Umbra

BROOO
NICE GAME

What an EXCELLENT platformer this is. Love the aesthetic, controls and roguelike aspects a lot.

<3

Lots of cool stuff here! The obvious standout part of this game is the sword. It both looks and feels really good to use. If there's one critique I have about the sword it's that I'd like it to be an even more central mechanic. By that I mean, right now the sword only really interacts with the combat half of the game, and not the platforming half (or if it does, I completely missed it). If you could find some way to make it meaningfully interact with platforming as well, that'd really elevate this game, as the sword is absolutely the best part of this game and what makes it stand apart from other, similar games.

Minor Art Critique:
sometimes the background is hard to distinguish from the foreground. It's not always clear what I can go through and what I'll collide with.

Platforming Critiques:
The platforming controls feel pretty bare-bones right now. They don't necessarily feel bad, but there's lots of room for improvement. Jumping in particular feels very much like it's just a simple "if on ground and button currently down, jump", which doesn't give very fine control. The easiest 3 ways to make platforming controls feel better are probably adding coyote time, variable jump height, and input buffering (that last one would also require changing jump from being "if key currently down" to "if jump key transitioned from up to down").

Combat Critiques:
Sometimes the smaller enemies get really close to/overlap you, and it's near-impossible to see them when that happens. One way to fix this could be to make the AI try to stay to the left/right of you instead of getting all the way in close. I feel like either dying needs a bigger punishment, or healing needs to be cheaper. Right now, it feels like dying and respawning at full health is less punishing than spending 10 gems to restore just 1 health. Maybe dying/respawning could use a true savestate mechanic, where EVERYTHING resets back to when you collected the last checkpoint, instead of just your position? But that that might make some things more frustrating.
Using the same currency to heal and buy health upgrades means that the players who need those health upgrades more are simultaneously the least likely to be able to afford them (because they spent all their gems on healing).

Narrative Critiques:
I'm not generally the biggest fan of games (or any medium of story) opening with lore. I need to meet the character(s) and world first before caring about the gods/ancient history/anything like that. Even if it's just playing around with the characters for 5 minutes, I'll have had a chance to wonder why things are the way they are, and then the first nuggets of lore can be fed to me. But not too much at once, because too much all at once will mess with the pacing.
Instead of pressing a button instantly skipping to the next line of dialogue, it should probably instantly finish writing the current dialogue (only skipping the animation of the dialogue appearing), and then the next time the button is pressed the dialogue is cleared and the next line begins appearing.

Bugs I Noticed:
- sometimes the light glow effect disappears briefly
- When I found the final room, I couldn't seem to leave it the same way I came in. I hadn't explored the whole level and wanted to go back before finishing, but the game didn't seem to let me.

Some other cool stuff I noticed:
Lots of really cool tech art vfx here. A bunch of work went into all that, and it shows. I like it a lot.
Despite trying my hardest, I was unable to find any softlocks, so well done there.
Once again, the sword is incredibly cool. That's what makes this game special. You should lean into that.

what does cool down do?

wow

nice game