Soul Piece 2.5D Indie Puzzle/Platformer

My first impression upon getting into the game was really good. I liked the music a lot. The visuals, while a bit dark, were really nice too.

-The menu screen could use some visual feedback, and maybe auditory feedback, when hovering over things and clicking them.

-A game that controls with a gamepad should probably let the player use that gamepad in menus.

-I found it really strange to start the game by going left when practically every 2D platformer in existence has the player's goal to the right most of the time. Maybe there's a story reason for that, but if not then it's a little weird.

-The jumping doesn't have a nice arc to it. It's very vertical, but the horizontal movement doesn't match well so it doesn't have much range. I'd say the horizontal speed could be increased slightly.

-Movement in general feels very...samey. That's one of the issues with such a simple character. You don't necessarily have animations to make the movement look/feel good. That said, maybe you could add some particle effects when moving quickly, or make the grass move as the "character" passes through it. It might also make sense to have it act more like a ball, with slightly longer speed changes, but maybe that would mess with the platforming too much.

-I liked the unbalanced platform area. It felt good to make my way across (although I think I did jump off of mid-air at least once. Might be a collision issue?).

-That said, the limited jump did cause me to fall right at the end when it felt like I should've been able to make it. I then ended up at the very start of the game again, and really didn't want to go all the way around. It might be a good idea to set things up in such a way that you never have to retread too much ground if you fall, but then again maybe that "punishment" is by design. It's really not for me, though.

-...I just went back and tried again. For some reason, every jump apart from that last one is simple. Then I just fail to cross that gap as if there's an invisible wall in front of the final platform. The third time I tried, though, there was no problem, so I don't know what was going on.

-The message about the wings only mentioned keyboard controls, not the gamepad even though I was using it.

-I love the visuals for the wings.

-I really, really hate chromatic aberration. I know that's a personal opinion, but I don't see why you'd make a nice looking environment and then have a third of the screen be blurry and distorted at all times. If that could be turned off, it'd be nice.

-Walls have a really high amount of friction. I wouldn't expect to slowly slide down a wall with this sort of "character".

-The area with the crushers is not made like most similar areas in games. There are usually little hints in the ground/background that let you know what areas are safe, or that you can remember when the crushers rise up again. The cracks in the ground aren't that helpful, and the shifting, angled camera makes it difficult to see where the crushers actually hit since once you get there the camera angle is different.

-I really appreciate checkpoints before potentially-frustrating areas.

-Having to purposely fall down a pit that looked like a death pit was a bit strange, but I really liked that series of corridors down there.

-There doesn't seem to be a gamepad control for pushing blocks.

-...or to interact with crystals

-Between the slow movement and the large amount of back-and-forth travel, I didn't feel like finishing the colored block section. That's where I stopped. The elevator is really slow as well, which doesn't help. I feel like maybe that section could be reworked. Maybe the blocks could be spread out, so the way you get each one down to the bottom is a bit different to keep things interesting. I'm sure there are a lot of things that could be done to decrease the feeling of repetition there.

-I did like that the blocks were in an order that seemed like it would make getting them to their proper positions trickier, but I stopped playing before seeing how it would work out.

-One thing I'd recommend for testing purposes is some sort of "warp to checkpoint" system so if a tester gets stuck or annoyed, they can report that but then jump to a later checkpoint and go on to test the rest of the game.

-Some atmospheric sounds, and just more sound effects in general, would be good. Maybe they're there and I just couldn't hear them over the air conditioner but the music came through pretty well so I assume sound effects are limited.

Anyway, I think the game's got potential. It feels fairly good to play and I liked the environments. The music in particular really helped to create a nice atmosphere. With slightly faster movement and some reworking of the object placement, I think I could really enjoy this game.