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.