gem at the bottom? That could double as a funny implication that the sorcerer got it wrong.
It's too easy to get stunlocked by repeated hits when you're not even up against a wall. Judging by that one loading tip, you seem to know that knockback should be used strategically. I don't think there's a single situation where I found that to be viable. It's an unexplored design space for the future. Maybe increase the knockback distance and speed for various enemy types. Not the trees, though. It's flavorful for that trapping that arises organically through the mechanics to be their defining feature.
Death tips take too long. If that's supposed to hide loading, then give the player a button to read through multiple tips in one go. Reloading every death adds up in a game where you die a lot. This game is lightweight enough that it shouldn't take that long to load. If anything, you should afford to respawn objects without reloading a scene at all, since the world barely has any state data in it.
Splitting vertical and horizontal behavior in enemy types is very clever. It makes me think it could be interesting to experiment with further direction limitations.
Some of the sword tier balancing seems off, like how you get tin and bone in the same area but the bone sword is strictly better. But nice job balancing ranged attacks vs melee with different damage. And at some point I thought using nothing but ranged with full heals was flat-out better. Then I got the ghost sword, and that made me switch back to full melee all the time. By the time I was done, I would pick between the two approaches depending on the enemy. So that dynamic between the two types seems balanced. The ghost room is one of the best memorable ones in the game and that sword is a nice reward for it. Since some of these swords have unique mechanics, it would be nice if there were some way to get them up to speed with higher-powered swords eventually. Weapon upgrades would work as long as it's designed as a catch-up, instead of forcing you to stick with a single weapon throughout the game (like in Dark Souls).
I like how you implemented attacking speed as swords unfolding. It adds more depth than a windup animation.
I like how the healing is instantaneous instead of embracing the estus flask meme. At least with how the game is right now, you don't have a lot of health, so pressing the button on time is still a challenge and you have to worry about panic-overhealing.
I don't like the UI overall. Zelda 1's UI was not good.
I like how I can peek into a room before being trapped. Bonus points that you can't cheese them with ranged attacks.
Skrek enemies are not in a swamp area. I think this might be a glitch.
I want to be able to inspect item names on the forge and item screens. The icons are too simple to be self-explanatory. Also on the topic of items, the coin icon looks more like a log than a coin, which got me confused on the two at the start.
Hitbox size sometimes feels inconsistent across enemies, mostly with questionable accounting of the 3-dimensional space behind characters.
I guess that goes with the UI, but weapon selection is needlessly cumbersome. If you want weapons to have multiple uses in the future, that should be redone entirely IMO. The Zelda model for item selection is just bad. We have more buttons and computer memory to work with now. But, if you just want the player to swap between a melee and ranged sword, it should be a hold/release selection rather than a switch trigger, so that you don't have to look anywhere to avoid the risk of mixing them up. However, I myself already ran against the limitations of that, as I would often want the bonesword for ranged at full health and another one for when I'm hurt.
The seemingly useless coin debris on enemy death is distracting for a game with a simplistic visual style. Maybe get them to go into the player and quickly disappear.
Healing points being single-use is a great idea. It makes resource acquisition less stale. I don't like the death punishment mechanic of losing money, though. Shops are so sparse (I think there's only one so far) that you'll just end up not caring about money at all ever, and then mindlessly grinding to get items when you find one. Overall, I don't see what behavior you're trying to incentivize with that design decision, as it discourages exploration away from shops until you've toppled them. Letting the player cache money at save points and then losing a much higher % on death feels like a better solution. That would also help by letting players freely suicide in dungeons to start the gauntlet over, as that's one situation where the current one-use checkpoint is detrimental.
The optimal strategy in dungeons is to go in with full health and then use the start checkpoint midway through to recharge. This might be an oversight, where you meant to reset the dungeon such that it always starts on the save point.
It feels wrong that you get penalized for dying in situations where you could not have won or even deduced that a victory was impossible, by which I mean going into the seasnek ambush without access to a ranged attack. I think that fight would be better if there were a secondary (if hard enough to be implausible for a first-time player) way to hit it as well. If that's already in then I got filtered, sorry.
There should be some sort of signaling that indicates whether an enemy respawns or not.
Options are not saved when reopening the game
The difficulty is fine, honestly. You have so many zeldalikes out there with amazing art and mediocre gameplay that I feel if you're going to make one with art like this, the people who are going to play it are the ones who want tighter gameplay in the first place, and you clearly know how to deliver on that. The difficulty is what makes exploration viable as a playstyle. If you ever want to make it more accessible, it would be prudent to try first just being more direct in clarifying to the player that you're supposed to explore around, as most players have been conditioned to try to play these sorts of games the wrong way.
This is all I've found to do so far. If there's more please do give a hint or two, as I seem to have hit the dev roadblock on every front.
