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Heres my notes from playthrough:

- Good flow and puzzle design in tutorial! Simple mechanics, no too much information at once but still have to stop and think now and then on early levels.
-Make rotation smoother for guards. On second glance, it seems like they just freak out and twitch around on some turns.
-"Craft" button in craft-menu is basically the "Start" button. I'd like it bigger, clearer. Took bit of time to figure out that is what to push to play. While we're at it: show-level next to it, as a smaller button, and the "Get-back-to-gameplay-from-show-level" button at the same position as "Show-level" button but maybe greyed out or darker color.
-Walking enemy different color than still standing one. "Show lvl" -button lied to me when figuring out lvl6.
-Puzzles keep being fun.
-After using 1 dagger, automatically equip 2nd. Maybe the daggers should not be changable during play at all. Make couple of daggers, then use them in the same order.
-I strongly feel like the crafting UI should be visible at the same time as the lvl. So you could look at both the sides of the puzzle simultaneously while thinking about it!
-It's not clear immediately how many daggers I have for a lvl. They could be shown as:
[SYMBOL] [SYMBOL] [SYMBOL]
in the middle of screen or somewhere where I can see them clearly. Oh and then grey out a dagger after crafting onee. Instead of the symbol and numbers. Or both.
-Again with the moving enemy! Darn! lvl 10. Maybe the path he's gonna take should also shown as some sort of line or arrows in the thinking-phase. The map with information, or just playing the background, then on the top UI or somewhere is the crafting menu as a bar. Or is it the grey rock?
-Music loop getting old. Remove music, add cool cave ambiance or make the music fade in and out some times and make it longer in general.
-I'm at lvl 16, 15 was quite a lot of visual information but the solution was funny and not too hard!
-Same for 16. Had to think and try different ideas for a while but solution was rewarding.

Hey, it was a really good time playing your puzzle prototype! I wished for more variation for the puzzles but thats more like a final version stuff tbh anyway. For a 2 week jamgame, playing around with one mechanic in clever ways is way better scoping. The puzzles were expertly crafted imo! Needs just some visual clarity here and there and polish and voilà! For a full length game, I could see the protagonist maybe getting gradually some new ninjacool-abilities, like blinking around, temporary invis, ranged kills, etc. etc.

Thank you for playing! I had so much fun making the SFX too, almost woke up my neighbors with weird shouting in the middle of the night, before I realized what hour it was and continued the next day haha..
Yeah I feel you, didn't really have time to tweak the upgrade-values and it gets bigger too little per-upgrade. I kinda fixed this issue by making the minions able to gather exp for you. Now it's pretty fun to make them run around with the flag to gather any clumps of exp. Of course can't upload the jam entry but we'll make another upload at some point and/or we'll make this into a full game eventually.

Good responsive controls. Simple yet fun idea. Throwing the potions feels intuitive, I easily hit my targets after a few practice shots.

Performance was an issue for me, the game was lagging a quite a bit. Not so bad I couldn't play it but noticably still. Maybe cutting the area into smaller pieces would help or offloading stuff further from the player.

Love to hear it! I adored Hyper Light Drifter and this gave such a similar vibe I'd love see a finished version one day!

We're also continuing our little prototype further since it turned out pretty fun IMO.  It's pretty much a vampire survivors -clone with a couple of small twists. It definitely has some shortcomings and rushed things on the jam-deadline-version but give it a try if you feel like that sounds interesting! Any and every feedback is super appreciated, specially right now since it's still just a prototype and everything can still be changed easily. Cheers!

My "first time playing" -notes:

-The font is abysmal... Well it's cool but reeeeally hard to read. It could work for the title of the game but please make a simpler one for descriptions and shit. I gave up even trying to read anything after the first couple of sentences. Deciphering any of the descriptions or tutorials is a struggle. ...or maybe I'm turning dyslexic..

-Monsters look very cool!

-Music in and out of battles sounds good, transition from one to other is smooth.

-Getting the loots and crafting them into spells is a fun loop. Even though I dont bother reading anything from the descriptions it's intuitive and simple and feels like I'm accomplishing stuff.

-Move faster, shadow-man! The slow top-speed of it is annoying because the enemies and I are moving a lot faster.

-The background moves around too much for my liking. It's making me a bit motion-sick.

-I dont get what's my HP. Is it the symbols bot-left? Guess it is but it's a bit unclear.

-It's hard to keep track of what abilities are off-cooldown because the combat is super fast-paced. I do like the fast action but I don't have time to avert my gaze from it to check which abilities are available currently. You could make the shadow auto-cast all of it's abilities every time they are off-cooldown and maybe keep the basic-attack manual or something. Atleast I spam them whenever I can anyway.
Or make the abilities spammable but usable only 1 at a time so the player has to choose between his weapons on the fly depending on situation. Or show a small cooldown indicator right on top of character/shadow when an ability is on CD (or when it's available), so I dont have to keep checking the bottom right corner.

-Made it to lvl 6 first time.

2nd playthrough:

-Theres a lot of different abilities to unlock it seems. Tons of combinations from different loots, very nice. I have 3 abilities now and they all are different from the 1st playthrough.

-Made it to 9th lvl.

It's a bit rough but cool prototype. I'd add some abilities that take into account the duality of the player character. Maybe something that swaps the positions? A powerful link that stuns or deals damage between the player and shadow, maybe only when activated? Shadow blocking bullets for player? A quick dash that makes the player run quickly to the shadows-position? Some things like that would give more meaning and depth for the duo-character. Current abilities are mostly "do dmg to something".

I found one ability like that though; the vortex or whatever that sucked nearby enemies to the shadow was very fun to use and gave rise to deeper strategies than "dodge and spam". It was my favourite ability from the bunch I found.

Very nice atmosphere, like more chill and down to earth Hyper Light Drifter. The tree swaying animations are soothing.

Combat needs some juice, stat! Some hitstops, knockbacks, hit-flashes, particle effects etc would go a really long way. As it is, it's pretty "impactless".  As combat seems to be an integral part of the gameplay, it needs to feel great! When done right, just killing one goblindude over and over in an empty room can be made so engaging you could do it thousands of times in a row and not get bored.

That said, I understand you ran out of time and maybe you would have wanted to add all the things I listed and more. As it is, it's still a pretty convincing draft of a prototype for a very promising action-rpg! 

For the next jam, I'd seriously cut down on the feature-list; "open world RPG about exploration, dungeon delving, resource gathering, collecting randomly generated loot using a prefix/suffix system and building a town for yourself." is waaaaaaaaaay ambitious list of game-mechanics for a 2 week jam project! :D
Each feature there is a lot of work in its own and making them work together nicely is hard and even more work.
Theres nothing inherently wrong in overscoping though, trying to do all that. It's good to try and fail, "fail faster" is a great advice! Pretty much everyone overscopes their first few jam (and non jam) -games. But if you start with maybe one or two of those mechanics, make those mechanics feel fucking awesome, and make a handful of levels where you maybe explore what those mechanics can do in different ways. Thats always more convincing than a a list of unfinished features. Plus if you keep the scope small, you might just finish everything early and THEN you can start adding more of the features that you had in mind. I always keep a wishlists for projects where I put all them crazy ideas I WANT to add to the game, plus a tasks-list where I put all features I absolutely NEED for the game to work as it's intended.

I also keep having to remind myself: "K.I.S.S, keep it simply, stupid!" so much that it's become a sort of a mantra for me lol. I always want to add more but oftentimes removing or simplifying features/ideas is the right answer.

Enough rambling, it's a really good first jam-game in my opinion. Visuals and audio are already in a great shape! Movement and fighting mechanics are on a good foundation too but need a bit more polish.
Me likey!

Really glad to hear it resonated with you! I've gotten so many ideas from playing the game myself afterwards and from the feedback we're getting i'm really feeling like testing more things out with the flag, and flag-adjacent mechanics, and make this into a full game.

-Very pleasing to look at! Nice color choices and everything! 

-I walked straight in to the first light I saw and just got shrinked to oblivion. that was really funny :D

-Would like to dash to diagonals and up-down as well.

-Second puzzle and I'm totally stuck.   If theres a hint to whats the combination here I don't get it.

-10 minutes later I got it!! Worth the struggle! It alll makes sense now. Breeze through the rest of the game.

Enjoyed the whole experience, even when i was just angry and frustrated because I couldn't figure the puzzle or any hints out. I think the roots that were on the walls and ground would have worked better as a hint if I remembered that there were NOT roots on walls or ceiling before. Which I didn't. So maybe if I could walk backwards when im stumped, notice no roots around that would have made me think... Anyway it was a charming prototype of potentially really interesting game. I could imagine a world with all kinds of puzzles!

My notes from playing the game:

-Art is weird, bright, colorful and charming. Love it!

-Too much frontloading of the story, start the game already! The characters kept on talking before any game had started, ended up skipping most of it. If I could skip the text animation and view the full message instead of going to the next one when I skip, I'd probably have read more.

-Interactable objects are hard to distinquish from environment, couldn't tell what is a note and what is just a rock lying on the ground.  Maybe the camera is a bit too far, the details were really small.

-Music is fun and weird, fits the artstyle nicely!

Overall the world seemed quirky and interesting, if you'd introduce it gradually to us it would be easier to jump in.

The visuals are excellent! Movement was a bit janky, maybe the hitboxes for obstacles like chairs were a bit big or something but I bumped into a lot of things. A shadow killed me by hitting the air 5 meters away from me and I got sent back to the start and it seemed like I had to go through the intro and everything again so I got frustrated and quit.
Anyway, the atmosphere was really cool! The game looks and sounds real nice but I found the gameplay a bit lacking. Maybe there was more of that good stuff later but never got there since after exploring for maybe about 15 minutes  and gathering clues and keys it basically undid all my progress.

Sound design is so juicy and on point! Kudos! Visuals are very pleasing and charming. Making the best potions you can while also trying to save ingredients for next customers is challenging enough and fun, makes you think and strategize.
The potions make a bit too much money I fee like, since I could just empty the shop almost every time. First time in shop I had fun trying to think about what I can buy so that I have all the directions covered and so on, from the 2nd time on I just bought everything.

The reversed movement of my shadow while fighting him was super cool! Havent really seen that done like that ever before, it's always in puzzle-situations, but it worked well here. Made the fight pretty unique and interesting!

Wrote down something while playing:

-Some jumps feel too tight, had to retry tens of times some jumps because jumping from a fast moving moon didn't always work and the jump timings/angles I had to make were unforgiving. With a bit easier jumps and some coyote-time and other movement-juicing mechanics, the experience would be much smoother.

-Sometimes between tries, when you fail a jump and die, you have to wait a long time before the jump presents itself again; before the moon/moons comes around for another revolution and line up.

-Didn't initially get at all what to do in the first "combine"-window, brute forced myself through by spam-clicking everything. The second one was a much clearer example and there I realized immediately what I'm supposed to do in it.

-Got stuck on the part where I had to jump on the 3 moons of one planet and then go to the next one. I made the first jumps couple of times just to get killed by walking to the sunlight thats just a tiiiiiny bit too close to the surface on the next planet, and another time afterwards while trying to get to the third and last planet of the screen. Got frustrated because each time I died I had to do the 3 hard moon jumps before getting back to where I was and each time those took atleast a few tries plus for each try there was a lot of waiting before they line up.
Would have helped if after each try, you start on a position where the jump (ie. a moon rotating to the correct position) is just a couple of seconds away and youre already in the position (or close to) where you have to start the jump.

-The idea is super cool, the custom gravity and changing from one planets gravitational field to anothers works really smoothly. The abrupt change in direction of LEFT and RIGHT input when changing gravities almost fucked me up many times but I wouldn't change that. It didn't feel wrong, just abrupt. Maybe some kind of smoothing when the change happens would help, idk.  Didn't bother me much really once I got used to it.

-The clear and simple artstyle with random colors on the planets is good, and the clarity of it helps to understand what's happening.

Wow, looks stunning! Both the characters (especially the hair) are so lively. The look-at-what-you're-pointing mechanic works really well and naturally!

First impressions: looks really good, character controls nicely.
Some things I wrote down while playing:

-Hard to know from a glance what is an enemy projectile, loot on the ground, environment art, character or something else.

-Thats propably because the enviroment, almost every object and character had the same amount of contrast and the same kind of outlines so It's hard to know what is what.

-Speaking of characters and pixel-art in general. Love it! Super cute and animations look good! The attacks though (melee and ranged) feel much too slow for me. Faster attack swings and projectiles could feel more impactful. If I were to do it and I really wanted to keep the slow feeling of the attacks, I'd make the anticipation before the attack happens really slow and then make the actual swing, with damaging frames, happen in just a few frames with a long recoil afterwards. (Just my version and thoughts on the matter.)

-Shurikens fly slow and look like loot or an enemy so I end up dodging my own throwing stars.

-Hit flash (and maybe some particles) when damaging enemies would go a long way! ATM it's hard to know if my attacks landed or had any effect.

-Crafting items was simple, streamlined and quick to do. Excellent.

With all that said... I did enjoy playing it! Had a few near death moments, had fun with the small, but ample weapon variety, the boss gave me a good challenge but made it through by the skin of my teeth in the end!

Tight! Nice and crisp controls and graphics. Feels super finished already! Depositing the shapes to the upgrade-system and then going to the computer to buy shit felt super good. The actual upgrades themselves unfortunately felt lacking. Just increasing my HP- or DMG-stat by couple of points didn't feel that rewarding.

There was also a visual bug for me; Whenever I alt-tab'd away from the game and back, the background and the walls had changed colors to bright basic colors. Like the whole floor was a flat, saturated green and walls red or something along those lines. It fixed itself though whenever I alt-tab'd away and back a second time.

All in all, completed the game, enjoyed myself. Would have liked a little more challenge, now I was never in a near-death scenario because the upgrades pumped up my HP a lot and I could keep the enemies at bay with the weapon. I say it's a good prototype. With some more variety in enemies, player upgrades and levels would be a great one!

Hahaaha i was really confused as to what was happening but having fun all the time nevertheless. I felt like I was trying to grow some plants but ending up feeding some random handsome snails and snarky rabbits and laughing my ass off :D

Then I read the tutorial/key prompts and went back. Now, with the gun, the game made a bit more sense. Have to admit, I honestly liked "feeding" them to get rid of them more than killing them since they look so sympathetic :D

I didn't like draggin every time from the icon to plant, it feels finicky. Clicking a key or the icon to select one plant and then clicking the soil would make it much smoother or something along the lines.

Overall the game had a fun, happy atmosphere and a I really enjoyed it!

Thats a really valid point. We thought about that during dev and tried to balance it a bit by giving only player power from the lvlUp -power ups but I too feel like it's not enough. I'm thinking maybe it would be better if the minions didn't perma-die but instead got knocked over and then could be saved again after a while.
Thank you for feedback!

-Can I change my shadows element? Mine always shoot fire.

-Flanking shield enemies with shadow is fun.

-Hoping for more varied arenas, always kitin enemies around in a circle gets a bit boring. The enemies with poison mist break this pattern nicely, got to evolve your strategy when theres big poison clouds suddenly blocking and obscuring half the map. Keeps it fresh.

-Lightning link between me and the shadow that I got from the upgrades is cool and gives more meaning to the "move-shadow-here" mechanic. Adding more similar, but different, mechanics that makes you think of the shadow placement would make sense to me. I mostly kept putting him in the middle of arena and then running around. Didn't ever really find a use for him to be following me. I would rather call him some 5 meters behind me if I needed help with shieldy-bois.

I like the direction your little arena survival roguelite took!

Nicely challenging puzzles. Got some Myst -nostalgia out of this!

I want to be able to move multiple things at the same time since i have to constantly drag them from screen to screen!
Now the puzzles include a lot of repeated dragging a thing to edge of screen and changing screens with the little button just to move like 5 pieces around to another portion of table. I'd like to just bundle up the stuff i need from one screen and take them all to the next one or have some other kind of smoother navigating.
I also would have wished there was some way of knowing which objects i still can duplicate or can't. (Now that I read the description maybe there was a thing with shadows and them missing but I didn't notice while playing.)

Other than that, no comlaints! The story and the puzzles tied together well and the challenge was ramping up in a nice pace.

Fun and panic inducing. Dont eat my plants you stupid cat!

Thank you for playing! After making the game and playing it some myself, I also felt like the minions should auto-aim while player is using the flag! It sounds to me you were using the flag correctly! I'm even thinking of making a shield or something for the character because I took some bullets for my minions in the same way too :D

The recall flag-without placing it sounds clever and the despawning of enemies sounds like a good idea for the bossfight. We tried to make some introduction to it, like spawn in players view with a big effect but the bossfight and the endgame in general is really rushed since time was running out.

Thank you so much for the feedback and playing! I'm sad we didn't have time to make any introduction/tutorial for the flag-mechanic. I wanted to add  some more functionality /synergies to it as well but fell short on time. Like maybe obstacles only minions can go through so we can make spaces you have to guide them to go in and they can then maybe open a door from there for you, or gather unreachable loot etc. Also, I found it very fun to guide the minions to their still trapped allies with the flag so they can do the saving. I should make it so that the minions also gather the exp lying around to have more reason to make them dance for you.

Figuring out the next bottles element is really fun. I constantly try to strategize, what to trow next at whom, and try to keep my mana at an comfortable point but not full while waiting for enemies to clump together more. Those plus the refill of mana from fallen enemies all play well together and feel like a good and well executed combination of gameplay mechanics.

I may not be the target audience. I skip literally basically every "read-this-lore-box to know about the world or this character", and most of the cutscenes in every game I play.
I tried to read most of your lore tho! (sorry, still skipped some, not sorry ;)

    ... But heres what I feel:
-suuper cute pixel art, outlines on characters make everything clear as day
-movement good, toggle to run extra good (why do i have stamina!? just let me run forever and walk when i want to.  Or make the stamina bar fill up in seconds, maybe after a short initial delay after I stop using stamina)
-those ceiling-fan-shadows are dope! I want more of that and make them BIGGERR! (And then maybe spin real slow if they are really big)
-unplayable area vs gameplay-rooms, maybe just flat-black for background instead of floor tiles

After the beginning i got left in the big main-research-area where dudes and droids kept shooting at me. I didn't have a way to fight back and I couldn't find much to do there. Felt like you ran out of time there or I missed a weapon or something before so I quit there.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot. Colors, characters, environment objects looked excellent and fitted together well. The look reminds me of Super Time Force Ultra. A fun shooter with a twist and some nice, crisp, vibrantly vivid pixel art! Check that out if you havent!

Super cool! Fast paced, engaging... some juice and fine tuning to movement and that could be really fun.

Gathering The floaty orbs around you and turning them into power felt awesome and fitted to the theme well, I just wished the orbs would be less noticable. In the heat of battle I kept trying to dodge them, I got distracted by them, or they obscured something, an enemy or their bullet. Going to the vendor and rolling the dice(?) on the upgrades was such a rush after intense battles, it was maybe a bit weird that the enemies then kept spawning after the timer was out.

First time in 2nd map, I had the vendor and The 2nd Map Surprise right there next to me. That got me good! In the panic running away from it I got swarmed by more of them and died soon after. I don't know if exactly that scenario was intentional but it was really funny, and emotional, and made me that much more determined to come back and get my revenge!

I would like to have a big custom cursor. Please. Something super-clear, mega-constrasted, maybe-crosshair-shaped(or even better, maybe alchemical symbol-shaped). Maybe my eyes are just bad but I was really struggling to see where I'm aiming while dodging everything, because the combat was fast with a lot happening around me. Our entry struggled from the same problem too.

Overall, seven kings out of kong. Honestly enjoyed.

Very nice! Feels super finished. I couldn't distinquish from wall to ground to pitfalls and constantly bumped into something and fell down pits, that felt pretty frustrating. Maybe some more contrast there? Also because the movement and gameplay is so fast paced (which was fun) , it would help a lot if the camera moved towards where the player is going. Now if I run up or down I'm super anxious because i see only few meters in front of me.
The rock-paper-shotgun against the enemies and their bullets was rewarding. It made it feel like every mechanic had a reason/use. Same for dash going over pits and sword-dash not.

Very nice! I love how mobile you get when youre hot, the long dash is extra nice. I like how you then you have to keep in mind to touch a shadow briefly now and then and it becomes a fun micromanaging minigame while slashing enemies.

Thank you for the kind words! Yeah some things were left a bit unclear, the red bar is a boss's HP. There spawns one when you've survived for 10minutes and you win by beating him. I wanted to give players more indicatation when and where he spawns but ran a bit out of time! Thanks for playing!

Super cool ideas and neat execution! Cool sandbox-y environment. The answers to the puzzles were not set in stone!  ;)

Cool idea! The difficulty picked up pretty fast, camera was annoyingly jerky. I made it past the room where I had to run with the fireballs after 20 tries but got stuck after. Enjoyed the atmosphere and the cutscenes a lot!

Really fun! Good visuals and the scroll spell jump idea was fun to play with. I struggled a lot in the spike lvl, a bit too punishing? Or me bad. Movement could use a lil polish but it was pretty good still! The scroll cooldown-indications werent super clear, I constantly tried to mega-double-jump when mega-jump was still on cooldown, BUT the mega-double-jump-scroll still showed itself as _usable_. 

Good job overall!

COool! Really funky idea and smooth execution. Getting the hang on spinning the lights was pretty hard for me

I loved the Galaxy size -option in the menu being hidden in the darkness. Went from main menu to play and then found it there, gave me a big smile!

Sweet baby Gsus thats some banging dubstep! :D

Fun idea and moving the items around felt mostly good. The mouse aiming was bit hard to control, I constantly accidentally turned around when I was throwing stuff.

Hey, nice gameplay -feel and the inverted-controls felt challenging and nice!

The gameplay is a bit too messy and hectic tho. Also I feel like the intro movie didn't add much to the game. Maybe the kitchen would have benefited from some obstacles that you'd need to manouver around, asymmetrically placed in the kitchens different sides perhaps?

Music and sounds... sound cool! The pixel art and the look of the game were really tight, cool retro aesthetics! Good job overall!

Hey, nice gameplay -feel and the inverted-controls felt challenging and nice!
The gameplay is a bit too messy and hectic tho. Also I feel like the intro movie didn't add much to the game. Maybe the kitchen would have benefited from some obstacles that you'd need to manouver around, asymmetrically placed in the kitchens different sides perhaps?
Music and sounds... sound cool! The pixel art and the look of the game were really tight, cool retro aesthetics! Good job overall!

Thank you for the kind words! It warms my heart hearing many people appreciating our quirky little game <3<3
The game wasn't definitely polished up to my standards, some annoying bugs / shortcomings had to be left in.

I feel you on all the the feedback. Hadn't noticed that the camera sense resets, imma write that down. The mode-changing doesn't feel right agreed, I only ended up adding one honey-melon that requires you to use the ' bigjump -> switch for speed ' because it's jank at best. Some other benefits/drawbacks for each mode could work better, at least some tweeks.
Ze melons do nothing! Some of them also respawn when I told them not to! At least they are fun to collect, schluuurp shlurp!

We were talking, since many people has said they liked the game and we had to rush it in the end, that we want to revisit the project at some point and polish the game after the judging. Adding in the stuff we wanted to, take out the jankiness and rest of the bugs and maybe add in new content. So look forward to the last bonus-stage being a dance/pose-off-battle against the boss!  ;D

Juicy

As others said, I too liked the usage of sprites in 3D. Especially the drivers looked super fun sitting in the 3D-modeled car when you get the full turnaround in the start. The diff drivingmodes felt meaningful and it was fun trying to find a balance between in using the modes and when to slide and boost or not.
Only one small issue: I coudn't turn left while drifting. It worked for WASD but it was hard to then use Q and E then so I drove with the arrow keys. Might be just my keyboard is bad. I'm sure its better with a controller though, didn't have one rn.