Thanks for giving it a try. You're confirming some of my suspicions around how things work right now - I REALLY needed someone elses perspective though. Hard to stay objective after playing through the thing for the 1000:th time

-It's a bit weird that the small blobs don't turn around when they hit a wall. I'm just letting you know in case you're too good at killing enemies and don't ever see that behavior.
-Yep. That's my bad. The AI really shouldn't be that simple. We went from a system where you didn't really have different hitboxes depending on whether you were standing or crouching, so I threw together a smaller enemy to test it out. But yes. It shouldn't just walk into a wall

-The initial slime seems a bit cruel. Someone who's just figuring out the game has a good chance of being hit by the slime after attacking it once and expecting it to die. Also kinda cheap is the small slime hiding in the grass later on.
Agree with the small slime hiding in the grass. Will remove that one. Regarding the initial slime (I'm guessing the one in the very first room), I'll probably just remove that one altogether, and let the green one encountered outside the first room be the first enemy.
-The ducking animation gives the appearance of readying the shield, but it doesn't do anything to protect me.
It's supposed to. It's just not implemented yet. But we were thinking of having it protect you against projectiles rather than enemy attacks later on. Maybe that's under-utilizing the shield though...
-The sword swings are much too slow for me. I imagine it's something that I could potentially get used to, but once the reapers came into play, I found fighting them like that really annoying. Pretty much every NES game I can think of had near-instant attacks. I guess Zelda II doesn't, but the shield was useful in that and made combat very different from this.
This is something we've been changing and tweaking and trying various things with. I had a feeling that this might come up. The way things are currently working, it IS actually a bit modelled after Zelda II. The shield will be used, but no, not in the way that it's used in Zelda II.
The thing is, we started out with an initial sprite looking like this (Kind of. It was a bit more polished later on, and the in-game attack was faster than the actual gif shown here). It also had instant attack:

This didn't work too well. The expected hitbox were big to the point where missing an enemy was virtually impossible if you didn't *really* screw up. We also added a small, small delay pretty early (it looked kind of weird that an enemy in front of you got hurt when the sword was in its top position). Still, it was more "near-instant" than the current way.
Yesterday, in order to fix the whole issue of basically being impossible to lose, we switched to the current way things are working. In order to also avoid the stun-lock problem you're mentioning, we added the slightly larger Zelda II-esque delay. We've also been experimenting with different kinds of enemy knockback etc to avoid this.
One option might be to scrap the delay and give a much more instant attack, combined with removing the stun on the enemies altogether. I would love to hear some more ideas on this.
-A downward attack while in the air would be helpful and maybe make combat more varied.
For some dumb reason, I've found myself trying to perform downward attacks. I wrote the code - I know they're not there

Might be time to add something like that, yes.
-Why do the reapers take off so much health? Losing more than a full heart to a single hit seems a bit extreme.
Definitely something that could be tweaked. Maybe it's kind of evil right now.
-Why does the game close when I die? That's an easy way to make players/testers less interested in trying again.
Of course, the plan isn't to do that later on. You're supposed to be respawned at the last checkpoint, but that part isn't completely in place yet. I could have just made the game start over of course. I'll do that in the next build if I'm not done with the checkpoint system. Thanks.
-A way to quit the game without using Alt-F4 (or dying in this case) seems pretty important.
I haven't implemented the menu system yet, so I didn't want to spend too long time building a throwaway menu when Alt-F4 sufficed for testing purposes. If it's just the matter of closing the game easily, then I could just bind it to escape for now.
-I hated the controls. It's been a long, long time since I last played an indie game that used J and K as the primary action buttons, but I guess there's a precedent for it. Personally, I would really like to play this with Arrows + Z and X (or X and C in case of AZERTY users).
Yeah, they're going to be configurable. To be honest though, I didn't quite know what people preferred as a default. I almost never play this kind of game with the keyboard.
-I never did figure out what the purple orbs on my HUD were. I thought they'd be magic, but all I could do was jump and attack.
There is a magic system, but it's a currently disabled WIP. I'll disable them from future builds to avoid confusion if I haven't finished that system by the next version.
I did mostly get used to the range and speed of the attacks, which was nice, but the whole thing does feel like it's lacking in excitement. Enemies don't do anything interesting, and all that combat does is slow down progress. There's no benefit to it and it's just not fun to fight these enemies. That said, I don't think it would be that difficult to tweak the combat if you feel inclined to listen to me. I'm curious kinda what other people think of it.
This is, without a doubt, my *greatest* worry to be honest. We've tried so many various ways of "making combat more engaging" that I'm afraid we're losing track of what has been working and what hasn't. This is exactly the reason why I needed to get a build up here for people to play and comment on. Thank you so much for leaving such detailed feedback.
If you, or anyone else, would have more suggestions on *what* would make the enemies more interesting to fight, I would LOVE that kind of feedback. I too am a bit curious of what other people think of it. If it turns out that the general concensus is "this is a boring way to do things", then I really need to change things. I'll give it some more time to gather some more feedback, but this was worth a lot.