I think all the points I wanted to make about the game have already been made in the comments, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE this game, I'll happily buy and play a finished version of it on steam!!

After reading through the comments, the music DID NOT get enough love it deserved. MIOH has outdone themselves in this one, when I get lost or frustrated from constantly dashing into bottomless puddles or grinding trash mob to open a gate, the music kept me going, and the thought of hearing a new track in a new area pushed me forward. The music singlehanded bumped all of the relevant categories by at least one star for me. It is rare these days to hear actual motivic development in a game track Pokemon Mystery Dungeon style, filled to the brim with emotional twist and turns, throwing you unexpected modulations and bringing you to unfamiliar territories before seamless looping in on itself. The music in Filoplume is arguably better than a lot of full priced games out there. Hats off to you MIOH, Bravo!

First of all, I absolutely admire the vision and ambition of the game! While the rest of the review might seem like I had a lot of issues, I think that's kind of a given with a project of this size. There might have been plenty of nitpicks, but that's because the game attempted to achieve many different things and mostly succeeded in all of them, but fell short here and there. Overall, I think the level of polish and execution is very impressive considering the scope and the timeframe!

The art style was very cute, and I loved the variety of characters and enemies! I immediately thought the trees looked like people, so it was really funny when I found out some of them were actually enemies in disguise. That said, I feel like the overall look of the game was strongly hindered by so much of the level being taken up by empty space, which really drew attention to the simple graphics. I think the game also suffered from not using true pixel accuracy, which resulted in some things looking weirdly out of place (this applied mainly to the font and the "smeary" enemy projectiles).

Overall, the controls were very solid, and zip-zooming around with the dash was a lot of fun! People have already mentioned the issue of falling into pits too easily when dashing, so I'm not gonna harp on that here. When using the analog stick to move, the character also really likes to face up/down even when it feels like I'm pointing the stick sideways, which often led to missed attacks.

And again, as people have mentioned, the combo attack often hurt the player more than it helped... though as I found out, by pacing the attack just right to never actually trigger the combo, I was able to do better overall damage without the risk of accidentally running into enemies. (Still, I never used the melee attack again after unlocking the ranged abilities.)

My only major roadblock was that I had to look on Discord to figure out I was supposed to kill enemies to progress in the mountain area, because to me, the obstacle with the counter looked more like "collect X of this weird-looking thing" than "kill X of any enemies".

The second boss was definitely the major highlight of the game for me and helped motivate me to keep going. I absolutely loved the attack patterns and how dynamic and fast-paced the fight felt! My only issue was that it felt like there was very little time to actually hit the boss... until I realized I could just stand to the side during the "bullet hell" phase and get tons of hits easily with the aforementioned "slow attack" strategy (hitting slowly enough to avoid comboing myself into taking contact damage). Once I figured that out, the fight was over in only a couple phases.

The third ("mechanical eye") boss would definitely have been a big challenge... if I hadn't gotten a glitch where I somehow became unable to take damage, which obviously made the fight much easier.

The difficulty definitely took a huge nosedive after getting the disc ability. It felt like it became the solution to every puzzle and every enemy encounter from that point onward, and it kinda trivialized both combat and farming. It was sure as heck cathartic to use, though!

The final boss looked cool and felt suitably climactic, though it was again made pretty trivial thanks to dash and the disc, and overall, I think the bird boss had far more interesting attack patterns and would have made better final boss material. The presentation of the fight was also held back by the size of the boss and the arena, which meant the boss was barely visible much of the time. Still, the design of the boss and the music were amazing!

One big disappointment was that I couldn't go back to the main world after entering the final dungeon, as the gate requiring the three feather items was locked again and I couldn't open it from that side. This was annoying because I had missed the final bunny somewhere (and I even have an idea where), but I locked myself out of finishing that quest by thinking it was gonna be somewhere in the last dungeon.

All in all, the story might not have entirely landed with me, as I feel like it got a bit overly pessimistic towards the end and kinda contradicted its own message, unless I somehow missed a secret ending? I did get the keepsake from the shadowy person, but that didn't seem to have any effect. I also feel like I didn't really understand most of the references and easter eggs, having neither been part of the gamejam long enough, nor active enough on Discord. Still, it was definitely one of the strongest attempts at a solid story-centric entry I've seen in a gamejam, and without sacrificing the gameplay either. Overall, exceptional work!

SPOILERS:

Okay, so after some more consultation in the Discord, I did totally miss a major secret that happens to solve my biggest problem with the story! I think some bigger warning about the point of no return would definitely have been nice, or just letting you go back through the final gate normally, because the game will absolutely feel incomplete if you miss that. Still, that was definitely a really cool way to tie the loose ends together, and elevated the story and the game for me a good couple points, so great job!

That laser attack on the second bird boss is rough, I'm quitting there. I watched the ending in Celio's uploaded playthrough.

Of all the games I played so far, this one definitely feels the most like a journey. The narrative isn't super inventive, but it serves its purpose well.

Visuals were serviceable, I have some small peeves with them though. The high res font felt out of place in the pixel aesthetic, and it's not like it helps readability, as it's pretty stylized as is. Most of the game's screens looked pretty simple, which is fine in a jam context. The only place where I think some more detail would've been necessary is the water area, the bright cyan just doesn't look very good in my opinion and there definitely could've been done more to make the visuals match the vibe which the music was giving. In the mountain area, I found some of the screens in the mountain region hard to parse visually, as I was never sure whether certain tiles would be treated like walls or death pits when dashing into them. I didn't actually get there in my own playthrough, but the final arena and its boss had a very interesting energy to them, sort of reminded me of Giygas from Earthbound.

Music was excellent for the entirety of the game, it did a great job of establishing a mood. (And it just sounded good :)) Sound design was simple and didn't get in the way of anything.

I have some gripes with the gameplay. The sword didn't feel very good to use in my opinion. I think one of the main reasons for that is that the hitbox was just really tiny. You have to get very close to enemies to deal any damage, and when either you or the enemy move a tiny little bit, you are going to take damage. This is made worse by that three hit combo that makes you move towards where you're facing. I don't think this is bad on its own, as the enemies do get knocked back to compensate, but it did become an issue when trying to repeatedly attack a static enemy (such as any enemy in a corner or the bird boss), because you will just move into it and take damage. It becomes more apparent just how bad the sword is when you obtain the disc, because why would you use anything but the high-velocity homing projectile that bounces from enemy to enemy? The sword (fortunately) becomes obsolete by that point.

A big pain point for me was that you could fall down into pits or water when dashing. This just did not feel great, especially when sometimes the player was clearly still visually standing on the ground, and I think the game could've been better off if this just was not possible in the first place. I know some of the platforming sections rely on the player being able to fall, but I'm sure there is a way to design around this. If this is really something you want to keep, it might be advisable to make the player respawn next to the pit they fell into instead of the beginning of the room.

The map is pretty large, and while traversal through the forest and the earlier parts of the mountain do get trivialized by the dash, I think that fast travel in some shape would have been adequate. When I was stuck at the second bird boss, I wanted to go back to buy some more upgrades, but the way there is so long that I just could not be bothered.

It took me a while to figure out that those black obstacles with red numbers on them require you to kill all enemies in the room. Might want to indicate that more clearly somehow. Or maybe I'm just stupid, who knows. In one of the rooms where you're required to do this, an enemy flew offscreen, making it impossible to kill. Not a huge deal because I could just re-enter the room, but figured it'd be worth noting.

Some other miscellaneous notes:

The text scrolling in the dialog boxes seems to happen within the same predetermined duration, no matter how long the text is, so very short dialog texts would take a while to fully reveal, whereas long lines would go by very quickly. Generally, you want to reveal each individual character within a set amount of time, not a percentage of the whole text.

I wish the music and sfx volume settings were sliders, or at least had numbers indicating their current value next to them.

That's about it! This game was pretty neat, it felt like it was inspired by aLttP, and it does manage to capture some of that energy!

Giving up on this at the second bird boss - it's just not fun, and having to climb all the way back down and then back up the mountain to get any upgrades means I can't really do much to make it more manageable.

The bosses were a low point here. They start out decent and then get consistently worse over time. The first one is simple and works fine for an introductory boss, the second one is flawed but I still had some fun with it, and then the two bosses I fought after that were both absurdly tanky and fully uninteresting to fight. Every boss attack in this game seems to be either completely trivial to dodge (most of the bird's attacks don't even focus on the player and can be dodged by just standing still for most of the phase), or they're the bird's laser attack. God I hate that attack. The flames appear with no telegraph before the attack proper even begins, so you just. Instantly take damage if you happened to end the last phase standing in the wrong spot, and then the two flame patterns are treated as equal and have a 50/50 chance of appearing despite being radically different in how they actually effect the attack - the horizontal flames make it relatively easy and even decently fun to dodge the lasers by moving back and forth and then dashing across the lasers when you need to turn around, but for the vertical ones I genuinely cannot imagine any way to consistently avoid the lasers there. The lasers are now much more closely aligned with the space you have to move in, so you can't avoid them by just moving back and forth through the lanes like you can with the horizontal beams because they just take up so much more of the space; trying to move horizontally doesn't work because for some godforsaken reason the flames are placed exactly close enough together that trying to dash over one row will regularly faceplant you directly into the next; and when I tried to just repeatedly dash through the lasers I got killed by their lingering hitboxes stacking up over the space. Every time it used the vertical flame pattern I'd come out of the phase with at best a third of my healthbar gone, which meant the fight came down to tediously waiting for the extremely slow and mind numbingly trivial dash and thunder phases where the bird is just... fully invulnerable to damage despite these taking up the majority of the fight, standing next to it and wailing on it with the disc for the like ten seconds the fireball phase lasts, and then praying that it used the correct flame pattern in the laser attack often enough that I could survive. Repeat for cycle after cycle after cycle as I'm left wondering just how much health the stupid thing has, until I inevitably lose most of my health to vertical flame patterns and then accidentally dash of the platform and die. Most of these phases are identical to the first fight against the boss, where they already wore thin after a few cycles - by this point there is nothing even slightly engaging left to them at all, leaving them as soul sucking time filler while I wait for the make or break laser attack.

The third boss had similar issues with being invulnerable most of the time combined with a massive health pool. The fight is interesting at first - you have to work around the walls the boss makes to defeat the towers, the whirlwind attack is genuinely difficult and fun to figure out how to dodge... but within a few minutes the towers are gone, then it takes maybe a few more cycles for me to figure out how to dodge the whirlwind, then within a few more cycles its started getting tedious... and there's still dozens of cycles left to go. That one, at least, was easy enough that it didn't take multiple tries, so I ended up pushing through it, but I had I died close to the end (which I nearly did as I started slipping up from boredom) there's a good chance I would've just dropped the game there.

I'm not sure how much else to comment on. Maybe I should've just given up at the end of my previous session and written a review then, because with this session being just failed attempts at the second bird the bosses are all that's on my mind. I left some other feedback on discord during the rest of my playthrough so maybe that'll have to do.

As far as positives... the mvm references were fun, and the visuals are decent. Wish I'd gotten to see the end of my sidequest. I think the core "platforming" mechanic of dashing over gaps in a top-down setting is interesting and shows promise too, but it's still rather janky and often frustrating in its current state (though significantly better than it was in the beta version I played.)

Me when i see a gay people (It's a Metroidvania Month reference)

Okay so here i am gonna be 100% honest and wont lie and just say how i felt after the playing the game 

Firstly lets start with positives :

1.Great inclusion of mvm references 

2.Beautiful art

3.Nice Dash effect(I have ran out good things to say actually )

4.bosses were cool

Now the Cons OR Things  I found annoying  and not fun : 

1.The world feels empty like it has a whole lot of nothing and just iis empty and feels boring to revisit older areas 

2.The music - this is one thing i hated the most in the game the start area and start screen music is so annoying like my ears actually started to hurt after playing the game i took a break and continued later 

3.Now this one is MASSIVE ONE : the player itself now i will explain this in depth 

a) the movement is fine i would say slow yes but thats fine i would say the main prob is that after the player does the attacks they get moved in that direction now this i hated the most literally made me rage quit the game 

b)The upgrades sys is telling the player to grind instead of explore and i think thats not cool personally the shop was weird if i had a guess i think you had no time therefore you made a shop for upgrades 

c)Player respawn is a bit unfair i would say but this part i would say is pass able actually 

4.Bosses : So i am shocked firstly i liked the bosses (like i mentioned above) but the boss hurt boxes are too off feels like i took damage by the air and dont get me started on the flying one like its a cool fight but its paced badly the boss is never open to take damage and when it is the player attacks suck so you just end up taking damage and finally make the arena that tiny is crazy and making it fallable its like you wanted the player to chill around personally the fight could have been so much cooler if the boss was there a lot of time and the arena was not fallable. The wolf boss i think is fine not that much to complain about it ig .

5.Things are unclear like after hitting a switch i am going around trying to see what happen just to see a door opened like maybe a sound effect or something or atleast make the thing we hit different sprite so we understand its important 

6.The game in my opinion is not a metroidvania its more of a action rpg like thats cool but I think this could have been a metroidvania if there were more connections to areas and stuff instead of the mostly linear structure which gives the feeling of a journey but towards the ends make u disappointed 

Suggestions / things to improve thing :

1.make the player more fun to use and make its attacks not put them in danger 

2Make the world more connected 

3.and probably add hp up or stuff in the world instead of a shop 

Now to End this review i would like to say the game was fine i expected a lot more from the game but left disappointed also if my language here was rude or anything sorry i was being 100 % honest thats all and GL for future projects