I found all 27 samples, and the coziness of this game was a nice break from playing horror games (which there seem to be three of in this jam).
Nineties: The game looks like it could probably run on a 32-bit console.
Fun: Pretty. I’m not sure if I’d have liked playing this game for several hours if there were a lot more samples, but 50ish samples would probably be fine. I guess more items could also help make it worth collecting more. And yeah, the things you mention having planned might help too.
Sound: The music seems a bit mysterious but relaxing, and goes well with the game, which is about exploring and doesn’t seem to be about danger. And the sound effects also made it easy to know whether the samples did or didn’t get collected (though sometimes it would collect ground samples when I tried to collect a sprite that was on the ground, I guess I have to be fairly close to the sprite but perhaps it would have felt better if it looked at the distance to the tile under the sprite instead of the distance to the sprite, or whichever of those two were lowest).
Graphics: pretty good, and you don’t really notice the things that might not be as intended (well, I did notice a dotted line between two tiles, which I think was some weird rounding error or something, but it wasn’t very noticeable, and I’ve seen more obvious rendering errors in old 3D games).
UI: There’s plenty of options. Even keybindings, which I used to remap movement to the arrow keys. I also like that I can choose whether I do or don’t want to run the game in fullscreen.
But I initially misunderstood the codex UI, so where it said X/27 I thought it meant I had to collect 27 samples of each type. So that confused me for a little while. Perhaps having the word “sample” before the X/27 would hint that I don’t need to find several samples of each type (other than to be able to get the items).
Marketing: You have a nice collection of screenshots and I like the logo too. And the logline (“Cozy retro 3D collection adventure”) seems descriptive enough, although the word “adventure” made me expect some story.
As for the game page, the green text feels a bit dark on the black background, but other than that it seems like it tells me what I want to know. It doesn’t tell me the controls but the game itself can show them and even remap them, so I don’t really need to look for those on the page.