Amazingly well presented, great user interface. It oozed potential with the backpack, item descriptions, stats modifiers and character traits and abilities. The "What have you learned", etc. journal/quests page was a great touch. This really felt like a classic RPG of old. Great job. Font was a great choice as well BTW!
As you've probably noticed, we're not huge fans of the retro 8 bit style graphics ourselves but it was all self-consistent. The instant movement and lack of free look made it feel a bit clunky and disorienting when moving around. The textures for walls were almost identical in many places, like the dark cave in the forest, so sometimes I wasn't even sure if I'd moved forwards or not.
Verticality was a nice touch and worked pretty well in the library.
We spotted some typos in the narrative text. On the "New Books Table" the "Well" at the end should probably be "Will". The "Cursed Book" "draw" should probably be "drawn". It's OK. Dan (our artist) can't spell either.
Combat was nicely done. Turn based like the original rogue type combat mechanic. You move and then they move at the same time. Don't move and nothing happens. It's more tactical, which can be good and less sweaty. You avoided the two step by locking into combat when an enemy was next to you. Multiple enemies could attack at once as well and you saw an arrow indicating when they were there but offscreen. The special abilities like Frenzy and Defend which showed an active icon and the number of turns remaining for that effect was excellent. We weren't sure what the scale of health was for any of the enemies so when we did 5 damage, we couldn't understand what that meant. The enemy health light did change color but it was a very coarse way of describing enemy health. It didn't make for meaningful combat decisions.
Lots of really nice narrative touches were in there like walking up to the walls with number lines etches into them and it mentioning counting the days. This enhanced the theme of solitude. Having a conversation with someone and not killing them and them telling you about a key was something rarely done in the dungeon crawler jam and we did like that. Intro was nice, we were worried it was going to be too wordy but actually you hit the sweet spot on that.
We played for 47 minutes but couldn't get out of the forest so we quit the game. At one point a Hint came up that suggested we might have hit a bug as it said we could interact with the books of the walls, but all we saw were trees.
Sound was good with nice UI and combat sound effects.
Very small point, and we're only mentioning it because everything was so polished and well done. The light direction on your buttons seemed off on the start menu. The title "Library of Endless Souls" has the light from the top left, but the buttons/panel edges suggest it's coming from the top right. Also, when your backpack needed a scrollbar, the mouse scroll wheel didn't seem to be calibrated properly so you couldn't move more than a few pixels at a time. Thankfully you could drag to scroll. Again, small point but you might want to fix it in your toolkit.
Overall that is one of the best entries we've seen in a game jam. It felt very complete and so much thought had gone into everything, from the UI to the narrative and then the combat system. Great job. We're inspired by your entry to try to do more things like yours in our next game.