This is my favorite game of the jam (out of the 30 of so I've played). Maaaan, what a cool little game ! With some improvements here and there + expanding it a bit, you could definitely put this up on steam for 5$. I'd buy it honestly !

So this is a 3D metroidvania zelda-like which is extremely cool ! Each ability impacts in a significant way how you interact with the world and allows you to discover plenty of secrets. Secrets being the key here ! On top of being a metroidvania, this is also a metroidbrainia (sorta like Outer Wilds) which is a genre I absolutely love. Discovering how to go for the 0% run was a treat. Though, I would recommend not telling the player at the start that a 0% run is possible. Perhaps that could be a secret to uncover within the game itself.

Now, I've had glowing praise for this and I've rated the game fairly highly, but there are issues here. One of the issues is related to the movement. Ground and air movement felt fine, but the jump was perhaps a bit too floaty. My main issue likes with the dash and the wall jumping which both feel janky. The dash maintains your vertical speed which gives you a variety of results. This would work well in something like a Sonic game, but here it gives you unreliable results. Furthermore, if you dash without the full bar, you'll get a partial dash which also contribute to it feeling unreliable (despite the reason why that's the case being apparent). The wall jump worked, but it feels janky. Perhaps a wall slide animation could improve it. I'd also add in a ledge grab.

My main issue with the game is the combat and I feel like it is the main thing holding it back from a full release. It feels hard to hit enemies due to the low range of the staff (and lack of lock-on ?). They move in weird ways. They'll suddenly gain a lot of speed and it doesn't feel very natural. One fight in particular was frustrating: the fire yokai. For this, I'd recommend going all in on the inspiration from 3D Zelda and take its combat system. Adding a lock-on feature and all. Also, enemies should not respawn unless you ring a bell imo.

I also really like the presentation. The NPCs added life to the game and had neat little designs with their own masks and colors. Some of the animations need work, but it worked for the jam. I also enjoyed the music. Solid stuff !

To conclude, it says a lot about the core of the game that I enjoyed the game as much as I did despite my issues with the combat/movement. Keep working on this ! It's really cool and I'd buy it ! Also, extra cool that this is your own engine !

Very nice game and feels pretty completed. The jump is on the middle mouse button, so it take me a lot of time to find this, i was trying to jump with space. I thought it was a bug preventing my character from jumping. I had problems jumping from the mushroom to the platforms, maybe the mushroom should automatically bounce the character up. The lantern that launch fireballs and the moving fireballs after get graveyeard almost killed my character instantly, so the only options was to run from them. I liked the map system and the scenarios are very beatifull, but the movement needs some improvement. 

It's giving TUNIC if it was 3D Zelda instead. Very inspiring game in the vein of mixing metroidvania and metroidbrainia, with the whole 0% challenge informed by knowledge from the 100% challenge. The world feels very well realized while remaining compact, pretty much spot on in terms of scope for this context I think. I'll be revisiting this to take notes on this type of structure, it really feels worth exploring off of this example alone.

I personally have completed 56% and 6%, but I'm getting some leads out of talking to a friend as well. I think it's worth pointing out that this game, while perfectly doable alone, inspires conversation, and that's commendable in its own right!

my fellow yokai enthusiast! i had mostly an incredible experience from start to finish. the gameplay was pretty fun, even though the controls felt a little stiff, especially the combat; when attacking, the locking felt way too much.

the only part that i got frustrated with was the suzaku fight, because sometimes when attacking him during his vulnerability time, he would instantly make an attack in melee range (i felt it was because damage canceled his return action or something), which had no window to dodge at all. the other bosses were great, though.

the way you handled ability gate bypasses was neat. when going up towards seiryu, i did not find the stone pillar that goes directly up; i've gone through by wall jumping the wall and the torii gates.

playing through the game both with upgrades and no upgrades was fun in its own way. the first time i beat the game without all upgrades, because i felt the wall jump did most of the things i needed in order to proceed. but it was by design, which felt good.

in the end, congratulations for your entry!!

my fellow yokai enthusiast! i had mostly an incredible experience from start to finish. the gameplay was pretty fun, even though the controls felt a little stiff, especially the combat; when attacking, the locking felt way too much.

the only part that i got frustrated with was the suzaku fight, because sometimes when attacking him during his vulnerability time, he would instantly make an attack in melee range (i felt it was because damage canceled his return action or something), which had no window to dodge at all. the other bosses were great, though.

the way you handled ability gate bypasses was neat. when going up towards seiryu, i did not find the stone pillar that goes directly up; i've gone through by wall jumping the wall and the torii gates.

playing through the game both with upgrades and no upgrades was fun in its own way. the first time i beat the game without all upgrades, because i felt the wall jump did most of the things i needed in order to proceed. but it was by design, which felt good.

in the end, congratulations for your entry!!

This looks and feels almost like a complete game. Art is amazing, music is spot on, the controls are pretty good. My only complaint is enemies are very aggressive and they don't really have a tell so I can time my dodges. It was usually a frantic jumping around, dashing and attacking hoping to take them out before they did. Also, having jump as middle mouse button with no alternate key was criminal. Good thing I had a controller :)

Overall this is by far the most complete entry in the jam. Well done putting in so much effort and making such a gorgeous game. I will be coming back to this one.

A solidly well made entry. Nothing to say on the sensory experience, nor on the metroidvania and theme, apart from the fact I'd wished it was more in the spotlight, but that's a nitpick on my side. It feels like the enemies hurt a lot, or maybe that's just low health (do admittedly I was trying for a pacifist route after reading one of the first tips), but I do wish the player was a bit faster in it's movements. Apart from those little picks, I must say it was a very pleasant experience, and I loved how Zelda-pilled it was (Is Zelda a metroidvania?)

Enjoyment 4/5: Despite not finishing, I really enjoyed my time with this one. Not a lot to say. Player could move a little faster?

Execution 4/5: Pretty well executed, no major bugs or glitches. Bosses feel like they might need a re-work of sorts.

Sensory 4/5: Simple but definitely by no means bad. Some of the sounds feel a little unfitting but props for putting your voice into SFX. More dev-vocals-driven SFX says I :)

Metroidvania 5/5: I could be a horrible party pooper here and rank it down for letting you skip everything but that would be neither in the jam nor theme nor probably genre-spirit.

Theme 5/5: I am giving this a 4.5/5 (rounding up) because it's not necessarily front and center, and I haven't got to experience it yet, but the sheer effort that has to have gone into making it a thing is awesome.

Stellar! There are some minor quibbles, like the lights popping in and out but dang did I have a good time! I didn’t initially understand exactly what you meant by items, so the first playthrough I got the dash and staff and skipped my way through everything else. I immediately went back to do 0%, had an idea for one of the bosses that didn’t pan out, probably need to 100% as suggested. There is a lot of great sequence breaks similar to what I wanted to do but didn’t manage nearly the scope of what you did. Also, I’m just so much happier with a controller, thank you!

The controllers took a while to get used to, i was using a Switch controller so i mostly had to remap them because jumping with A was not a natural feeling.

However even after the remapping, the choice to have the interact to be it’s own button instead of being tied to attack or jump was a little confused, i ended up attacking everything i tried to interact through the entire game and then remembering the interact button was somewhere else.

The signs being interactable seemed a little unnecessary, since the player doesn’t stop to read them, it just shows what it’s written bellow, it should have been an image that shows up when you get to close to it instead (It is, however, very funny that you can spam interact and the screen just feels with the text multiple times)

The map wasn’t that much useful to use at the end, since it didn’t show where i was, i didn’t really get much use of it, but it was a real nice looking one, that i will give it.

When i talked to the Frog and told me to whistle “Left, Down, Up twice”, i assumed they meant “Left, Down, Up, Up” and tried to do it to my confusion about the menu not disappearing, until the third attempt where i realized all songs were of six notes, and he actually meant “Left, Down, Up, Left, Down, Up”, as in, doing “Left, Down, Up” Twice. Not that it mattered because the song didn’t work either way.

The gameplay itself was honestly really bad, consisting of platforming and combat, both of them extremely janky and hard to control.

The platforming featured really stiff air movement that never made me feel like i was in control of my character while jumping, and the fact that sometimes the player was able to double jump (like when jumping on top of a mushroom, or floating on those random sci-fi looking updrafts) but most of the time not felt real confusing.

The combat was extremely infuriating, every time i attacked i felt like i was anchored to the floor, and also for some reason the character felt in slow motion when hitting the attack, that is to say, ONLY the character, because every enemy was extremely fast, or like the lantern, moved away for me and most of the time out of range of my attacks, not that attacking it would have helped because it kept hitting me on the little amounts of time i managed to catch up to it, on a way that that made me feel like the game was not designed for combat and it was just an extra tool, assumption that soon proved incorrect when i encountered the first boss, Suzaku, who immediately destroyed me, made me go back the beginning and made me never go back to that zone, since i had no tool to fight a flying enemy (if there is such a tool, i wouldn’t know, because i never found it)

After wandering aimlessly and not being able to find the song of the dead to open that one door (Which i wasn’t sure it existed, since as i stated before, Whistling did not work for me at all), i decided to follow what the sign told me to “””not””” do and wall jump on top of it, ending up with combat with ghost that i could never hit, so i assumed they weren’t to hit and instead i was to dash and dodge… Which confused me soon after i found the lenses of truth, that removed my ability to dodge, and thus made traveling the lost woods part of the map annoying, since i had to open the sigh, see where the arrow pointed, then start trying to dodge an invisible enemy, which was ironically probably the most enjoyable part of my whole playthrough.

After advancing for a while, i managed to obtain the mallet and find the Byakko boss, who i got to remove like a third of it’s HP before i got killed, which is when i decided to drop the game because i was just not having fun.

Overall a really good looking game that i did not enjoy at all, which is a shame because it was the exact same aesthetic that i find enjoyable.

On a last note, i was confused about why all those people on Shinto Priest clothing were calling themselves Shinobi, or why for some reason Byakko was a pig, instead of a White Tiger.

Personal Score: 3/10 (All points given for the graphics)

I’ve been keeping an eye on this game in the Discord while it was in development, and while I was intrigued (this was the first game I tried after clearing my rating queue), I was also a bit skeptical you could pull it off. To make a game that’s fun to play both with 100% and with 0%, without being too demanding of the player? That’s a very slim tightrope to walk.

But man, do I feel silly for doubting, because you absolutely nailed it! Disclaimer: at this point I’ve only played through it 100%, but I think I understand all the tricks needed to go for 0%, which I will probably try tomorrow. I definitely did some skips on my first go, such as fighting Seiryu without the mallet, tear, or boots, and finding the Grappling Hook only after I no longer had any use for it. It can be hard to tell the difference between what is intended and what is “”“unintended””” in this game, but that only got my gears turning about my next run.

I think the combat was the weakest point, which was mostly due to the way the player character controls. The camera could get in the way, and the three hit combo never really felt that satisfying. However, it makes up for it with some really good boss design. Having 4 bosses is already impressive, but they all felt like a solid challenge, but never like a brick wall, they have very fair patterns. Learning Seiryu while fighting him “early” was a lot of fun. I hate that dang lantern yokai though, I never managed to beat those guys without taking damage.

The game also has a nicely cohesive theme, a pleasant artstyle and music, and even has a bit of lore. Not to mention a hint system, and map drawing tools? You really went above and beyond. Very impressed, definitely one of my favourite MVM entries I’ve ever played.