This is a fun story concept, and there's a lot going on in this game! I think this is the first submission I've seen so far that uses a palette swap and it feels really good for how it's used. Some critiques, uncategorized because some of them may or may not be empirical:
- As mentioned in another comment, inputs in menus are very delayed. I suspect this might have been to combat multiple input triggers on a single button press, and while the current implementation is good for holding a button to more gradually select options (though the timing could be a little tighter), individual button presses should always be honored one way or another. Usually the way to do this is to keep a previous state of input while you handle the current one. If the previous input had a button up and now it's down, you know that it's a new instance of a user pressing that button, and vice versa for lifting a button.
- I'm not sure if you intended to apply acceleration to movement, or to restrict movement direction, but if you're in the middle of accelerating/decelerating in one direction, you can input a different direction to add influence and start curving diagonally. The acceleration also feels very fast, but that's just a preference.
- The attack action feels unclear if I'm actually hitting an enemy, and combat just feels like I can spam through with attacks as long as I have the health to chip away.
Good work on this!