Really awesome presentation! I was very impressed with both visuals and sound. Having a full-blown cutscene at the start was super cool too! The game lived up to the promise I saw in the preview - I will chop down that tower and make them rue the day they captured me and left me unattended in their camp!
To get into some chunkier feedback: The gameplay had plenty of positives, but overall I didn't feel too deeply engaged during play. Chopping down objects was fun to look at and visually satisfying, but I didn't feel much push or pull to engage with it from a mechanics perspective. Most obstacles didn't offer too much decision-making - chop the trees when they present themselves, jump over obstacles, and enemies were both (mostly) safe to ignore and simple to dispatch if not.
I don't think that a game's gotta be chock-full of complicated moments and decisions, but some mechanical tension (having a couple game elements that offer conflicting threats & incentives) does a lot to get me engaged.
I thought the archer in the tower near a tree was a nice moment like that - ignoring the tower meant I was in danger of getting shot while caught in my sword-swing animation. Chopping down the tower meant I could attack them, but it also meant their angle would be poor enough that I could safely run past. Or, when I was really optimizing, I could just stutter my movement slightly to bait the shot early and then run past to the chopping tree.
It was a fun little puzzle for me to play around with, and I'm glad it was in the game!
A different angle of engagement could be having a flow that's satisfying to execute, and I think there were some moments like that in the game for me:
- The spot where you run across gaps down a slope and then get caught by the start of the broken bridge was cool, it was satisfying to recognize I could just hold right and press jump and the end while looking dangerous and death-defying
- Similarly, jumping across the broken bridge over the shallow spike pit felt cool too. It felt good to time my jump with when I caught the edge of the bridge, and the way it held me at the edge meant I wasn't actually in terrible danger.
I think the fact that the character has to stop to perform the sword swing makes sense from a practical perspective (it's a simpler state to manage and you don't have to animate a running swing and a standing swing) but it does hamper that flowing feeling for me. The animation itself is really nice, but the feeling of my movement seizing up on ground and air made me feel like I wanted to avoid using it whenever possible.
The "chop trees to cross gaps" thing caused similar kinds of flow-interruptions for me. The look of it is very nice (and the implementation details behind the scene are equally cool, I bet!) but the fact that I couldn't jump forward into the trees easily before chopping, had to stop to chop, then wait for the tree to drop meant every tree represented a chunk of downtime.
Not that the downtime has to be bad - it led to the cool moment with the tower for me - but I feel like it's a bit at odds with the idea of a flowing movement game as-is.
Sorry for rambling on for so long. I definitely want to emphasize that I was very impressed with your game and thought you did a great job!
Balancing time during a game jam is a difficult thing. Deciding where to invest your time is important, and I think you did a great job of make a cohesive game with some cool features and really above-and-beyond presentation.