I really love the concept of the game and enjoyed playing it. It really follows the theme "failure is progress" and the artstyle is very cute. I would say though that it can be quite confusing and frustrating at some points as you cant see where you're going sometimes even with the fireflies. But overall great idea :)

I very much like the core concept, however there are some points in the execution that I feel could be significantly improved. Mainly, the pace. For a game jam, completion takes way too long. I think it took me like half an hour to an hour explore the entire level, with some frustrations along the way. With out your firefly, visibility is almost zero, and with no way to regain it, you might as well reset yourself to the beginning and start the arduous journey again. Additionally, during exploration, you might accidentally die without having used your firefly at all, basically wasting the time spent. I believe if the player automatically dropped a firefly upon death, it could improve the players quality of life. There's no checkpoints throughout the level, and while adding them would lead to faster exploration since you don't need to go through areas you've been in already, adding them, i believe would distract from the main mechanic of lighting the path. I think speeding up the movement would be a better way. Maybe even a dash?

Some other minor things i noticed, the players gravity feels weird? The player character falls very slowly, suggesting a low gravity environment (which i thought at first), except the fireflies flap too quickly for that. With the player character being a kind of mage, i think adding some magic particles could suggest a kind of slowfall spell?

The slow-motion on death feels poorly implemented and more like the frame rate is dropping than an intended feature, and there's a bug where an intense force is applied to the character on death, pushing them quite a distance.

(oh, and the level completion trigger isn't working so I didn't even notice I won the game)

With that out of the way, the level design, while sadistic would have been fun to explore if it wasn't for the issues above. And the player characters art is delightful, and I love the fireflies (though their light could be a bit warmer.

I like the main idea but i felt like you weren't forced enough to send a firefly due to the light ressoruce it already gave to the player, since i could basically walk through a big part of the level without using it, though i feel like the level length was a bit frustrating, maybe a checkpoint here and there would be nice to avoid that. I could also image the fireflies flying after a set cooldown and you have to decide where to shoot it to actually being forced to walk into death. Also maybe add a fullscreen button to the itch page.

Other than that i liked the theme of the game and i think it fits pretty well into the Jams Theme. Thank you for the game :)