There’s a lot of game here, which is cool. My laptop was chugging the whole time - admittedly it lacks a dedicated GPU, but with 16gb of ram and an i7-1165G7 it isn’t ancient and does not normally struggle with 2d games.
Personally I felt the jump mechanics and acceleration/deceleration were too floaty for my tastes, especially in the flying sections. There’s a lot of stuff that’s missing feedback to tell the player what’s going on - the enemies and boss in the full metal cosmos providing no feedback whether or not you’re hitting or damaging him, the final boss just randomly teleporting you to other places without warning, etc.., having to interact with the pirate captain after talking to him to advance the story (which I suspect is what other people got stuck on?).
I spent an annoyingly long time on the pirate boss, because I assumed I actually had to do something in that fight, rather than just dodge. Wish that could have been telegraphed clearer.
For pixel art, inconsistent pixel size is a pet peeve of mine, that I can accept is a matter of taste though. I did find the super detailed (relatively) rocks at the beach to be a major clash though. I also wasn’t sure what was up with the player’s shadow, I think going for a like pixel-art paper cutout look could be cool if that was the goal, but that was the only element with such a shadow, making it stand out strangely. A lot of it was very charming, especially the skeleton with that super cool hat.
There’s an impressive quantity of loops, music wise, but most of them became very repetitive very fast, and I think could have benefited greatly by adding contrasting b sections at the very least, maybe extending the “a” sections to 16 bars instead of the very short 8 they often were. The chord after beating the boss wasn’t even long enough to play for the entirety of that few second long cutscene, which surprised me, surely that couldn’t have taken more than like a minute to fix? I wish I could’ve understood the lyrics better at the end, but I appreciated the song!
For my personal tastes this could’ve been absolutely amazing if you had cut a couple worlds and really focused on polishing up what you had left instead. Still, it’s a functional platformer with a lot of content, multiple play-modes, and it actually works without getting too buggy (at least from my experience), and that’s impressive under the best of circumstances, much less in the time period of a game jam. So definitely an accomplishment to be proud of! And you now have great bones to polish up into something really extraordinary if you wanted :)