Okay, I met the developer over discord and I am a developer myself.

With that out there, I am not extremely familiar with this project, I did get a chance to play the demo and later purchased this to see what was up. It is my understanding that this is the developers first complete project and that this was created using Game Maker. My experience is in Unity and GODOT so in this critique I cannot speak to GameMaker but I will speak on fundamental design.

1. State Machine in specific a Finite one would have made much of the controls better, controls are the first impression and it was a bad one, you had various controls that are active at the same time. Generally I make a habit of locking controls within a FSM to ensure I keep the growing number of them under well... control no pun intended.

1a. Forced options, when the game starts it detects my controller, this would be fine if it could detect which input I was actually using later or if it didn't actively use the controller and gave me the option to upon detection.

2. Music, a completed project in my humble opinion needs to have a ST or OST you really shouldn't have pushed this out without one. I fiddled with settings a bit and found sound by default is off but that's just the SFX not any music. Without that you've given yourself a higher hurdle in pulling your player into the mood you are setting.

3. A game like this is impressive to me, in that you attempted to give everything functionality and to the point where you have evolving logic from sequences of interactions. That tells me there was a strong vision for the game before design which is great.

4. UI is very smooth, while the visuals are very likely engine default that's just a rub, you can easily replace those place holders, however it probably should have been done in Early Access not on full release.

Conclusion. Okay this game has some very Nintendo-isc vibes but in what it is going for. It however can't get out of its own way in getting there.

This could be largely fixed with the implementation of a proper state-machine and some music. You've got the idea though with your tutorial, and to be honest tutorials are by far the most difficult thing to design, you go too far people hate it you go too light people hate it but what exactly is too far or too light? The reality is there isn't one, you just need to make the first thing you teach be the skip button.

Okay, I met the developer over discord and I am a developer myself. With that out there, I am not extremely familiar with this project, I did get a chance to play the demo and later purchased this to see what was up. It is my understanding that this is the developers first complete project and that this was created using Game Maker. My experience is in Unity and GODOT so in this critique I cannot speak to GameMaker but I will speak on fundamental design. 1. State Machine in specific a Finite one would have made much of the controls better, controls are the first impression and it was a bad one, you had various controls that are active at the same time. Generally I make a habit of locking controls within a FSM to ensure I keep the growing number of them under well... control no pun intended. 1a. Forced options, when the game starts it detects my controller, this would be fine if it could detect which input I was actually using later or if it didn't actively use the controller and gave me the option to upon detection. 2. Music, a completed project in my humble opinion needs to have a ST or OST you really shouldn't have pushed this out without one. I fiddled with settings a bit and found sound by default is off but that's just the SFX not any music. Without that you've given yourself a higher hurdle in pulling your player into the mood you are setting. 3. A game like this is impressive to me, in that you attempted to give everything functionality and to the point where you have evolving logic from sequences of interactions. That tells me there was a strong vision for the game before design which is great. 4. UI is very smooth, while the visuals are very likely engine default that's just a rub, you can easily replace those place holders, however it probably should have been done in Early Access not on full release. Conclusion. Okay this game has some very Nintendo-isc vibes but in what it is going for. It however can't get out of its own way in getting there. This could be largely fixed with the implementation of a proper state-machine and some music. You've got the idea though with your tutorial, and to be honest tutorials are by far the most difficult thing to design, you go too far people hate it you go too light people hate it but what exactly is too far or too light? The reality is there isn't one, you just need to make the first thing you teach be the skip button.