Briar Flame - Demo

Thanks everyone for your valuable feedback! I have updated the demo with these points addressed. I hope you enjoy the game!

Okay, honest feedback from playing. This is fairly critical but not meant badly.

• This is trying way too consciously and overtly to emulate Hollow Knight. The title screen in particular is just... Hollow Knight's. If you have any interest in this gaining commercial viability or popular success, you need to abandon this direction and find your own ASAP. At bare minimum, if you're emulating others' directly, you need to wrap the aesthetic differently. Also a bit of a tone whiplash after the "Happy Doodz" silly cartoony logo.
• The tutorialization is all over the place. You're told how to walk, but before you ever need to you have to crawl, which you aren't told how to do. And so on. You're told how to attack before there are any enemies, then like 5 tutorial points later you fight an enemy and you just have to remember what the attack key was. Before you ever need to regular jump, you need to double-dash-jump.
• The tutorial ghost people also are pretty inconsistent on how vague their direction is vs. outright telling you the controls to press; I think you should be more consistent and if you have to standardize one style or the other, do the latter so the player at least always knows what they're being told to do/learn.
• Someone warns you to look before you leap, with the indicated icons just being the movement keys again. I hold down, assuming it'll let me see down; it doesn't. I jump down, assuming there's a trap but not being sure how to avoid it, die. Not sure what you're meant to do here or if the 'look down' command just wasn't working?
• Way way way too many things taught in too short a span, which is not how player retention works. You need to establish the player understands and has retained one thing before packing on another. In like, two minutes, you've introduced base gameplay, two types of attack, a shield, and two different resources besides health. The first enemy takes like 8-9 hits before you've even established the player knows how to attack, and you fight the next enemy with a different attack, and then suddenly you're fighting a boss with like, one and a half actual enemy fights under your belt, maybe.
• Genuinely rolled my eyes at "Jailer of the Untriumphant". Deeply overdramaticized. Approaches like that really need to earn the player's respect to be taken seriously, and when you force it that fast, well. Yeah.
• On retention/tutorialization again, by the time I got to the boss I hadn't really been tested on this pretty wide skill set (many of the keys I only had to press like, once ever, or in a single combat situation) and didn't really remember what my moves were besides "spam attack" and "one of these was a shield, shoot, which key was it". Looking at your gif it probably feels good to be dashing through the enemy hitbox but I don't think you've actually trained the player enough yet by a long shot.
• UI takes up far too much space. Lines are way way way too thick. I also don't think it looks that great with very sharp pure white edges when that's not really in line with the in-game artstyle.
• And, uh, as others noted, this is outright just Hornet's outfit down to the colour. This is an outright error. Imagine if you dressed the character in red clothes with blue overalls and a big red hat with a "M" on it, then gave them a mustache.
• Maybe I'm being overly nitpicky but I don't think the font suits the art style.

That was pretty critical - some positives.

• I liked the gremlin-y rat character noises a lot. I think leaning into that more than the self-serious HK/SS direction would be a good move.
• Assuming you learn and internalize it, it seems like a pretty varied and responsive moveset.
• The overall art style and aesthetic was working, other than the blatantly HK-elements (font, black ghosts). I do agree that having pure white background elements with pure white gameplay elements isn't great but that's pretty addressable, and I think the simple gradient-shapes looks is overall working and cohesive.

Hope I'm not coming across as disheartening; if you slow down your tutorialization and back off from the HK imitation I do think you're starting on something solid here.