Notes from gameplay:
- Nice music, but very short and no loop?
- Cute pixel art
- LOTS of background infodump text in a font that's not easy on the eyes
- Intro text switches between present and past tense at random.
- Intro animation with screen shake is effective
- Score is different font from rest of the game
- Info page feels kinda messy, could use with nicer layout and maybe outlines around blocks of text to visually separate it
- "Heal yourself quickly" - how do I do that? Is that the same as the ritual results?
- Gameplay is very swarmy.
- Character doesn't always turn in most recently walked direction, so it's hard to see where I'm aiming
- Casting ritual makes character face the player, even if she's still aiming in a different direction for projectile
- Game over screen is beautiful pixel art. Music here is nice
- Definitely some balance needed, after you kill enough enemies you can just spam space/control over and over without any effort needed
- After around 150k points, the countess' animation breaks and she doesn't show animation for movement/ritual, just becomes a static sprite
- What does the cross do?
- Are there any more levels?
Overall, I think this is a solid prototype for future development. The art design is strong and consistent and there's an intriguing story core here which could be lengthened into an overall dark narrative about revenge. The mechanics need balancing but there's a fun core loop of kill/revive which adds some complexity. There's a lot of decent stuff here to expand on for future development!