It’s hard but the games on my time were hard so I liked it;

very original, and very well made.

Good music, nice pixel art, te only thing that I noticed is that some sprites looks misplaced, with the wrong pixel size or with filters so some of them looks a little blurred but this is a minor problem.

And maybe faster bugs, they took too long to get to the baits.

Overall Very good job.

I’ll post a review for this game on my YouTube channel, probably tomorrow.

Great art and sound design, everything looks so good!

Interesting entry with a clear inspiration from old-school 8-bit games, though perhaps a bit too challenging?

Pros:

• Strong Metroid inspiration (which i think is good), especially with the first power-up being left behind for the player to find.

• A variety of enemies, which keeps things engaging.

• The mechanic of feeding insects to reveal the path by breaking blocks is a clever and unique idea.

• The music and visual atmosphere work really well together.

Cons:

• The difficulty feels a bit unfair at times, reminiscent of older games (such as enemies attacking from off-screen or unavoidable enemy patterns that force you to take damage to progress). I think it's a bit of a shame because game design has evolved to reduce unnecessary frustration. That said, if this was an intentional choice, I completely understand that I might not be the target audience for this style of challenge

• The wait time for the bugs to reach their food feels veryyyy long, making it easy to be bored during this time.

• I struggled to understand how the second power-up worked at first. I died some time after obtaining it, and when I returned, the second room felt more convenient to understand how to use the ability.

• In the second upgrade room, I initially thought the small upgrade area was a wall due to the strong contrast between its tiles and the rest of the environment.

I ended up feeling a bit lost and stuck in front off a one tile narrow corridor, unsure if I had passed through it before. Since I could remember all the areas I had explored, I eventually stopped playing, thinking I couldn't progress further.

While the difficulty wasn’t quite my style, I really appreciated the atmosphere—it’s very well done! I also liked the effort put into the UI to describe the player’s abilities. With some game design adjustments to make the experience align more with modern expectations, I think this game has a lot of potential. Anyway congrats for having make it so far, finishing a game is already a huge work !

...okay...

...I'm... not sure I like this game.

...let me start with the positive though.

The spritework is pretty good, for one (a few gripes with animations like the shooting animation aside). I like what you chose as the player's first upgrade, that's a pretty solid pick. The intro sets up a pretty intriguing premise. Scientists who are basically being trained to be powerful warriors? Yeah, that's an interesting idea! I do like the song that plays on loop for the game, it's quite catchy, energetic, adventurous, yet somewhat atmospheric, everything I could want it to be honestly!

Also, I like the idea of the bait ability. Luring around creatures from the environment to do your dirty work is a pretty fun idea. More games should do stuff like that one.

...

...however...

I originally wrote a longer wall of text here, but it felt a little too mean given I don't like, hate what you've done here enough to warrant it. I've opted to replace that and summarize my thoughts on the negatives as...

Okay, so, this game claims to be oldschool difficulty and no tutorials, only to have a control tutorial, an intro with a lot of text mixed with art that feels closer to 1994 than 1986, item descriptions with lots of text that explain how they work, and then seems to punish you for experimenting with missiles in the way those older games actually wanted you to experiment by, as far as I can tell, never giving you a way to actually get more if you run out and can't find a missile expansion item, since enemies never seem to drop them.

And far as I can tell, that means my last experience with this game was seemingly softlocking myself, because I ran out of missiles and could never figure out how to get more. Suffice to say, I kind of gave up, since I wasn't having fun and I'd rather spend my time playing the other games in the jam at this point.

I beat the yellow devil in Mega Man 1 without the pause glitch, by the way, so don't misunderstand, I'm the sort who can love me some oldschool difficulty. Problem is, this game is not oldschool difficulty. It's not as clever as oldschool difficulty often was. It's just poorly designed and tries to excuse itself by calling it oldschool difficulty.

There are cool ideas here though! Please, find time to make a better game to use the idea of the bait in. Maybe also make it slightly less finicky next time though. But seriously, it's not a bad idea. There's good ideas here! There's good things here! I wish I could say I liked this game, I just... I can't. I'm sorry.

to play in browser https://gx.games/games/3c2be4/cybercellula0/