Edit: I got good, and the devs added a heavily expanded how-to-play section to the description. See the reply to the developer below to see my updated opinion on the gameplay feel, plus some comments on how you're actually supposed to play if you are a confused player reading this - everything else I say here still stands.
Caught a glimpse of this one on a stream and put it in my to-play list, and bumped it up a half dozen places when I saw one of the team behind it left a really thoughtful comment on my game. Just managed to beat it, and I'm gonna have to replay it in a few days to get my final thoughts in order. What I can say right now is that
1. This game is really good.
2. This game does not explain itself at all.
The music and sounds are great. The graphics are beautiful. Each enemy is unique, well-animated, with well designed attacks which all ooze personality. The level transitions being wanted posters. Brutally hard arcadey gameplay with limited lives is pure retro. The effects on Golden Hour. We'd be here all day if I had to comment every little thing I liked, and besides some aliasing issues on the font, I only have one gripe.
I beat the game and I still have no idea if I'm doing it right. There's no in-game tutorial, the description has the controls but not a how to play. I had to learn how to parry and how to enter golden hour from a reply on the jam comments, and didn't even figure out what golden hour did until glancing up from this comment box and seeing it in the "How does your game meet GBJam's theme" section under the ratings. It took me a while to realize that you need to hold to dodge - with such a fast attack speed and needing to spend so much time in the side positions to be able to parry side attacks, I expected the control scheme to be tap to dodge, hold to attack, since you only really need to care about timing for the parries, which you can luck your way into timing-wise most of the time regardless. Instead you're mashing the same button constantly to maximize damage, to the point where my finger was getting sore (and this is coming from someone whose game's sole mechanic is quick-time events!), and holding dodge for extended periods of time just to stay in the corner, only to release it in the middle of an attack animation and wonder why I'm not dodging back into the center, or hitting the other direction on impulse and overshooting. The game is also really fast, so fast that there's information that I just couldn't parse, like attack hitboxes on the final boss while trying to read which coin is which (and I'm positive that I didn't even realize the double coin was the thing that killed me the first time facing that boss).
There's definitely something there though, once I had the first couple of bosses' patterns more or less down there was a flow I could kind of get into, dodge, parry, dodge, coin, stagger, repeat, and it felt very satisfying once I got there. I didn't stay there for long usually, and I'm missing something for it to all click - and I don't know if it's a skill issue or a game issue. I managed to reach the final boss with five or six health in my winning run and managed to beat him just by being able to hit him for long enough, I was not fast enough to react to most attacks and the only mechanic I really ended up understanding was the double coin.
I'll come back to this in a few days and give it another go, see if there's any more tips in the comments and leave an updated comment with my final thoughts. But regardless of whether it ends up being a major tutorialization issue, or a game that just doesn't click for everyone, that shouldn't detract from the fact that this is a great game with a clear vision that's been very well executed!