This one got really hard towards the end, but after more than 4 hours of attempts, I managed to beat the game! Having been steadily losing my mind while waiting for Deltarune chapter 5, I quite enjoyed the fourth-wall-breaking aspect of the story, and I think it's a perfect implementation of the theme. The ending was quite emotional and bittersweet, yet heartwarming. I only wish the fourth-wall aspect came up more often throughout the game itself.

But first things first, being able to move around in the start menu was a cool touch, though I was immediately able to make Yui fall off the edge of the screen. The UI, campfire and shop systems were quite impressive and very polished for a gamejam project. The game definitely deserves huge props for having a control customization menu, as that's not something you usually see in gamejams! Occasionally, the game seemed to show text in Spanish despite most of it being in English, like in the Volume menu or the explanation for the Attack ability.

After equipping the Vital Heart upgrade, the health bar seemed to bug out and display the first heart from the left as missing. There seemed to be a limited amount of Q heals available per rest, but if the flask icon below the health bar was meant to indicate it, then I don't think it worked as it always showed 0.

The music was nice and calming, even if a bit repetitive, the tileset was very pretty, and the artwork for the characters was adorable. The levels were a bit empty, though I think that actually made for a cool eerie feeling, and the light effects around the bottom of the level were pretty cool. I had a hard time getting out of one of the rooms, where you had to use the mushroom to jump back up but the mushroom wasn't exactly under the hole in the roof leading up.

In some areas, or while falling a long distance, the camera seemed to lag behind Yui a bit. The camera also had the jitter issue which I think is common when combining pixel graphics with a smooth "follow"-style camera. I remember having massive problems trying to fix some of the same issues in one of my past games, so in my newest game I simply went with a basic camera that's fixed to the player position (and clamped to room boundaries).

The wand controls took some getting used to, but I personally found them pretty intuitive after a while (using keyboard and mouse). The combat was pretty fun and snappy for the most part, although a hit sound when hitting enemies with the sword would have been nice. The bats were by far the hardest enemy due to their speed and constantly getting behind Yui even as she was swinging at them.

The first real difficulty spike for me was the area leading up to the final boss. Not having a checkpoint before (or after) the boss was definitely brutal. The boss herself wasn't that hard once I managed to get to the fight with decent health, and was mostly solved by just mashing. The mimic nearby was a neat little jumpscare and a great implementation of the optional challenge!

The grapple mechanic was definitely the biggest source of difficulty in the game and sadly, I don't think it was always for the right reason. I don't know if being able to actually grapple was tied to Yui's speed, but sometimes it felt like she could easily latch on to the grapple point from quite a distance away, and other times she'd just fall like a rock even though I could swear I clicked on the grapple point. Timing the physics of the swing so that Yui would get launched in the direction I wanted, at the speed I wanted, was also really tight, and was the source of many frustrating falls. It didn't help that the rope length at which she grappled also varied, leaving me with very little room to maneuver if she grappled too close to the grapple point.

The last climb, while certainly cool, was also fiendishly hard and took me the longest out of anything in the game by a large margin. After an hour or so of trying to zoom past all the bats and getting hounded to death (or falling all the way to the bottom), I finally decided to painstakingly lure all the bats to areas where I could actually fight back, and managed to clear the room of enemies. At that point, I "only" had to deal with the unforgiving grapple mechanics sending me all the way to the bottom, and the long climb back, at which point I'd eventually start failing even easy jumps out of exhaustion, and was close to giving up many times.

However, after probably upwards of 2 hours, I finally did it! ...Only to nearly die to the enemies back near the starting area, which I forgot were there. Fortunately, I managed to reach the ending cutscene without further adventure, and got "a bit" emotional.

Overall, despite its many rough edges, definitely one of my favorite games in terms of theme interpretation, with the theme perfectly woven into both gameplay and narrative! Finishing this one was quite a rollercoaster, but the game absolutely deserved it in my eyes.

I like the idea of this game, but honestly the fact that I can’t see my mouse cursor made moving the magic wand feel very unresponsive. Aiming is a lot easier on controller, and being able to rebind stuff to the triggers made it so I could jump and attack while aiming with the right joystick, but the dash especially caught me up.

The game looks cool and sounds nice, and has a decent amount of content. Unfortunately it's not very polished making it difficult to play, the enemies are very fast and you have to hit them a lot before getting upgrades, the dash feels very awkward moving the player towards the mouse, but you also have to aim with it for enemies and anchor points, it would be nice to still see even if only a little bit of the mouse as sometimes I got lost on where it was. I once got knocked by an enemy to another room and got stuck outside the map, only could transition to the outside of another map and back.

I loved the idea behind it, as well as the general gameplay ideas, but I had a hard time playing both on controller and keyboard (it could just be I suck at games though!) since I could not make it very far without being killed by enemies. A suggestion would be to have enemies not knock out a single heart when they hit you since, if you are like me, get killed easily.