The clock does suck.  If you click near the middle of the clock face on the right half, the hour hand moves forward.  Near the middle on the left moves it backwards.  Clicking near the outside of the clock face on the right moves the minute hand forward and the left backwards. 

ASCII art!

Code:

          12
  +-------+-------+
  |       |       |
  |    +--+--+    |
9 |    |H-|H+|    | 3
  | M- |  |  | M+ |
  |    +--+--+    |
  |       |       |
  +-------+-------+
          6

The game didn't feel like I had meaningful choices.  I read the thread to figure out what guard did (I didn't really see any evidence it did anything) and still don't really know what it does.  Giving 'temporary armor till it's broken' sounds like it's not worth a turn unless it's enough to completely block more than one attack.  If it does block more than one attack's worth, you always use it, otherwise you never use it.

The first time I played I got a series more than eight shop/tree/sign/church events in a row at the very start.  That sucked.  I just bought weapons and eventually started coming up against acolytes and ghosts.  I would probably hit them less than 25% of the time, so eventually one killed me.

Second time I bought armor instead.  The price didn't seem to go up, I bought armor of invincibility or something for like 40g.  Then it offered me armor again for like 40g and I bought it, but it didn't give me anything new.  I missed what the text called it.  By this point (maybe earlier and I didn't notice), enemy attacks would actually usually heal me.  Against the 60ish HP ghosts, I'd probably have to attack 20-30 times just to hit them the three or so times necessary to kill them.  Then I got a 90 HP ghost that I attacked 50+ times and hit only once.  I stopped playing there (still at full health because of the healing).

I play roguelikes, so the idea of permadeath isn't harsh to me, in general.  In most roguelikes you have many paths to build your character and strategies to use in combat (including running away).  Here, you basically click fight a lot unless you're about to die so you hit heal instead.  If you give players enough options that they feel that they wouldn't die if given the same situation again (even survival means fleeing) or that they learned something and would do better next time, permadeath is not bad.

I thought the feel of the game was nice but it was too short.  I liked the music.  I'm not sure if the Simon-like games between parts really fit.  The puzzles were okay, but would maybe be more interesting if you could work the entire room into each part.  For the final part when finding the keys, some areas were too dark (at least on my monitor) to see anything, but I could use tab to have Flash highlight clickable areas.

I couldn't figure out any of it.  What am I supposed to set the clock to? 

There are numbers on the paper in the garbage can and behind the picture on the wall.

I played through this once on speedster.  It was decently fun and even though it felt like it was on the simple side right now, it wasn't too long to overstay itself.  I thought it was fairly easy and didn't die.  Afterwards, I did the first level with each of the others to try them out.  I enjoyed speedster by far the most.  Controlling the ranger didn't feel very good; it's like playing Smash TV with only one stick.  The berserker is billed as the easiest but I actually played it last and took the most damage with it on the first level.  Spy felt like maybe you shouldn't be detected if you're standing still.  It's also kind of unfun fighting multiple enemies at once to kill one and then have to run away to restealth. 

To make it more enjoyable, I think more varied enemies would help.  They basically vary by melee/ranged and attack speed.  I guess these ideas might be a little cliche, but stuff like fast but weak enemies, or slow enemies you have to hit from behind or bait or strong attacks from.  You could take a look at NMcCoy's Dragondot games.

Giving the player an additional ability not tied to the class might be interesting.  It could be a Castlevania-like subweapon you find with one/limited uses or you find charges like Castlevania hearts.  This would probably be better for a longer story mode if you're the same class the entire time through than for shorter challenge games.  Some kind of combo system to motivate the player to be aggressive like in the modern Shinobi games might also be fun.  Or perhaps this could help with spy to chain kills.

As for the graphics, I think some people will be turned off by them.  I don't mind them and personally consider the simple and clean abstract nature easier on the eyes than having bad sprites with poor animation.

It was interesting and not too long.  Is there an extra key or did I miss something?

On your personal forum, the textboxes for input set the background color to white but not the foreground color.  I use a white text on black background color scheme.  You need to set both colors or neither.  This is why I'm posting this feedback here instead.

I should be able to fix this, but I'm having trouble visualizing what you are experiencing. Could you snap a screen shot for me? Thanks!

It appears you've set the background to be white but did not set the text color at all.  If that's the case, then you can't guess what color the text will be.  In my case, it's white and can only be seen when selected.

Since someone else brought it up, it reminded me I also experienced something of a tearing effect when the screen scrolls.  I've only tried playing at 3x size.

I played for a little bit.  The music is very good.  The gameplay itself seems a little slow.  I enjoy adventure/exploration games, but I suppose I'm used to more action or platforming oriented ones.

A couple suggestions that aren't very big ones would be to allow down + jump to drop from certain platforms or allow jumping/letting go while climbing the vertical shafts.  The main ideas would be to allow quicker movement but not really impact gameplay.  Climbing the shafts is a little annoying because it's slow, if I could just press jump to drop down one or hold up and tap jump to jump up them it'd be nicer.  Reusing the crawl graphic at 90 degrees is a little weird.  Crawling down them should probably still leave you facing upwards, not downwards.

I had a few small issues, but nothing important.  In this image, you can see the hanging plants/vine stuff gets drawn over everything (like the bird or the player if you jump), which looks weird.  The same issue happens in your grandmother's house while she's sleeping and you stand on top of her and the bed, basically.  

In this image, while you're hanging on the middle ring you have to face right to jump and grab the top ring.  If you're on the ring and face left, you'll just jump and fall back to the same ring.

In this image, I didn't think the red line was a platform at first.  I tried to jump several times from the block to the ledge.  When you try to jump all the way from the block to the ledge, you very briefly ledgegrab but then are forced to fall before you can climb up (which is why I tried to do it several times since I was confused).  I suggest redoing the visual of the red platform, putting it up against the ledge, or both.

When I had to go to the general store in the first town it was night time.  A way to skip to day might be useful.  Or make that first shop open all the time, maybe.

It doesn't seem like you can exit the game from just a gamepad.  I had to use the keyboard to hit escape.

I'm not sure these are possible because of MMF2, but volume controls and preventing the Windows screensaver from coming on when playing with a gamepad would be nice.  (The latter is an issue I have with a lot of indie games that use a gamepad.  I have a cheap Logitech USB gamepad, if it's relevant.)

On your personal forum, the textboxes for input set the background color to white but not the foreground color.  I use a white text on black background color scheme.  You need to set both colors or neither.  This is why I'm posting this feedback here instead.

http://sheap.net/~fyren/wager.jpg

If this text is not intended to be white, then I suspect you are specifying the background but not also the foreground color.

My eyesight is kind of poor and I find a lot of the text kind too difficult to read.  The font on the intro story is weird.  The screens/popups with white text on a yellow background don't have enough contrast.

There's really very little to see yet which makes it hard to answer your questions, but here goes:

1. should I have an inventory so you can carry oil cans you find?
Lacking other mechanics, no.  It would probably make it really easy.  The way the prototype is, you waste a ton of oil at the start because you're overfilled.

2. what purpose can journals have? originally they were purely score. should you need to collect a certain amount to make the exit appear? I would like them to be grounded in gameplay.
One idea might be that the goal is just to get out but the journals give you access to other areas to grab treasure or something for score (rather than the journals being directly tied to score).  They could have text saying "look for X and then do Y" where X vaguely decribes a pregenerated/hand made area.  Y could be not an action the player does but just like "press the hidden button" that happens by itself once you know it's there.

3. if journals played a more important part. should you be able to burn them to get a small boost of Torch power? causing the player to have to choose?
Need more mechanics fleshed out.  If there's only fuel and only journals as direct score, it's not too interesting.  There isn't really a significantly gameplay choice. If you're about to go blind you start burning journals, otherwise you don't... it's basically "lose" or "don't lose yet and pay score."

If you want to preserve journal burning, the choice should probably be using them as fuel or getting some other bonus.  Taking the idea above as an example, you can choose to burn the journal (maybe letting you go over the oil cap) or read it to get the info.  This could be rationalized as the journals being old, folded paper that falls apart after being opened and read, if you like.  This choice should probably be immediate on pickup and not delayable.

Like others have said, the art and style are nice.  I only played the first six levels, so I don't really have a lot of comments about the gameplay.  Mainly, waiting for a robot to walk to a button is kind of annoying and also getting crushed by a closing door is annoying.  Less annoying because I guess you get a checkpoint at each button or so, but the first few levels don't seem designed to make the timing tight.  Maybe some buttons should only be pressable by robots but not toggle off when the robots step off.

I also found being asked for a login pretty irritating but I don't think many others would be bothered by it.  I don't really care about high scores at all, so to me, that plus the unskippable scoreboard after levels is just wasting time.

The level select menu is also really slow to respond to input (I have a Q6600, 4 gigs of RAM, and an 8800 GT with recent drivers).  Volume controls other than on/off would also be nice.

I enjoyed the platforming.  The little mechanics added to spice it up were good, but some of the arrangements of platforms/walls seemed to get used a few times.  I would have liked it if the time between death and playing again were shorter.  A few of the levels with the moving spikes could have had a better initial timing; as it is the player would have to wait on some of them.  For me, it seemed the first couple red levels had a big spike in difficulty and then the next two were easy.

For the aesthetics, the foreground was nice and though I never lost track of the player, it might be possible.  The backgrounds were a little too simple.  I enjoyed the music in the red levels the most but the track was a little short.

I disagree with Valerien and enjoy the music.  I wish there were more tracks, though, since there's a lot of repeating and instrument swapping.

I found a few more bugs in this version.

First, the root creature crushed me to death.  It told me I could quickload or go back to a checkpoint.  When I clicked to use the checkpoint, I was on or near the start, but should have been in the town, I guess.  When I loaded with F9 or whatever (I had never saved the game myself, just wanted to see what would happen), it put me somewhere above the start, falling.  I ended up landing on the starting platforms, I think.

Second, I was able to stand inside blocks a few times.  I was climbing up a set of single-high blocks in a column by extending and jumping so they'd end up below me.  By doing this a lot, standing near the wall and jumping kind of late so the front face would clip me, eventually I'd be inside one, standing on the one below.  I could jump, and then I'd land on top of it.  Or, I could retract it and I'd just still be there standing on the one below.

Third, if you hold jump going up a slope like the stairs, it plays the start of the jump sound repeatedly (and annoyingly).  I guess you're landing and starting a new jump because of the slope.

I got up to the Frankenstein monster puppy.  The style, graphics, and music were good, but the gameplay was pretty uninteresting.  I guess I'm not looking at it from a casual game viewpoint, but the enemy bullet patterns were not really interesting, player speed seemed slow, and the player hitbox seemed large.  Worst of all, almost every enemy just moved left and right across the top of the screen.