10/10

overall opinion: yes

I love this game. I honestly wish you could turn it into a full long game, because it's really cool to play!

I love this, fantastic game!!

Love the flowing cape! Having your direction controlled relative to the enemy you are slashing is super neat!

(For anyone reading, this contains spoilerish stuff, so play the game first and then, if you are insane enough, read)

Alright so I have not even started the game and I know this is going to be one large ass wall of text. I'll be writing as I play, so it will probably be a bit unstructured and chaotic but you can probably understand my brainfuzz by now.

First off, I downloaded löve2d today to give it a peek and see if It would be a good tool to use, and hell yea. I totally understand why you like it now, and I've used it for an hour max. It really gets out of your way and just let's you go full ham and create. And after trying godot and constantly getting stuck with how to properly follow the structure that they have set up and so on. Löve just goes BRRRR instead and let's you do whatever you want to. So I'll be sticking with it a while longer for sure, especially if I manage to make typescript with with it (I'm not a huge fan of lua, then I'm set for life. There are even some crazy people writing a vr version of löve and I'm superhyped to try that out. Sometime. In short, I might make a game with löve, already have the idea for it and I'll bash together a prototype soon. (hopefully)

Also I saw the email from itch yesterday that you had released something and I basically bounced around for five minutes, and then went to bed. I was tired, long day, and I needed energy to play this properly.

Thank you for celestifying the controls I love the arrows + zxc combo, they work really well together. So I hope this will be a bit easier for me to play than last one was. Also congrats on getting on armored games! (I might have already said that memory doesn't exist today)

Alright starting the game now. The title is a bit out of place, being too blocky in comparison to the rest of the game. Music is really good I must say, it's really nice seeing how it has progressed. I will press space now promise. I did. Nice menu. I was expecting getting thrown right into the game though. Having some problems with putting the game in fullscreen but whatever. From now on I'll try to be a tad more structured ahhh.

Nice cape, inspired by celeste? Also the music here bops holy bonks. Font is pretty small and it's hard to see on my small screen. The slash is very very juicy. I didn't think I'd ever say this, but I think it's a bit much. It gets a tad hard to see what is in front of you.

It's kind of interesting that you go in the direction of the point you slash, I was expecting to go the direction I was holding with the keys, but this makes it wayy more interesting. 

Btw the sprites look really good. 

I think I've found a bug, at level 1-7 I slashed before the one at the wall, and I got teleported off screen. Now I'm stuck. I think what happened was that it thought I slashed through one of the points on a different level. Not entirely sure though. Saved by the reset button. Camera is too high up on when sliding down that last wall, I was a bit scared I'd fall into spikes.

In general the camera is way to slow to go downwards when you are falling. I guess this is to make it more stable and you aren't going to go down that much anyways, but you will bounce a lot. what I'm trying to say is that I fell out of the camera and it felt a bit wrong. 

Those locks are super clever, I like them a lot.

2-1 and now shit's getting really really interesting. I would have liked to know a bit more about the other character though, other than other helmet guy mission control doesn't really care about. Also is the text because of that razbuten video? I remember they had problems figuring out you could dash in all directions.

I think that celeste had the dash on x, my muscle memory is kind of confused right now. 

The spikes have a bit larger hitboxes than I expected.

I keep hitting x instead of c, and when I finally hit c, I glitch through the wall and head into the spikes on the other side. Damn it. Hehe made it.

Maybe a cue where you will go to the next level would be a good thing, I got a bit confused at 2-4 because I didn't see anything above me, and just had to assume I'd go up.

The canon is very cool. 

I keep hitting the wrong damn buttons. HAHA MADE IT. hell ye. My mood is back on top.

OH BOSSFIGHT YEAAAA. I will die so much. That wasn't a boss was it. Just warmup. Oh well.

Switching the blobs up to just go horizontal is kind of odd, it feels like they should be marked or something.

The spades shaped monster (?) was really nicely presented, I immediately know what it does, and the blob was blobby enough that I recognised it as a blob. 

Oh you die if you touch said blob. Damn it.

Making a two stage bossfight was fun, I was going to say a checkpoint would be nice but it felt really nice to beat them both right after each other. So maybe no checkpoint is best. 

Alright just got through the last bossfight (I thought this was the end of the fight originally, future me speaking btw). Holy shit. That was hard. The last one took all my brain power not to bump into the damn purple blobs. Still, that was a lot of fun.

Level 4-4 feels a bit celeste inspired?

This will be hard, holy smokes. Nice checkpoint. Will need to eat dinnerrr. Back from dinner with new energy. And that break made the second half of 4-5 wayyy easier. 

Have got to say, even though all of the cutscenes felt very celeste inspired I still liked them a lot, the last one caught me a bit off guard, and it was a super nice way to end the game. I really enjoyed that and it hit very close to heart. I think this is the most story you have a put in a game to date, and it's really heading in a good direction. 

Anyways that's me finished. I think i fell down about 500 times, subtracting the times I died while I was away eating dinner. It was difficult but this felt differently from the other games. This felt more balanced, and while it was really damn hard, it always felt like I was improving and never losing progress. I was getting beaten down, but kept coming a bit further each time. 

I still had a few frustrating moments though, like being just a pixel off a wall and not getting to jump, and slashing the wrong blob was something that frequently killed me. But those were quite minor, especially in comparison to older games you have made.

And I need to talk more about the art and the music, because holy shit it's good. The old music still had a vibe, but the music in this hit's a really sweet spot for me, being chiptuny and melodic but not overy chiptuny. It feels like a bit more modern take on it. The end and menu theme are my favourites (and also the only ones my brain had time to actually process). The art I've known you to have before is basically black and white or really basic sprites, this beats that by miles. While it does feel a tad flat, and the important elements could pop out more from the background the art still hits hard. It looks great and it really fits what you are doing. Must say you have gotten good at pixelart. 

The juicyness is amazing, everything is oozing with it, and it makes everything feel so good to do. It looks really good in the pixelart style, everything feels like it has texture, and the black and white "flashes" feel even more punchy in that style. 

So one thing I had problems with was just trying to see what was going on in the game. In the bossfight there was a lot of things going on, and I'm already pretty bad at filtering stuff out but that took that to max, which was quite frustrating. I did still get through, but it added to the difficulty in an unfun way that didn't really feel fair, since I couldn't really do anything about the things I could not see / take in. So maybe an option for just dialing down the VFX, or making the game from the start with the intention of keeping everything clear. Things I think might be helpful would be a darker background, outlines on all the enemy sprites, and the walls / ground being a bit less strongly colored. Walls / ground is still important information in platforming sections though, so there needs to be a good balance, while still keeping the visuals looking good. A bunch of stuff to balance really. Other things would be having a bit smaller VFX, and having them go away faster. This was a problem in the beginning when I were slashing the blobs, as I would have trouble seeing the other one and having time to react and press the key at the right time. A game I know does clarity really well is downwell (sort of pun I guess?), and borrowing from that might be an idea. The style is a bit basic compared to this though, so visuals and clarity will be a bit of a tradeoff. The clarity thing also applies to the text, it was pretty hard to read for most of the time, and with the text just scrolling on without any player input it can get really difficult for someone with dyslexia or similar. Alright that's that. 

A note as well, I have not played katana zero so I can't do any comparisons from it, but I guess the slashing mechanic is from there? I have played my fair bit of celeste so I see that you borrowed a few things. Which is by no means a bad thing, people come up with good ideas and the easiest way to improve is to(ethically and in a way that respects the creators) steal the good ideas. And I think you did a good job, while I could feel that a few things were borrowed, it never felt like it was just ripping off celeste, and you did it really nicely. 

Curious about the controls, is that taking inspiration from the guy that developed move or die and is working on mental checkpoint?

Last thing, I might get into speedrunning this, but considering my first try took a bit more than an hour, I think I'll get beaten pretty hard. Still worth a shot. And it might be really fun as well. 

I think that is it (finally, this is an essay at this point. Did a check, it's just short of 2000 words. What the heck). I guess the wall of text is just a thing at this point, and I really enjoy both writing and reading them so ye. I hope you are up to something fun now that you have finished this, and that you didn't burn yourself out while you developed. Cheers!

Whoaaa this game is so good

You can just tell there was a lot of love and care put into this game. Fantastic. S+

Hell yeah