An exceptionally promising metroidvania.
Total play time around 1hr10m, no bugs to report.
Massive skill issue detected: I may not be the target difficulty for this? I wouldn't say it was hard but I did have issues with just this small demo. I would count it mostly on me, but I didn't really expect to die much for just a basic demo. I died 3 times: Once when I was starting out and just kept running into more and more enemies without really having a good grasp on how to deal with them; two times on the final boss (more on that later). Losing progress each time because I didn't get to a save point sucks. It's a design that I have to respect. The only thing I could think of is adding more but then it feels goofy. I would chalk it up to skill issue.
Movement feels good for the most part. There are some things like wall kicks that felt kind of awkward. I think the go-to these days is to have your character slide down a wall if you want to incorporate wall jumping, giving the player more forgiveness.
One thing I will say is this game will benefit greatly from sound effects. I think all my complaints can just be summed up as "this doesn't have sound yet so it felt weird." I feel that sound is pretty integral in a game like this, especially if you want to have stuff off screen.
Level design felt good but can be improved. There were some platforms that might have been at a weird angle but most of it was ok. Once you get the hang of movement the level design makes more sense. I will say overall, the game felt hard to me in the first 5/10 minutes and I would say tweaking enemy spawns and room layouts accordingly would probably help if that was the issue, but again, I may not be the target difficulty here. Another thing is that I don't know if save rooms have visual tells or not, but I ended up going to the final boss instead of the save area the first time and had to redo ~15m of gameplay from a death. If I were to see a long, narrow hall or some foreboding thing, I might have been more hesitant to turn back and explore somewhere else for a save point.
Enemies: I don't like the flying guys who rapidly zoom to you when you hit them, feels weird. Maybe they're too fast? The charge monsters felt brutal at the beginning when I was first learning it but I got better and also grenades are badass against those guys.
Bosses: Something that applies to both of them is that they have a bit too much health IMO. The speeding up mechanic is ok, but having some kind of visual to indicate the next "stage" would be nice, like sparks flying off the robot drone or the tentacle metroid thing changing color. The Frenzy mechanic also seems to kick in 1/3rds? Which seems way off scale. Maybe second phase at 50% and the last phase 80% or something, but trying to fight a boss in it's last frenzy phase should be a brief experience, but not overwhelming. A small shot of adrenaline is all you need to make something memorable and not frustrating.
The first boss was fine, but again, I was surprised at how much health this dude had. Seemed like an insane amount of time for just a basic beginner boss. A very fair boss otherwise.
Second boss: Going back to the whole sound thing is that this dude would have been a lot better with them. A sound for when it's going to spawn little guys(DPS phase) A sound for when it's going to use it's divebomb, etc. Near the end it just felt kind of like I was playing a fighting game and all I could do is mash because I could never read my opponent. There were visual tells, but the thing is: the speed-up or frenzy mechanic or w/e it's called in combination with the no-sounds means later phases the boss is flying across the screen, out of sight, and then getting ready to do another thing that I can't hear or react to. I was basically thinking of Eye of Cthulu from Terraria when fighting this thing and I realized how much I rely on sound cues for that boss. Mechanics aside: Very fun fight and nice design.
Overall very promising. It feels like a complete demo that i'd play on a GBA display in a K-mart back in 2001. I really like the art direction and aesthetic and I hope to see more from you soon.
