Hello!
Thank you for playing the game and giving feedback! We're also really proud of the game's presentation and final looks!
I'll be honest here; the game was originally supposed to be put on TriJam where the theme was "Remove limits", but because we realized we'd need a lot more time to finish the game, we decided it'd be best to join MiniJam instead. As a consequence, we had to roll with the game we already had and incorporate only what was possible to during the 1 ½ days we had left, leading to the gameplay feeling kinda not suitable for the limitation.
Had we designed and developed the game for this jam from the beginning, we would've probably had time to integrate stuff like hieroglyphs on each room that show which door would be the most suitable to open next. Or perhaps even a dialogue system, with the sentences decrypting as the player got further in The Dungeon, leading to a more interesting playthrough overall.
You're right about the balance of the game; it is somewhat all over the place. We only had 2 people testing the game, and it was past midnight when we were fine tuning the values. Both of us like bullet hell style games as well, so not much variety there.
The features you suggested; blocking enemy attacks and dashing, were actually on my todo list, but because the clock was ticking I had to ditch them and focus on getting the game's balance at least somewhat right.
Thought this would've only been a short reply, so apologies if this text kinda resembles a postmortem 😅.