What a joy to play, that was cozy as heck! You've clearly put a lot of care into your sprite designs and story. Loved the animations for the player character, and the designs of the various monks and creatures. The mushroom king's sprite was especially a standout for me. I'm also going to need a whole spin-off about Brother Jimbo, because how did a former mob boss ("who wants to know?") wind up as a monk lol? 

Generally I found it clear how to progress in the map, and your layout made it easy to see points of interest to come back to. In terms of player movement, it would be nice to have more fluidity/control, but because the world wasn't very challenging, it didn't bother me much (i.e., it didn't cause me to die in frustrating ways). My only other note would be that compared to the way the green and blue keystones worked, the red one felt a little disconnected, since you (I think?) relied on nearby rats to chew through the vines, and so you could activate the red pedestals before getting the red keystone itself. 

Huge shout-out to you for the amount of effort you spent writing unique dialogue for every NPC...like, WOW - and let me tell you, I talked to every living being. I lived for the non-stop mushroom puns and THE TOXIC MUSHROOM...perfection XD. Also, doubling back to talk to that one hard to reach flower, just for him to yell "POLLINATE ME"? This is the content I crave haha. 

Awesome work! <3

Really nice game, I rally enjoyed the game play and the story, and all the love you put on there, all the npc’s, and level design. Really nice work.

I believe there was some bug I’ve got the double jump without buying it, and sometimes I could use the keystone power before getting it, but it was just minor details

I’ve made a review of it on my YouTube channel.

Really great entry! I love the idea of having the autotrophs, heterotrophs, and decomposers split into their own sections, and its a super creative take on the theme. The game felt very well-paced to me, with lots of fun character interaction, as well as platforming challenges and exploration. At one point, I encountered an audio bug where the footstep sound kept repeating after walking into a room, and it never stopped, which was a little annoying, but it was only during the last few minutes so it wasn't too bad. 

Overall, really well made, great job!

I love the world you created and all the different characters were a joy to discover and talk to. The Cactus Guard were my favorite lol. And I appreciate how well you incorporated the Ecosystem theme. 

Being able to buy the abilities and access each area in any order is a fun idea, but also kind of a double-edged sword. The nonlinearity and player-freedom is great, but it's hard to level design around not knowing what abilities the player has at any particular moment. So there was maybe more backtracking than there needed to be through mostly empty levels. ("Empty" meaning I've already talked to the NPCs and collected most of the pickups) 

But it was still very fun to get new abilities and explore more and meet new characters. I had a great time!

Hello just want to start off with that this was a really pleasant and fun experience! A very solid entry! I love the artstyle and the theme of the game!

I'll just run down some notes that I took while playing! 

Visuals were simple but cute and I liked them, however I think they would do well with more polish and more animation but I understand that's hard to accomplish in such a small period of time!

I think the player could use from being a little faster so the movement feels a bit nicer!

There were a bit too many NPCs in the game compared to actual gameplay, I understand this is just a personal preference though!

I love the hub zone and shop but my main gripe with it was that this felt more like a zone platformer than an actual metroidvania albeit had alot of metroidvania elements! If thats what you were going for than disregard this bit!

Overall a very sleeper entry and has a lot of potential and cool additions!

PS: Super minor thing but when zipping put everything in a single folder so it's a lot easier to just extract and play over asking the player to make a folder for it!

PS2: I just read the comment where u had only an hour a day to work on it and you are a single developer, this makes this all the more cooler! And I loved the storyboard-esque intro at the start, had a cozy feeling to it!

Nice work! Super charming, fun writing. I also don’t think combat was needed, it thankfully wasn’t bad, but mostly avoidable. I think a cool direction would be the NPCs giving hints for puzzles, I already wanted to talk to everyone for the puns alone.

I’m really of two minds regarding buying upgrades. My initial reaction was that I didn’t like it, but after exploring the levels to collect more stuff, and knowing what they were, it was nice to think “I’ll need to dash to get here”. I certainly love the sense of discovery, but it was cool “know the solution” and then “identify the problems”. I can imagine there’s a way to make this setup work.

I’m really impressed by the full integration of the theme. I had some ideas but they a) never came to fruition and b) wouldn’t not have necessarily been identifiable of “ecosystem”. It would have been cool if the zones actually were interconnected (or you started to interconnect them) and you could see things improve.

Not a fan of the key bindings (fortunately controlling the character felt fine). Thankfully I was able to use antimicrox to map everything to a gamepad (additionally combining E and W).

Lastly, loved the intro, I wanted to do something like that but time is my enemy.

Nice game! Visuals weren't the most polished but they're charming and the areas were all nicely varied. The design of the world in general was pretty solid, and was pretty expansive for a jam game! Theming was very original, and nicely implemented.

I agree with the previous comment about the combat, it felt pretty lackluster. Just giving enemies some stun or knockback on hit would help a lot I think - as it is I mostly just stood outside an enemies range and waited for them to walk back over, which was just kind of tedious.

Also agree that the main abilities being bought rather than found kind of killed the metroidvania feeling on this one. I also feel like it probably wasn't intentional that you can dash in all eight directions given that kills any potential utility of the much more expensive double jump upgrade.

Biggest issue for me though was the sound design, the singular music track got old pretty quick and the footsteps sound had weird clicking in it that was really irritating. I also encountered a bug that caused the footsteps sound to keep playing continuously and stack on top of itself which drove me to finally just mute the game.

Alrightie, that's a very cute little game x3

I love the artstyle and the char designs, they're all adorable, and I really really love all the life you sprinkled into this little world, everything here is as charming as it can be, from the little intro animatic to all of the dialogues x3c

That's also a very fun implementation of the theme! It sounds basic on the surface, but I would never have expected an entry that could also serve as a little educational game! Separating all three stages of the food chain like that was super creative and I love it <3

Gameplay is very basic tho, there's not much to talk about it. Combat is honestly pretty lackluster I'm afraid, this would've been actually way better if it was just a little cozy adventure without your sword nor enemies, I think they do more harm than good here. You can't move while attacking and none of the moving enemies get hitstun nor my char gets iframes, so combat boils down to "mash the mouse until the monster dies while tanking hits because I literally can't avoid them", wich isn't particularly fun. (I would've just avoided all enemies altogheter instead of engaging with them, but there are a few mosquitoes and poopie beetles on positions where this isn't really possible).

Also, still kind of related to combat, I'll be a little nitpicky now, this is 100% just personal preference on my end, but I really see no reason as to why the attack button had to be a mouse click, and I personally also don't like using spacebar and shift for common actions like jumping and dashing, so I really would've appreciated an Arrows + ZXC option. But again, I'm just being nitpicky lol.

Buying the upgrades is.... Interesting, to say the least... Not a huge fan of it tho, that made me backtrack back and fourth needlesly more than it should've,  And I'm like, 80% sure you don't even need any of those upgrades to progress, the only things actually stopping you are the keystone balls, so this makes this essentially a "lock and key" game, wich is not what a Metroidvania is supposed to be. Ideally the only gates you should have are obstacles that requires the actual power ups and tricks you learn on your journey, not doors locked behind keys that you just press "E" once you have them.

Well I think that's all I had to say. Really adorable experience still ^v^

(I can't give ratings btw, I'm just here for the funsies, and hopefully to give usefull feedback)