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(2 edits)

As I started playing this game, I was really liking it. The art style is really nice, reminding me quite a bit of the Pico-8, and the puzzle mechanic was really clever. I was rather disappointed, then, that I ended the game feeling really frustrated.

I think there were a few things that added up my frustration, but they all seemed to center around the character controller. I was wondering at the start of the game whether it was using a pre-made character controller. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, just that it felt kinda out-of-place for this kind of game. The jump arc felt kinda strange, and having the jump height tied strongly to holding the jump button feels like the wrong choice for this kind of puzzle platformer. 

Having the physics for the two playable entities seems fine on paper, but was a real issue for me in practice. Having the spirit have much more momentum meant that I was constantly over-jumping when I was the spirit, then under-jumping when I wasn't because I was trying to compensate for a momentum that suddenly stopped existing.

This was exasperated for me by the rounded corners. I'm not 100% certain if it's the platforms or the character that has the rounded corners, but in either case, it was a huge determent to me. I found myself slipping off of platforms way more than I should have because of them. If you're going to round the corners like that, then the rounding should be significantly smaller, in my opinion.

I'm not sure if the direction the spirit goes when ejected is RNG or just based on something non-obvious, but I found it really obnoxious. There were quite a few times where an unlucky ejection angle caused me to instantly die. This was most prevalent in the last level, where it seems like ejecting from that starting platform seemed to instantly kill me like 30% of the time (and trying to jump off that platform not as a spirit killed me much more often).

Speaking of ejecting the spirit, I found it would randomly not work for me. At first, I thought it was some sort of cooldown that the game just wasn't telling me about, and I was getting annoyed at that. Eventually I figured out that there's some sort of bug in the character controller, because it happened whenever the character's walk animation broke. Jumping seemed to fix the issue whenever it happened, but until I eventually figured that out, this was a real annoyance (especially without an easy way to just restart the level).

Lastly, I found that (at least at first), I had a real hard time seeing the insta-death ... vines? flowers? ...  the purple stuff. I found they blended in more than I think they should. I'm not sure if this was because I'm colorblind (in which case it's an accessibility issue), or if it blends in like that for everyone. Either way, some more contrast would have been nice there, but once I learned where they all were, it wasn't an issue on replaying the game.

Overall, I really wanted to love this game. I think this could have been one of my favorite games of the jam. However, these technical issues I had made me not like it as much. I still think it's one of the better games this jam, but I feel like it could have easily been better.