SAGE 2023 - Demo Cave Story: The Desolate (SAGE 2023 Demo)

Honestly the fact someone took the prototype of Cave Story and builds upon it is an interesting concept, it's not something I ever thought off so I should give points for originality.
The graphics, music and gameplay all work quite well.
Of course it's not perfect, the menus are clunky for many reasons, mainly because you can't change weapon unless you grab it, unequip it and put it on again, the remove item from inventory button which can lead to frustration if pressed accidentally or the fact that cancel in my controller didn't work so I had to press "x" on my keyboard instead.
The game starts quite in a brutal way too because there are already many obstacles and enemies on the first screens, and also how some of the boss patterns feel unfair and random, also some jerk moves like that bartender attacking you without you having a chance to put in your weapon.
There are a few bugs too, some very weird, like the third Balrog I couldn't damage until I read the sign again, that was weird.
Despite these caviats, I think this project has a lot of effort and sweat put into it and I did enjoy myself, I'd suggest that you insta-equip weapons when you click on them, having a message that says "you want to remove this item?" or something, fix that controller issue, in general make the menu more comfortable, balance the difficulty a bit more, being able to aim up and down like in the og game, oh yeah, and avoiding jerk moves like that one. As an extra I'd like a pixel font too, because the HD font with the pixel graphics are a bit jarring.
if you manage to do those it would make your game something truly special, because I want to see how the narrative goes.

I'm a big fan of Cave Story, and it made me really happy seeing another fangame like this! You really got that weird mysterious vibe the original game has down, and it's been neat seeing a weird alternate take on it. The writing is also very reminiscent of the old translation and I appreciate that.

I think my biggest issue aside from the occasional UI weirdness is that the bosses can take a lot of hits to kill? It can get a bit tiring to mash the fire key at them.

Aside from that, I thought it was solid and I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Some notes I took while playing:

- Using down to interact with things instead of up really throws off my muscle memory. Was this a trait of the original game? It's been a long time since I played so admittedly that could be on me, but I would still really appreciate the option to interact with things by pressing up like most other games.
- There's a single tile in the Fire Tunnel (directly above the glass block near the first fire enemy in the room) that isn't solid. I don't know if that's intentional (considering there's another one near the door on the right side that visibly has a hole in it), but it's definitely misleading and makes that jump harder than it really ought to be, especially considering you don't even have a gun yet by this point.
- The back button on the controller and the backspace button on keyboard force close the game for some reason? I'm assuming this is some debug thing you forgot to remove when you released to SAGE.
- The shop is completely impossible to exit on controller as far as I can tell. I've tried every button and as far as I can tell, the only way to actually stop shopping is to press X on the keyboard instead. I'd rather not have to juggle control methods to avoid a soft lock.
- I'm really not sure how to beat the besides to pray to RNG. Its projectiles have no apparent pattern at all like the first encounter did, so I have no real idea how how you're expected to dodge it for that long.

Overall promising start for a WIP. Looking forward to next time. o3ob