I really like how open the world is and how you can choose to explore, talk to NPCs, fight monsters or go straight to the boss. The world is beautiful and the 3D models look very clean. Overall you've done a great job.

On the other hand, a number of small problems add up when they could be fixed very easily.

Firstly, the camera. The problem is mainly the fact that the controls are inverted compared to pretty much every third person game, so it takes a lot of time to get used to. 

At first, I was very confused. I tried to kill some enemies, even though I didn't know what I gained fighting them. The magic abilities are unlocked after a certain number of "Imaginations," but the count isn't shown anywhere, so I didn't know what I should do. I would have really appreciated feedback when the player makes some kind of progress (like a text showing how much imagination gained, or XP, etc when killing enemies, opening chests or talking to NPCs). Since it takes so long to unlock the first ability and there is no feedback, I was really wondering if I did the right thing or if I missed something. If the abilities you unlock depend on the level of the character, then it would have been better to write "Unlocked at level X".

The first time I played the game, I collected everything I could, killed every enemy, and on my way to the boss, I fell in a tiny hole in the mountain where I couldn't jump, so I was stuck, and I had to reset the game and do everything all over again. There was also another spot where I could fall under the floor, so I had to run to the sea to get out. I think it would have been nice to have a reset button in case that happened.

The chests are weird. They open when you go next to them, but then you need to press F and there is no indication of whether you did something or not (except if you look carefully at the bar under the health bar). Since the "press F" text doesn't disappear and the weird glitched noise they make, I didn't know if the chests actually worked. Then I noticed that they make you level up instead of level down, which seems to go against the purpose of the game. But since leveling up seems to increase your attack damage, I went for that alternative strategy to fight the boss :)

After pressing play in the title screen, if you press enter or space instead of skip or continue, It shows glitched text, and the more you press enter, the faster the text appears. Nothing game breaking here but I thought that was pretty funny. Also, after beating the boss, in the final story text section, the skip button doesn't work and that made me lose time on my speedrun!

Sometimes when you fight an enemy, especially the "Shadow", the attack animation gets hidden by another animation, so you can't avoid it, and it looks like you take damage out of nowhere.

The fight against the boss is fine. I just don't like the way it sometimes teleports the player in the middle of the room because there is no animation indicating the attack will happen and it sometimes teleports you direcly into the spikes of it's other attack so it feels very unfair. Eventually, I found a way to consistently avoir the attacks but it looks more like a bug than an intended strategy.

Here is my speedrun of the game :)

comments work, I was definitely feeling the burn of the controls and somewhat uncertain premise but everyone liked it so much I went back and figured it out, and I had a good time. I enjoy the details in your three worlds (especially the overworld) and your final boss design.

The combat is very strange, starts off very grindy, becomes very easy and then ends with a very grindy tank-boss. I get that it probably was less about balanced combat and more about the representational symbolism of the enemies. 

The models and the combat animations are very nice though and reactive, pleasant to just roll around. I could take or leave the drum sfx though.

One error I encountered is that powerups do not work near enemies, and in general, their recharge is kinda scuffed, often just waiting around for relatively long periods.

The thing that carries is that you really did build a big RPG in such a short time and the world feels lived in, congrats on the release

Game is really good, really polished. I like the big world and models you made. I think the mouse sensitivity is good because I use a trackpad. Overally, really really good, good job!

I'm sorry, I tried but was not able to work the camera, my eyes got tired very fast. From what little I could play, it seems like the objective was to level down your character which was interesting. If you fix the camera, it will improve the experience by a lot. Good luck!

this was such a nice and charming game to go through! its crazy how much you managed to put in this game, from the scale of the island to the 3d models you made! it seems like theres even a lot of underlying systems in the game, very nice! the foundation for a nice action rpg is there since a lot of the major systems seem setup already, though there are quite a bit of issues that stack up and should be addressed first (nothing too game breaking).

like some of the people have said, the inverted camera controls felt hard to work with for this type of game at least. mouse sensitivity also felt a bit high for me (though that could just be on my end), so having both of those be in an options menu would be great! some visual communication adjustments could also be appreciated, like showing what you get in the chests (even just saying it as world space text), since im not too sure what i got most of the time. there was also a point where i think i got xp from a chest and leveled up instead of down, which made me lose the skill i earned earlier (though not too big of a deal since i got it back, but weird for the chest to kind of nerf me). there was also an audio bug when approaching the chest where it seemed to play every frame. lastly, the enemies (especially the shadow one) sometimes dealt damage to me without going through its attack animation which led me to dying a couple of times because of it (though i am fully aware how hard the Unity animation system is to work with xd). so yeah, a lot of small issues, but them stacking could lead to problems overtime so it'd be best to address some of those QoL issues first when developing!

enough of the negatives, the general RPG system is sick! i can't say i played a game with a leveling down system (though i think i've seen some before), but i like the trade-offs of leveling down and the in-game context behind what it means to " level down", very cool! i also like the how cooldowns for skills don't reduce while attacking, thus informing the player to not just spam attack and swing randomly, i think thats a neat design trait of this game! also the non-humanoid enemies look really nice! the ones that are in the game rn have nice custom animations that im surprised exist due to both the jam duration and the amount of other content thats already in game! the environments in the game also look really nice, i was always surprised when entered a new area!

overall, this was a fun and campy world to go through, i think it has a lot of potential! from the dialogue and the animations, seems like you had a lot of fun making it, which really shows while playing the game, great work!

Well, I liked the environment, shader, and the sound that make during dialouge. HAHA.But the camera moment felt annoying, it was reversed so had very hard time managing it.  Additionally, i felt it would be better if there was button to skip dialouges, or speed up. But, bravo u did that in this amount of time. Best of luck

The shaders are really good and I'm rather impressed that you managed to create a game with a rather large scope, though i'd probably recommend in future that you go for a game with a lower scope in hopes of being able to polish it more. There were a few bugs rather frequently along with the camera being a bit annoying but I see a lot of potential with this game. You could really make some good content with this game with some more polish. Great work!

A setting for the camera controls would've been nice, and I would've liked a way to make the dialogue move faster. Overall I think it has a lot of potential. I really love the art direction that was taken.

Hey, just played your game. I liked how the movement felt fluid, except for the inverted camera controls which were difficult to adjust to. There were a good variety of enemies and places to explore, and I liked all the easter eggs and jokes you included as well. Overall, I think the combat could be improved a bit as some hits on the chairs didn't register, also I think some of the sound effects were a bit too repetitive/loud. Definitely a fun experience though with a lively world, great job on this game!

Hi, I just played your game, I really like the color palette and the general mood of the game. I love the combat animations, they look so funny to me. The only thing that troubled me a lot was the inverted camera controls. If you plan to develop this game further more in the future, I would suggest to revert that or make it a toggleable setting.

I still enjoyed it a lot, it was very fun!

Good luck with it <333

This game has a ton of potential. The camera made it hard to weave in and out of combos, so a lock on would be nice. And the combat animations are pretty stiff, but I appreciate that attacks can be cancelled with a roll. That said, I had a lot of fun with this game. As others have mentioned, the scale of this game is really impressive. I've never liked games that try a levelling down mechanic as that just punishes playing the game, but I really liked that you counter-acted that by boosting the player's other abilities instead of just leaving them in a weaker state. Even if a bit basic, leaning more into using abilities as the game progressed was pretty neat. The secrets scattered around were cool, but chests kept making this pinging noise and I couldn't really tell what I was getting from the chests. Lastly, final boss was pretty neat. Great game, some more fine tuning of the mechanics can really turn this into a full experience.

The scale of the island is impressive for the time frame. I liked all the secrets hidden around in the "video game" spots to check, and the surfer joke about the water was funny.

I like the graphics, the transparent little guys, the funny voice acting and the colors, the creative combat sound effects, it's all pretty good! Main critique I would have is the inverted mouse controls, it was way too difficult at the beginning to get used to it, especially with action combat style, I was getting nothing done. Combat was okay too, other than the inverted mouse controls I think controling the character felt great. Oh, by the way, I think I was attacking the NPCs during dialogues, as whenever I clicked to get the next speech bubble I would also swing. Was there a way to talk without clicking? Hahaha

This is an awesome game! It took me a little while to become accustomed to the inverted control layout but once I did I was rolling! The size of the world is really impressive there's a lot of areas to explore and there are some easter eggs to find which I won't give away the details to... Dev ;-) The inverted leveling system as well was very interesting as I have not seen something done that way before. Combat was good the abilities are responsive and dodging is important rather than just spamming abilities. The environment was quite nice as well and it was enjoyable to just run around in the game. Overall this was a great game jam game very nice work!