Very solid design. I like that my progress got saved, because I took a break and came back after getting confused about how to progress. If that doesn't make the hollow knight inspiration shine then I don't know what would. The animations were consistently styled and the visual motifs were strong, including my favorite visual motif of the obligatory background skull.
However, I ran into a lot of bugs in the demo. I'm not sure how much of a focus they were during development, since this was supposed to just be a demo, but they really did hamper my experience, especially since I was traversing areas afflicted by them multiple times:
- Nix disappears sometimes after hitting spikes.
- Double jumps sometimes get eaten up by some mechanism. I thought it was from bumping my head on the ceiling during the first jump, but this wasn't true 100% of the time.
- I don't think I'm supposed to be able to stand on enemies. This really trips up the boss ai. Oh, the boss was really cool by the way. Not a ton of entries have a proper one. It was a fun fight.
- Player has a bunch of weird interactions with the ghost platforms. They don't snap to the ground far enough to account for platforms moving downward, and stutter if crushed between a platform and a solid surface.
But, I had fun anyways. Especially impressive is the variety of interactions achieved by just having a few enemies and obstacle types. Different screens demanded me to think about the base movement and abilities in different ways.