Overall Gameplay (9.5 / 13 points)

• Player Experience: 7.5/10
• Mechanical Polish: 2/3

Comments: A fun platformer with a well thought-out concept and a lot of content. I hit my 30 minute limit with this game right after finding the last ability. I was impressed with the vast amount of game space, and with the number of different abilities. There were three things that hung me up and drove up my total time played. First: figuring out what to do. The large game space, coupled with the lack of instructions or visual directions, had me struggling for a while on where to go, and on what my goal was. Second: using the wall jumping ability. The wall jumping ability was so challenging to control that I think I spent over 1/4 of my playthrough literally just trying to climb walls. I got that the idea was to not be able to climb a single wall indefinitely - instead, you'd need two nearby walls to chain jumps off of - but the precise keyboard dance that the jumps demanded was incredibly infuriating. Third: obtaining the earth ability. I very nearly quit under the assumption that this ability was completely inaccessible without using another ability before I finally figured it out. I respect a clever platforming challenge, but damn! I thought the controls in general were really clunky to handle. Using X and C instead of just Z and X tripped me up for a while, and entering and using the element selection menu was unintuitive (why even include a cancel key when the scene visually updates in the background upon element rotation?).

Theme Inclusion (6 / 6 points)

Comments: "Elements" was a clear focus of the game, nothing to comment on here.

Overall Presentation (4 / 10 points)

• General Presentation: 0.5/4
• Quality of Graphics: 1.5/4
• Quality of Audio: 2/2

Comments: This game very, very desperately needed visual cues. A down-key icon to appear when standing on a portal or checkpoint, "X to confirm selection" on the elements menu, "You need to switch to {element} to obtain this ability" when standing on a faded ability, something telling me what actually happened each time I collected an orb, "R to reset to last checkpoint", the list goes on. It got to the point where I needed the Readme up on a separate monitor for reference through the entire 30 minute playthrough. A little bit of UX goes a long way! The graphics were also a weak point - while it was nice to see tiles that faded to different styles depending on the area and on the selected element, everything else was lacking any detail or polish. (The red skull-and-crossbones blocks were amusing, but also indicative of a very rushed product.) Lots of gameplay elements were just simple shapes or solid colors - even basic texturing would've helped a lot. Were there actually four unique tracks for every single area? If so, that's incredible! The background tracks fading to each other smoothly was masterfully done.