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I don't understand the distinction.

I will say that's not the intended solution. It's not possible to do it by just dashing a lot.

Sorry you had a difficult time, the difficulty is definitely overtuned in some places. The word choice of "restrictive" confused me, since even for your example, you said there were two possible solutions to it.

Can you elaborate more on your criticism? You use the word "restrictive" a lot but I don't understand what you mean by it, you get quite a lot of freedom in terms of movement and ways you can approach challenges, in fact, that was a priority. The controls being "unsmooth" also doesn't make much sense to me. What are the actual issues you're having?

Hi sicave!

It does if you disable "pixel perfect" in options

Congrats on the top 3 finish! I didn't actually get to play this game during the jam, so I thought I'd check it out now, and wow, this is incredibly well done!

The aesthetic and polish are amazing, I love all the creativity in the design of the areas and the fluidity of the animation, overall no remarks there, top notch stuff. I especially enjoyed the urban styled areas where the trees were signposts. Very unique, I wouldn't have expected the final area to look like a crossword puzzle.

The core character movement also feels really good, it handles the way I expect it to, and chaining together the dashes and double jumps lets you zoom through places smoothly. The main thing I'd say was bringing this game down for me was the world design. I noticed that you went for filling the entire map screen with stuff, and for me personally, that didn't really work. I encountered a lot of screens that didn't really seem like they served much of a purpose, like they were just there because you felt obligated to fill out the entire map. I personally think a smaller world would've saved the game better, especially with the backtracking involved.

Still, despite occasionally getting a bit frustrated with all the wandering and backtracking, I was overall super impressed with this game. The final boss was my favourite part, I had a lot of fun with it. I enjoy that even though the character has a ranged attack, its range is pretty short, so you can't just snipe enemies from far away, making the combat more dynamic. I would've liked an accessibility option to make the fire button toggle fire on and off instead though, since I spent most of my 90 minutes holding down the attack button, and it was starting to strain my finger a bit.

Very good work, both of you!

Congratulations on the win! Didn't get to check this out during the jam, but now feels like a good time to. Really love the presentation here, the graphics and music are solid (especially love the background) and the reverse Ghosts & Goblins into was very charming. The main problem I experienced was the character's movement, which is a bit too slippery for my taste. Especially on moving platforms. Still, overall an enjoyable "classic" experience, great work you two!

Ah, you're right, my bad, I understand what you mean now. Yes, I think I may have used the grappling hook to make that double jump there without activating the lilypad. I forgot about that part, since I played it a day before leaving my earlier comment.

Hey there, I just completed the game (getting Pollinate before Sprout indeed fixed it), so I can confirm now how I got to the west area early, and it's not through the way you mentioned. Basically, I just went back to the starting area, went left and crooked my way up through the wall like this. Using the crook gives you your jump back, so as long as you can grapple onto something, you can scale heights pretty quickly, I didn't even need Fertilize. There may be other places where you can use the crook to get to places early, it's quite powerful.

From reading the other comments, I read other people having a pretty smooth progression, so it sounds to me like there was an "intended" path that I deviated from pretty hard, causing me to spend quite some time getting lost. This is a bit unfortunate. Like I said, I think the open-ended progression is quite cool, but maybe you should wait a little longer before letting go of the player's leash. Anyway, now that I've completed the game, I feel more qualified to leave my overall thoughts. Aside from the bugs and softlocks I mentioned, there's a few other points of criticism, which I'll now rattle off in no specific order:

For as much focus as there was on combat, I found that it wasn't really the most interesting part of the game. It was fun to slide through places and break hearts, but the enemies really only served their purpose as pogo fodder, they weren't that interesting to actually engage in combat. And I love a good pogo, but it made the enemy challenge rooms not that interesting. I think the game could work with more focus on combat, or less focus, but right now, but right now, it's in kind of an awkward middle spot, where I wish there were more platforming challenges since the platforming is clearly the more developed feature in this build.

The grappling was a little clunky. Grappling onto boxes or unsprouted vines took an annoying amount of precision, especially when they were quite close to you. The crook automatically locking on made it a lot more bearable, although when several grapple points were close together, it was still sometimes a bit unclear.

I really appreciated the inclusion of a fast travel system since the world is quite big, but the fact that it was name only made it a bit cumbersome to use, since I never really knew where it would take me. It'd be nice if it highlighted the fast travel point you selected on the map.

And last of all, while all the pixel art is quite solid, the huge upscaled mixels on the Tree made me a bit sad. Luckily it wasn't very present throughout the rest of the game, but it wasn't a strong first impression of otherwise a very graphically solid game.

That's all my nitpicks, everything is just very well executed! Good movement, nice setting, overall nice progression and thematically cohesive set abilities... I really enjoyed this game, but I think with some more polish and testing cycles (if you want to, of course), it could be truly great. Fantastic job, all of you!

Yeah, I tried pressing the button, but it just didn't work, no projectile is happening. I'll look for Fertilize first and see if that fixes it.

A really cool and ambitious game! Although I think in some parts the scope might've been too ambitious, since I got stuck a lot, sometimes in places where I couldn't do anything but quit the game, like here and after clearing the poison heart in the red area. Feeling quite lost, I looked at the comments, where you mentioned Fertilization was supposed to be the first ability you obtain, which I missed entirely, getting the Vine Crook and Tether before ever figuring out what the heck those lilypads are for. After that, I made some swift progress, obtaining the climbing and Sprout ability... But then found that the latter didn't do anything? I'm unsure if this is a bug, or if I'm somehow sequence broke again, and I was already supposed to find a projectile earlier in the game, and Sprout only upgrades it but I seem unable to do anything with this ability. So that got me stuck again.

I'll leave more detailed thoughts if I ever figure out how to finish this game, but my overall thoughts is that your foundation is really solid, movement feels great, you got a cool world set up. But while the large scope is impressive, and I think attempting such an open-ended progression with skips is laudable, sadly that also means you have to do a lot of testing to make sure players can't get themselves stuck by following what they think is a natural progression path, which seems like it was hard to fit within the jam's timeframe.

Finally got to playing this, and, yeah, it's really cool! I was briefly concerned after you took away the slide at the start, but luckily, you get it back really quickly, because moving around without it feels really bad with how slow you are. But the slide feels really good to make up for it, so that's all fine. I only wish there were more opportunities to show it off. Zooming through the bomb section felt good (although their AoE was a little unclear, so I did die once standing somewhere I thought I was safe) and I would've liked to see more areas where you could zoom through super fast. But alas, that's jam constraints for you. I also quite enjoyed the final boss. Great job overall!

Yeah, the pillar area is definitely a bit too fast of a difficulty jump, haha, you're not the first person to get stuck there for a while. I tried designing that whole around the one checkpoint (with the shortcut unlocking so it stays useful) so people wouldn't miss out on the healing upgrade, but the shield sentry arena's corpse run is definitely too long and perilous for how tricky a fight it is. Thanks for your thoughts!

Haha, yeah, it definitely would've been worse with holding, and I eventually got into the habit of pressing Ctrl first and only moving afterwards, but sometimes I ended up panicking and doing it too fast when trying to escape from the UFOs.

Very cool and moody! My favourite thing was all tutorials being phrased as memories, makes them feel way more immersive. One thing that annoyed me was that due to Ctrl being crouch, and movement being WASD, I ended up pressing Ctrl-W a few times and closing my browser window. Luckily saving worked even in the web build, so I didn't lose too much progress. I really liked the setting and the progression, using the Pogo to skip some of the UFOs was fun. I think some points could've used more checkpoints (like prior to the room with many UFOs), and I maybe was expecting a bit more from the ending, but overall, I really enjoyed this. Nice job!

I completely forgot to mention it in my original post, but I think your overall level and world design was very solid. I never felt lost for particularly long, and some of the platforming challenges took a bit of thinking for my approach, but I think that's actually a good thing, it was fun to plan out where to jump, where to dash, etc. I definitely don't think level design is at fault for some of my frustrations, those came primarily from the high dexterity requirements. Perhaps with some fixes on the controls, the execution barrier wouldn't have felt as high.

I don't feel qualified to say what would be "better" for the game. After all, Celeste is an excellent game, but I don't think it needs a combat system and boss fights (it does kind of have boss fights, but they're really obstacle courses). If that's the kind of game you want to make, I think it could be very cool! I think this game could work with more of a focus on rhythm-based combat and exploration, or with a focus on precision platforming, depending on what you want to make. Perhaps it is possible to combine both, but I do think that'd alienate a larger portion of players, since those two are pretty different appeals. Don't let that discourage you from making that game if you really want to, though, perhaps there's potential! If you do want to keep developing this game, I'd recommend doing some prototyping of different approaches, and really honing on where the fun is, in your opinion.

First thing that sticks out is that this game's aesthetic is amazing. The pixel art, the music, hell even the font, it's  all extremely cool. I love the main character's design too. I think the movement feels solid as well. There's a lot of great stuff there. Unfortunately, I also have my fair share of gripes.

I'm not gonna repeat too much of what the other comments already said about the controls, while I agree that both the dash and the walljump could be more intuitive

I think a main thing about this game is that it seems to have a bit of an identity crisis. Due to either a bug or me not paying attention, I completely missed the parts about timing attacks to the beat for a long time, and I honestly don't think it affected my gameplay at all. There was only one enemy type I encountered, and I could trivially beat them by just mashing the attack button. The game, by its level design, seems like it's more interest in little switch puzzles and tight movement challenges than combat.  I don't think that's inherently bad or anything, but I did find myself a little unsure about the relevance of the timing attack, since the game seems more interested in trying to be a Celeste-like precision platformer. During my playthrough, I never felt like combat was a challenge, while the movement challenges were consistently very difficult. And very punishing.

Here's a section I got stuck at for a long time, as an example. To get to where I'm standing, you need to do a pretty tricky wall jump into the double dash powerup, then do a double dash to the top right wall, and do another walljump, avoiding spikes in the process. After you step on a platform, you have to fall off the ledge, dash into the double dash again, use that double dash to cling to the left wall, then wall jump onto the platform. And then, after you've done all that? You jump to the other side to get instant killed by the spikes on the ceiling that are barely visible and you have to do that whoooole very precise sequence all over again. There's no second tries, no checkpoints, no recovering for mistakes, you just immediately die. This results in doing the same jumps over and over again just to get another shot at retrying the jump you're stuck on, which I just don't find engaging. Did those ceiling spikes at the end really need to be there? Do they really add something? Or would this challenge have been less interesting if there was a save point at the pressure plate at the top?

In the end, I got stuck on the segment where you need to race the raising hazard floor after getting the double jump. I'm not sure how much game is after that, but I just couldn't do it, and I was starting to hurt my hands, so I had to call it quits.

Sorry for the long ramble, I hope I don't sound too negative! There's a lot of stuff I really love here, which is why I spent so much time on it, but personally, I found myself a bit confused about what sort of game you want this to be. If you do focus more on the combat, perhaps these kinds of precise punishing movement challenges are better reserved for optional areas.

Wow, this game is really polished in some places! Very detailed menu, lots of options, cool unique loading screen, a lot of unique character art. Overall, the character designs are very charming and memorable, and their attack animations can look cool too. However, all this polish makes some of the more unpolished sections of the game stand out more, such as the lack of clear feedback (audiowise and otherwise) in combat. I also encountered a crash while talking to the NPC after the first save (maybe because I was mid character swap?), and found out that by using the electric boy's abilities repeatedly, I could jump infinitely high, and eventually fell out of the map. I also took damage from the bottom of spikes when jumping into the ceiling below them.

Is there a way to get out of the catacombs to the left of the central area? I got through the thief door but it feels like everything else there is an endless labyrinth of spikes and fire. I wandered around for quite a while but couldn't really find out what I was supposed to do or where to go.

There's a lot of really cool stuff to this game, it makes a strong first impression, the art is gorgeous, but I think the core gameplay and level design needs more refinement. I'll give it another look if it turns out I missed something obvious!

I love Walter, he's such a grumpy little guy. There's definitely quite some jank in the core physics, though, that hold the game back. I don't think I have much to say that hasn't already been said by other commenters (like the enemies needing knockback, level too big, etc)

Also, it must be said, your logo is truly excellent

The atmosphere is very cool here, very creepy. Although running out of light mostly just feels tedious, since it's hard to find your way. I also ended up falling out of the map a few times, so I didn't end up beating the game. Something very enjoyable about the unique vibes though.

Thanks again for the kind words and the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Regarding the spark collector, I double checked, and it is working, although its effect might not be super clear. The way it works is that if the enemy runs into your Echo and dies as a result, the sparks it would've dropped will go directly into your inventory. To be honest, the main reason why it's an upgrade at all is so people will read the description and go "wait, my echo can kill things?", haha. 

Wow, thanks for the kind comment! To be honest there is a bit of a drop-off towards the end since those parts weren't tested as much, but I hope you'll still continue to have a good time!

Glad you're enjoying it! I put some thought into making an interesting risk/reward healing system, but from seeing people's gameplay, it does seem a bit complex for what should be a simple action, as many people don't end up using it much. I do like the tradeoff of being able to hold on to the charge to get a damage boost though.

There's not really a progress indicator, but to give a general outline of the scope, after getting to the central hub zone, there's 2 areas you can do in any order (the forest with the Scavenger King and the electric area), after that you'll have to do a little bit of backtracking/exploring, and then you can open a short final area final boss. Depending on if you already did the electric area you may be pretty close to the end.

Yeah, definitely something to be said for just throwing a bunch ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks for a gamejam, I totally get that, so maybe it's for the best, especially if you plan to keep working on it through SMVM. Good luck!

For specific problems: I remember the part in the Quick Man laser area where you can either go over the top to get a health upgrade, or take a lower path to get to the top, it felt really unreliable to get into the top corridor to begin with, like my toe kept getting stuck on the edge. I think all the other times I got stuck in terrain had something to do with me going back a scene or doing something with moving platforms or the surf powerup. The room with the moving platforms that you have to hop between had me getting stuck a few times. Hope that helps!

You don't need any specific powerup to beat him, but some optional upgrades can definitely help! The Echo Parry upgrade from the shop in the central area can do a lot of damage to him if you use it to dash away from his grounded attack and then jump over him. Good luck!

Wow, what a cool game! Especially for being made in 12 days, this is really ambitious! There's a lot of good things to say, so I'll start there. The visual style is obviously a stand-out, it really captures the grossness of 90s cartoons. Seeing Meatball move remained delightful throughout the entire game, his funny crawls, the bounciness when he crouches, and some of the unique animations like blushing after getting a kiss, just overall fantastic. The soundtrack is solid too, and I found the core character movement to be pretty satisfying. Combat was simple, but serviceable enough, I especially enjoyed bouncing on enemies with the downward attack. I quite enjoyed the boxing gloves boss, that one was fun.

There's two main points of criticism I have. One is rather minor: the camera was sometimes uncooperative. Sometimes I couldn't see very far ahead of myself, so I ended up running into a wall, or worse, an enemy.

The other is a bit more substantial, which is that I think the world is too big for the amount of content you have. There's not a lot of variety in enemies, hazards, tiles, etc. which is super understandable for a jam, but the world you created is huge! I spent quite a lot of time just wandering around, looking for progress, and this really took the wind out of my sails. The fact that the map isn't connected, but made up of disconnected chunks connected by bubbles (love that his name is Kino btw) makes it hard to get your bearings. The worst of it was after I got the bomb powerup, when I ended up spending nearly an hour backtracking through the entire world looking for a place to bomb to progress. I found a lot of powerups, but no progress. As you know, I ended up having to ask on Discord, and it turns out a wall had disappeared by itself at the starting area. I'd even gone back to the starting area, but I hadn't noticed that a block behind the save point had gone missing. This felt rather frustrating, I'm not sure how I was supposed to figure it out myself. If I hadn't gotten to ask a dev, I probably would've dropped the game there, which would've been a shame, because I really enjoyed it overall!

Oh, yeah, one little hangup, during the ending sequence, I ended up going back the way I came from and ended up wasting 3 minutes before realizing that I couldn't exit the zone that way. Probably should lock the right exit from the boss room.

I ended up writing a lot of criticism, but that's only because I really enjoyed this game, I promise! All the core systems, mechanics, presentation are incredibly solid, but the lack of guidance combined with the huge size of the map sadly soured it a bit for me. Still, incredible job!

(I got 90% item completion but sadly did not rescue my wife ;_;7 rest in peace)

I'm a big fan of classic Mega Man and X, so this was nice to see. The movement felt instantly familiar, which was nice, the graphical style is cute too. Overall level design seems solid, with only the Quick Man laser area sticking out as a point of frustration. I'd say the main thing overall that's missing is polish. I think it would've been better to have a smaller map, but polish up the things you have more. Stuff like how non-ceremonious the bosses and enemies are when they die, but also just core physics stuff like getting stuck on walls, levels spawning you in the wrong location when you travel backwards, etc. I also think the timer didn't add much to the experience. Overall, the idea of having a Mega Man styled Metroidvania is really solid, and you're well on your way there, but I think you would've benefited from a smaller scope with more polish. Still, I enjoyed my time with it despite the imperfections and the lack of a final boss (hey, that's gamejams for you!)

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, but the music was great too. And just for reference, the ceiling here seems to behave like a spike, it damages and respawns you.

The pixel art and music on this are quite solid, definitely managed to evoke that Castlevania feel. I managed to beat the Priest, but overall felt quite lost. I'm not sure if there's more, he respawned when I entered the room again. I think the character movement also felt too floaty and imprecise. Still, I like the idea you have here, if you do keep working on it, I think it could become quite cool.

Yeah, in general, I overshot the difficulty, especially for gamejam standards. I think the skill ceiling is surprisingly high, but the skill floor might be too high as well, since a lot of players reported dropping the game after getting stuck, which is unfortunate but super understandable. Thanks for your comments!

Oh, to be a little blob eating isopods off of the ocean floor... What a novel idea for a Metroidvania! I was pretty invested in my little blobby boy, but sadly he got stuck in a wall after I got the dig ability.  I tried to press R in hopes that it would send me back to my last mating, but sadly that reset the game entirely... I assume that was a debug key you left in by accident, which I can't criticize you too harshly for, because in my game, you take 100 damage if you press R, haha. It was a bit of a shame though, because I was wondering where this game was going to go, but the beginning is quite slow.

I rate it an  "only game in this jam to have a dedicated Reproduce  button" out of 10

Sure, happy to provide it! In case you wanted something more specific, one of the rooms I remember getting hit on a transition was the very first room after the town, when I came in from the right. I wanted to go back to the town after rescuing the smith (before getting the orb) and the slime is all the way on the right of the screen. I had plenty of health, so it wasn't a huge problem, but it did stick out to me in an otherwise very polished game.

That was fun! You kept your scope small (or "classic") and just polished what you had really well. The pixel art is cute, I especially enjoy the bounciness of the slime enemies. Movement feels good, especially once you get some upgrades. Combat is simple, but getting freedom over what stats to upgrade keeps it engaging throughout the game. Most of the critiques I have are rather nitpicky, but here they are anyway: I wish enemies dropped their gold sooner so I didn't have to wait for their death animation to finish, some enemies are a bit too close to screen transitions so I bumped into them when going between zones, and I wish there was a clearer "point of no return" before the final boss, because I finished the game with 40/41 rooms seen, and I never got to back to explore that 1 room.

Oh yeah, and the ending made me laugh out loud.

Very solid job!

You really put a lot of juice into the animations and effects, lot of visual polish, looks very nice. Unfortunately, I wish there'd been some more polish in the core mechanics. The grappling hook just doesn't work 50% of the time (it either lets go too early or it gets me stuck in the wall) and the dash carries momentum for so long that I frequently ended up dying because I dashed off-screen, and immediately fell into a pit on the next screen. A similar problem often occured when respawning, which is so fast that it'd often cause me to immediately die again because I'd dart away just after spawning.

I fooled around with the time slowdown, but I never really found it useful. For the bosses I ended up mostly just spamming the parry/heal and using the regular attack to gain energy back, which didn't feel all that strategic. The third boss felt pretty different though, ended up using the fireball there since it deletes his projectiles.

Overall, I think there's some really cool ideas here, and I think the world design was solid. I was also impressed by how big it was, and how well the map screen worked. But if I could give you one tip for future jams, it'd be to spend more time with just a character controller in a testing room, and really iterating on it until it feels really good to control, especially if you want to make a game that so heavily relies on platforming through instakill spike gauntlets.

Still, I had fun exploring despite the occasional moments of frustration, impressive work!

All the pixel art in this is really cute, and the key art is adorable too, overall a big fan of the vibes you managed to put down. It took me a long time to get past the first arrow jump (I was trying to jump onto it from the ledge on the left where the message is, and only later found out it's much easier to jump on it from below) but I got the hang of it eventually. I was a bit annoyed by the underground dungeon area directly dropping you into spikes or arrows a few times. After I got through it, I accidentally killed the oni before doing any of the trials by standing in a corner and just waiting for him to kill himself with falling rocks, but I did get 100% completion afterwards. Overall, I think the time slow (which I actually like more than the time stop) has a lot of potential for a Metroidvania. There wasn't really a lot of room for it in this game, but that's expected with gamejam projects. In the future, it could be a really cool idea to explore further if you want. Nice job overall!

Very cool! I really like the "echo" mechanic, I wish it was used more later in the game. I was impressed how many upgrades you managed to fit into such a short game, and some of them are pretty creative too, the "burning nearby objects" one is a type of key I haven't seen before, and it really made me rethink how the level was structured. Overall good level design, I never felt lost for too long. My main criticism is that the movement doesn't feel great. You gain height really fast when falling, but you fall really slow, which I found a bit jarring. Still, I had a fun time, and the final boss was a good challenge. Nice work!

what the hell is hollow knight

Cool idea, and really polished and impressive for 3 hours! Takes a while to wrap my brain around it, max score was 23

Hell yeah brother!!

I posted some bug reports or gripes in the MVM Discord, but here's a more detailed review:

Got to the end on Hard mode in about 40 minutes. At that point my fingers hurt from spamming the mouse buttons so much, really not a fan of the control scheme or the overall spamminess of the dash, but aside from that and some other gripes, I had a good time.

The skillset is very novel, I particularly liked the combination of the dash and the grappling hook, you can really launch yourself through some of those grappling gauntlets, they were my favourite part of the game. Also thought the Sky Lord boss was pretty good.

I didn't really like the roll ability, it feels like it was only useful in the designated areas, and didn't feel that satisfying. I went to the red village first, but it didn't help me at all to get to green village, would be cool if there were some shortcuts you can only use if you went to red village first, so it feels more rewarding.

Aside from my previous nitpicks and gripes with the controls, I found most of the enemies way too tanky. Since there's no reward for beating them, I found myself just avoiding them. The chasey circle enemies feel especially annoying, since they're relentless, but also really tanky. They're easy to kill if you get them alone, but it's just a chore, which isn't my favourite style of enemy design. Not sure if this has to do with the difficulty select, I have no idea what the difficulty level actually affects, but definitely wouldn't recommend scaling regular enemy HP with difficulty level. 

Final boss being primarily a platformer gauntlet was cool, since that was the more interesting part of the game. Didn't enjoy the final phase though (the escape sequence), sometimes enemies would just fall on you, and I died a few times. I would recommend making that part way easier, at that point you've basically already beaten the boss so it should feel more tense than it really is, imo risk of death should be minimal at that point. In the end I beat him by kiting him all the way to the end before bringing his HP to 0 which doesn't feel intended

Overall, nice job creating this, and good luck in the jams!

Neat game! The sand and fire physics behave as I expect, good gamefeel.  I did notice some audio issues (I believe that's an issue with Godot HTML exports) and some lag, especially in the victory screen. I wish there had been more levels, since I felt like the last level was the first one where I really had to think about it and engage with the game mechanics, I would've enjoyed more like that. But that's a typical gamejam problem, of course. The artstyle is quite cute, too! Great job overall