This is definitelly one of the prettiest looking games on the jam, there's no doubt on that. Amazing pixel art and really gorgeous animations, all of them have a lot of charm and personality, and I really appreciate all the little details like the diferent spins for each jump and the interactions with ledges, makes the little mage dude look much more alive. I really like all the aesthetics in general tbh, the chill music, and the little dialogues as well.
Gameplay is kind of a mistery tho. In theory, it haves everything I could ever ask on a good platformer, fluid controls, lots of speed, cool effects, but for some reason, I didn't quite click with it in all sincerity. I don't really know why, but if I were to guess I would say that this is probably fault of the level design. I really didn't feel like the world really made sense or that it was actually made with the char's moveset in mind, it's kinda just a lot of caves with a few platforms and crabs thrown around. There was no real actual challenge anywhere, nothing that actually taught or tested any of my skills. All of the crabs are also just pushovers, they really feel more like just a nuisance than anything. Combat itself is not really fun tbh, more because the enemy design and movement tech don't get along well. Movement tech wants you to go fast, jumpy and pirouette-ly, while the enemies are small fast moving targets with contact damage, plus more often than not they're just spammed on random corridors with no real rhyme or reason, and sometimes it's too narrow to even try stomping on them. There are also a huge lot of blind jumps, you can't really see much of the screen when you're not dashing, so I died quite a few times by landing onto the spike ball dudes before I could see them. (Granted, I did forget about the slow fall until I was at the end of the game, but still, a mechanic that serves as a bandage doesn't fix the issue)
Also, I'm afraid you got kind of the wrong idea of what a metroidvania should be. Idk how active you were on the server, but if you stay there for long enought you'll notice that most of the active community members agree that your upgrades to explore the map should not be things that can be narrowed down to "keys to a door", wich this game actually did quite literally, and a lot so x)
The only real metroidvania "key" we have here is the dash, but even then it's only ever needed to grab a single other "door key", and never more.
Anyway gameplay vid!!
(Sorry if it's laggy, I actually almost didn't manage to run the game as well. Downloadable didn't work, and it didn't open on my usual browser either. I eventually managed to make it work on chrome, but it almost refused there as well.)
Also, I just assumed the game ended after I got the kill aura, I had no clue where I would have to go after that.