this was a lot of fun!  I loved bashing the boss with the shield!

the concept and strengthening/weakening mechanics are pretty brilliant. i think the premise of this game won me over very well, and I feel the theme of the jam reflected excellently here.

like always with shmups, I have very specific pain points that I feel could have made for a better experience.

ive played a lot of bullet hell games (DDP, Garegga, Ketsui, etc.) and i feel what you're expected to do simply isn't possible at first when I strongly believe it should be "doable, but pretty much impossibly tough".

this game should really have a much smaller hitbox and faster speed. bullets are also very fast and barely leave you any gaps which makes me feel that the intended solution is to shield / facetank your way through a lot of the patterns instead of dodge them.

the player's fire rate is very piddly and weak, and the upgrades felt lopsided in practice. I wanted to select the upgrades with "make me faster and fire more bullets, make the boss not fire the spread that kills me instantly" much more over "increase the time in which the horizontal lasers take a coffee break for 0.1% longer"

you can't bullet seal chronoculus's spreads which is a bit unfortunate. getting point-blanked by the boss with no time to react is frustrating.

Best game I've played this jam so far. It's a very rewarding gameplay loop of doing better in the boss to become stronger for next loop. I like the push and pull design of surviving longer to increase player strength, and dealing more damage to decrease the boss's difficulty. Great art reminiscent of 20 minutes till dawn, and the music is a great fit.

Lot's of fun! I love the ramping up and down of the music to queue the beginning and end of the loop. Nice touch!

Had ton of fun defeating this guy, the variety of attacks that this boss has is actually impressive, the bossfight kinda reminded me of deltarune/undertale type of bossfights, also the progression system is real nice, overall great game!

I really liked the feel of this one. I'm glad you don't waste any time between deaths and jump quickly from death to upgrade screen to restart, it makes it pretty painless. I really loved the color palette you went with and the art style of the boss and the player, if I could make a wishlist for what you might have done with more time, I'd have loved to see the UI elements designed in pixel art to match that style. I also think (again, in a perfect world where you'd had time to do it, lol) it would have helped with clarity and strategy for the upgrade options to have little pictures of the ability so you can visualize it, as - especially at first - in the chaos it's hard to tell which move is which number, and hard to remember while on the upgrade screen which of the bosses' abilities has been giving you the most difficulty. Anyways, you can tell I really enjoyed this because my brain is excitedly imagining how you could take this tidy, well executed concept and take it to the next level! 

This is fantastic! I loved the idea of overcoming a seemingly unbeatable boss by getting stronger each loop! This game has really well thought-out mechanics, like how you learn what attack power each "hour" corresponds to - a perfect mix between skill progression and numerical progression. You guys did a seriously great job!

Good idea
The music seems to be broken, or is it intentional?
The boss is cool and difficult
I like it :D

This was quite hard, but also an incredibly fun progression. Fantastic boss design too

That game was legit fun and addicting! At first it seemed impossible but little by little i could see beating Chronoculus was possible! 

I honestly can't explain it. I died constantly, often frustratingly, and each time I did a little better, improved my character a bit, made the enemy worse, and honestly it just worked. In general I think these bullet hell games live and die by how they shoot, but honestly the real MVP here was the shield. I really really like how you allowed the player to use the shield offensively and also upgrade elements most games would never think to of like that brief moment of invincibility after getting hit. I also think visually the game is really really nice.

As for feedback, I think it would be better if the player had some more notification about which way the attacks are going to come from.

Overall, it was frustrating in a really satisfying way that made me stick it out even after I would normally bail. Defeating that giant boss was wonderful (also I really really love his design with his little clock eye).

Really interesting take on an incremental style game loop. Super clever to have both an upgrade track based around survival time and one based around damaging the enemy. It also took me a while to realize I could move up - something about the layout and certain art assets seem to suggest a sideview perspective. Maybe a couple of 3/4 view pillars or something would help to sell the effect. Either way, great job!

The gameplay loop had me continuously coming back for more. I lost track of how long i was playing for. really fun!

Man, this was way too addicting! Pretty difficult and it somehow reminds me of Wings of Vi - great work!

This is awesome! It's like the Radiance from Hollow Knight all over again but top down lol. I beat it with 33 deaths, 23 upgrades and 26 boss downgrades. The randomness of it was also really fun, and tying each move with an hour on a clock made it easier for me to remember what each attack was and informed by decisions when choosing downgrades. Love this!

This is so hard, it's almost as bad as the bosses in Knight Witch. The intro story is hilarious, and the art is good too. Great job, especially for so little time!

Hard but funny, I like it