Very impressive implementation. The variety of rooms and the fact that they fit together so neatly is really cool, the nightmare that must have been QAing for softlocks hurts my head (and while I personally never ran into a softlock, I do appreciate that the main menu has an option to reset). I think it's a cool blend of theme and mechanics, the time limit wouldn't make a lot of sense on a static map that I can just memorize and rush through, but paired with the procedural map it makes for a really cool concept, so good job there. Using deaths to reduce your timer was a nice touch as well.
Some areas where I struggled:
- The jump is easy to control which is nice, but not having variable jump height (that I could tell) can be finicky when trying to dodge some of the more complex spinning blade arrangements or navigate through some tight passages with vertically moving enemies.
- Similarly for the diamonds, they're fun to use, but they could also propel you into saw blades pretty easily (looking at both of these comments, it might also be that there are just some saw blade configurations that don't feel particularly good). There was one time that I diamond jumped into a new room and the momentum carried me straight into a saw blade on the next screen.
- Small nit pick, but I kinda wish there were health drops or something. I guess the HP Upgrades kind of counted in this regard, but things got kind of nerve-wracking the deeper into a dungeon you got without any real means of refilling health. And if you'd already collected HP upgrades in that part of the dungeon and are rerunning through it, there's no real way to heal up. I think it's an interesting challenge to balance, because on the one hand that added pressure paired with the time limit (which was very forgiving) forces you to "get good", but it could still be overly stressful (a quick thought, maybe each time you respawn there are "shadow copies" of HP upgrades you've already collected. they just refill one health on touch. this way there's still that tension of limited health refills, but if you remember where some of the HP Upgrades were on a given map, you can make short and potentially risky detours to try to heal yourself a bit).
... that ended up being a lot of text, sorry. But yeah, I played through the game three times and collected the totem twice (although the third time I kept getting lost and so died on purpose to see what would happen). The game felt good to play, was mostly intuitive with good text prompts and explanations, the sound effect on destroying blocks was particularly satisfying. And again, the implementation is top-notch, I still can't believe you built a procedural map generator that can generate looping Metroidvania maps. Great job!