i beat it! ngl i was pretty scared there at the end that I would have to fight the captain a third time
the art and the music and the story were great; it made the game feel cozy and polished. I especially liked the parrot girl as a character.
the gameplay mechanics were unique. I guess in a sense it's just really complicated quicktime actions, but it's a very interesting mechanic to build an entire game around. I appreciate that the game made a real effort to try and explore the ways it could use the same simple mechanic to build out distinctive encounters and the arcs within them. There were regular length sequences intercut with short but fast beats to keep you on your toes. There were longer sequences at the end of each fight to express more dramatic beats. There were sequences telegraphed through dialogue. Some enemies had a distinct "flows" in all their sequences. The two-line inputs at the end.

despite all that, I do think the gameplay itself was missing something for me. and here i'll just muse for a bit. the input sequences often felt simultaneously not challenging enough and too hard (to not make minor mistakes) - tricky more in the way of not trying to make spelling mistakes on an old-timey typewriter than the way of balling up your ruined manuscript and tossing it into a wastebasket five feet away is tricky. to be fair, "making quicktime actions fun" is a difficult task to start with - but maybe that's the wrong thing to try and compare  it against. you could look at combo inputs in fighting games. usually, learning the combos in those games aren't the fun part; it's using the combos, when you get into a flow of chaining inputs to unleash a devastating attack. those are high skill games, but i feel like there could be a way to capture that same feeling in an easier game like this too (see "beat doctor"). In the final boss fight of this game, there was a brief moment where I felt kind of cool because I could really rapidly input certain combos because they felt "natural" (the final boss has a lot of "circular" input patterns). maybe the game could have leaned into that? i feel like the game tried to put a lot of minor variations on patterns to keep up the novelty and basically test the player by seeing how attentively they could not make any mistakes for as long as they can - but i think that worked against it. like, if i weren't being tripped up with deviations on patterns i've learned, i could build on those patterns so that at the end I was tackling larger combos, so that the game feels easy even though it also feels like i'm doing something hard. simultaneously hard and easy but in the opposite way.
I think that's what made the second fight interesting, because it teaches you something that totally helps you kick that specific pirate's butt. in that case, specifically, it was "how to predict the next sequence(s) through dialogue". but it could also have had sequences of short sequences, e.g. AAA always quickly followed by BBB, or other techniques of making the next sequence subconsciously obvious to the player in nonobvious ways. by the final boss, you could bust out everything and make the player do crazy shit and still feel easy.

just a bunch of unsolicited thoughts. ultimately though, I loved the game, and it's an amazing entry to the jam.

Easily my favorite music of the jam, and that's with some really strong competition. Unconventional harmony in a catchy structure. It feels right at home with OSTs from HAL Laboratory games, like the raw personality and weirdness from Earthbound/Mother series meets the chippy allegro of Kirby. 

I trained for Captain Nefarious back on Yoshi's Island, and luckily main an Xbox controller on computer. I think this was a good mechanical choice for solo developing a jam game that allowed you to work on art, music and story, which is what really makes this game fun. Polly's a G. The palette change in the boss fight is cool, but the way the whole scene became spooky was more than just colors. Just really good design all around. The continue without losing progress is highly welcome for a jam game, allowing for some difficulty without discouraging the player too much.

The water shader looks awesome, I like how the layers suggest foam and tide. It is a little difficult to appreciate when trying not to get shanked. Sometimes you just gotta make what you find fun though. 

Overall, a well-rounded entry with a ton of personality.

At first I have to say I was a little unsure of how good of an idea it was to make a game entirely based around quickly inputting sequences of buttons using an input device that doesn't fully correspond to the buttons being displayed on screen, especially when it involves very slim margins of error. Having beaten the game, my initial feelings were pretty on the money, since it does give the game a bit of a frustrating difficulty. 

What I also have to say is that everything else about the game, the visuals, the story, the fact that there even is a complete story, the design of the fights and how they incorporate dialogue sometimes, more than makes up for it. I particularly enjoyed the parrot calling out the next attack and the way the fight twists that concept around afterwards, and the way the palette swap is saved up until the last fight in order to break patterns, change the mood and up the intensity. That palette swap with the music change was a great vibe, very "oh shit it's going down now", and that was probably my favorite music track too. 

Which brings me to my next thing, the music. I feel that it was really impressive in how complete and varied it was, and sometimes the mood and the vibe are really top notch. It's well made rhythmically but sometimes it just has some harmony that just sticks out a whole lot for me, personally, like something just doesn't quite sit right. You should still post it somewhere though.

Overall, the gameplay is pretty basic but you did a lot with it for what it is, it's a bit too hard and fights are maybe a bit too long, but it's a very impressive complete experience. Great job!