Hey folks! It's CookieJar from the GMTK discord. Wow. This is the most fun game I've played in the entire jam. While yes, it's certainly on the more 'established' and trope-y side of game design (dash and wall jump are essentially staples now of metroidvania design), it's easy to forget that these things are still hard to execute well even if they are trite, and to do so in a 4-day jam is nothing short of impressive. Let's see: fully fleshed out world map with multiple, interesting routes for each lens and a plethora of secrets and discoveries to be made, at a scale rather impressive for a short jam deadline? Check. An interesting core idea (increasing the timer to explore more of the world) that gets used and fleshed out extensively? Check. Platforming that actually feels nice? Check. A narrative that's captivating from the jump? Check as well. Simply commendable work.
So what are my comments?
* Is the wall jump for this game inspired by Super Metroid? It's a little tight and has a little more upward force than sideways force for my liking, that wall-jump vector might need just a little fine-tuning imo.
* Sounds! Definitely, if you're gonna expand upon this game or what have you, do consider focusing a bit more on the sounds. And I don't mean making them sound better (although they could use some of that as well), but essentially just more accurate, becuz when I throw one of those golden spikeballs (U button) it doesn't sound like a spikeball when it hits someone.
* Consider adding hitboxes to the enemies. Because I can run past most of them, I as a player have less incentive to actually engage in combat with them. I ran past most enemies in my winning playthrough, for example. If the solution you want is not to add hitboxes, have some other way to encourage combat instead, like killing an enemy for the first time makes it drop a time stone or something (but only on the first).
I'd also like to note some subtle things that I noticed about the game that I simply love.
* Snird .
* The background sky scrolls perfectly to line up on the center of the screen when putting in the lenses. Whether or not that's intentional, it's honestly a flash of design ingenuity.
* The routes are quite well-planned. For the forest lens, for example, I initially tried the bottom route, which involved two locked doors which required killing a certain group of enemies to open. In another attempt, I skipped this bottom route, but when I was on my way back after retrieving the forest lens, these locked doors did not get in my way as there were alternate exit routes as well. Having planned multiple entrance and exit routes for each lens is just really really nice design.
Fantastic job team. I'm kinda blown away. Congrats for participating, and I wish you all the best.