I intentionally limited my session to around five to ten minutes so I could cover more jam entries and give more developers feedback. That first window still matters, especially for judging the hook, onboarding, presentation, controls, and whether I want to continue.

First of all, this made me say “what the fuck” out loud, in a good way. I understood the nesting-doll theme from the screenshots, but I somehow did not expect to literally enter another character’s head and discover a world inside. That reveal is crazy, immediately understandable once it happens, and genuinely great game design. I am not normally big on platformers, but this idea got my attention anyway.

The folk-art direction, characters, ornate platforms, wallpaper, and old recording all fit the concept really well. The art could still use another cohesiveness and polish pass, and the unusual mechanics need slightly more guided onboarding because moving, entering heads, hanging characters, and wearing their skills is a lot to understand quickly. Still, this has an actual identity and a hook I will remember. I wishlisted it on Steam, good luck with the release and keep pushing forward.

By the way, I agree with ace24713. I’m not a platformer gamer, but the level design could use some work.

If you have two minutes, climb inside the extremely normal spinning-mech world of BEAT BAES and trade me some feedback.

Open the battle-mech nesting doll · Leave notes inside its head

The surreal atmosphere and the hand-painted art give Lilith a really memorable identity. Every area feels like a piece of someone's inner world, which makes exploration meaningful rather than just solving puzzles. I'd love to see this grow into a full game.🪆🌹

Okay so this is intriguing. I played for about 20 minutes, but it's just totally overwhelming and I gave up. The level design is a disaster, you're exposing me to way too much information way too quickly, I can't process it! Within the first 5 seconds of gameplay there's a doll you can fall into, a random floating cat, some jumping dolls you can rope onto, something holding scissors, you can press Q to look into yourself... gah it's too much, I don't know what to even start with, I haven't even been given a goal or direction, so it's impossible to know if I'm making progress.

I would implore you to just start over on the level design, make an entirely new set of levels built with the express purpose of teaching the game, make it linear so there's always one obvious way to go. You don't have to "make a tutorial" you can use minimal words like you have, just dial in on one mechanic that you want the player to learn at a time. Riff off of Nintendo's 4 step level design method if you can: introduce an idea > develop it > twist on it > test the player (see the excellent GMTK video on the subject)

Many puzzle games I've played can take hours of teaching and reinforcing before even presenting the player with something they could conceivably get stuck on. Puzzle games are hard to design for this reason, because we as designers can't see our games from the perspective of a new player anymore. Try to swing the pendulum in the other direction, make it over-designed and then cut sections that prove unnecessary from playtesting. It's a lot better than people getting flustered and frustrated in the first 5 minutes.

I'm opening to revisiting the game if you make changes. Good luck!

P.S. I record my playtests, if you're interested I have the raw footage available unlisted on YouTube. Keep in mind I'm just a dev, I don't have a lot of practice giving live commentary, I do better at organizing my thoughts in text afterwards.

Edit: I just read your devlog where you said you redesigned the beginning room recently. I feel kinda bad now because I'm pretty sure I'm played the new version, and I still got quite lost. I think I kinda see the vision though? I was supposed to fall into the big doll which immediately presents the first challenge to escape. It didn't work out that way at all for me... but at least now I see what was supposed to happen.

I did try this game on stream, but unfortunately I just could not get past the beginning. I could recognise that it was structured in a way to guide you towards the initial dolls, but unfortunately your own abilities and the extent of them were just not explained in a way I could appreciate, much less how it interacts with the other dolls. 

There is definitely an idea here, but there aren't enough clues that I could notice to help you figure out how things work.  Link to vod below if you like but I really didn't last long until I gave up.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2864192089