This is honestly a really fun and nice game! I love the idea of powering up and getting more powerful as you kill enemies. The fact at you used WORDS as representations on which bar is which and the highlighted letters as charges is honestly genius. The music and sound design is also really good! And I was shocked at the fact you managed to add bosses and a starting cutscene to this game! The usage of the 1bit style here is insane as well! I love the static noise looking backgrounds and objects, you very much achieved a very unique 1bit style here and its quite impressive.
I only have 2 complaints, in all honesty.
First is that the margin for error is incredibly tight. Losing EVERYTHING when you lose a life makes it hard to recover afterwards. Theres no way to regain health, and health doesnt regen after stages, so you basically have to no hit the entire game if you wanna reach the end. I got up to stage 2 before I decided to move on because i kept losing lives and then being unable to recover. decreasing power instead of resetting it wouldve been nice, and adding the ability to gain lives back would have been nice too.
Second is very minor but I dont think the tutorial does a very good job of explaining everything. The way POWER works is completely unmentioned in the tutorial and I was super confused on what it meant when playing for the first time, though I did quickly figure it out after noticing my firerate speeding up. Maybe upgrades could have had an explanation too? But I think upgrades are simple and easily obvious enough to figure out what they do immediately upon collecting them.
Again, this is an insane amount of quality for a jam game, would totally play this in my free time if it recieved some rebalancing and was made a little less frustrating.