Fun! Brings back fond memories of playing Baldur's Gate 2 and finally remembering to actually buy the Shield of Balduran before going to the lair of the beholders.

This is a neat little game with a rather cool hand-drawn art style. It took me a few tries to get the hang of the gameplay, but once I did, it all flowed rather well. I liked the framing narration as well, and the music is an absolute bop. As others have noted, this really does feel like an old DOS game with a strong core gameplay loop (though in that era the boss battle segments would've probably repeated until you eventually lost.)

I like the art style a lot! Portraits in the mirror are a really fun indicator of remaining lives. The music track is very fitting.

The controls are perfectly fine, I just think that the game needs to visually clarify what you're doing. The purple target points are probably unnecessary in the defense phase, having the stalks light up before firing would be enough. On first play it feels like the targets are what I was meant to be interacting with or trying to time my hits at the point where a stalk reaches a target. Attacking one side at a time can also be clarified by showing slashes and having them appear on the wrong side when the mirror is positioned incorrectly. It took me too many tries to understand the offense phase, because the description makes it sound like I'm searching for a specific hidden point rather than just moving the mirror to the center of the eye. WASD as an alternative control scheme may also be a good addition.

After knowing all of the mechanics the game is quite fun! With a few visual hints and a slower start, I think the overall action can be made longer, faster and even a bit more challenging.

The game manages to nail the exact hyperspecific vibe of the average DOS game from the pre-DOOM era. From the game design, to the text crawls, to the presentation, to the music, everything! And it manages to pull it off without resorting to a superficially retro aesthetic! We’re a huge fan of it!

I got completely destroyed on my first go, then understood what I was doing well enough to win the second time. I thought the game was fine, but a bit rough (jam game, so it goes). Some extra sound effects for beating back the tentacles might have been nice. I liked the art a whole lot!  

Okay, the concept of a civil service guild that whose job involves capturing hypnotic monsters goes VERY hard

That concept could honestly be expanded into a whole game. Start off by rounding up some low-grade thralls, slowly escalate as you gain skills and willpower, end up  wrangling deity-level threats like the one we faced here. You could have a lot of fun with status effects, different ways of hypnotizing different opponents, etc. As a PoC for that concept, this is VERY good.

Two things i might suggest if you choose to pursue that are:

- Clarity of the text. As others have mentioned, big blocks of text without commas are hard to parse. The backgrounds for the endings might also stand to be a little dimmer; both the art and the text are good, but both have so much going on that it's hard to focus on either.

- Feedback during gameplay. During my first run, I thought the arrow keys were broken because they didn't affect the mirror. Something as small as shifting the mirror a little when an arrow key is pressed might go a long way towards making the gameplay feel intuitive.

Very fun concept. Solid art, solid writing, solid music; an all-around solid entry.

It took me one time failing to get the hang of the controls, but the second time through was exciting! I personally found myself trying instinctively to use the arrow keys to change mirror placement and space to attack and had to overcome that, but once I did it was a fun little arcade experience. Love the inclusion of the dialogue and endings to give the gameplay some context, too! I think highlighting the portrait of the character who's currently talking would be a nice addition for clarity, but the writing was really charming.

The music and art are amazing. Very nice!

I wanted to note that the text is a bit hard to read against the background. It was somewhat energy-consuming to read the exposition and controls, and I think it would be improved if the text were broken up more throughout gameplay and was against a different colored background. 

That being said, I loved it!

really nice art!