You've gotten a lot of good criticism and most of the stuff I was going to talk about has already been said.
I feel like this game has a lot of potential and parts of it are genuinely fun to play. However, issues with the game's "feel" are what drag it down.
The fact that the character slides a little bit before stopping is incredibly frustrating during precise platforming. It wouldn't be so bad, but the level design mandates perfectly timed jumps onto 1 tile wide platforms, and it's nothing but frustrating to try to do that when you slide off the edge every time.
I like the mechanic where you catch on ledges, but I might consider making it automatic. I got used to having to press a button to grab the edge, but it's kind of a convention for that to happen automatically regardless of player input.
The hook is really difficult to use and requires near perfect timing. Irritating, but maybe that's what you were going for.
I might just be missing the tutorial statue that tells you how the upwards blowing wind works, but it took me forever to figure out that you had to hold jump to keep floating upwards. I lost nearly twenty lives just trying to get through those jumps.
I get it if you're looking to make a challenging game, and I respect that. I enjoy games that offer up a player a more "hardcore" difficulty level. However, if a game is difficult because the controls get in the way, that's just infuriating to the player and not remotely fun.
All this being said, I can tell there's been a lot of work, time, and polish put into this game. It really does seem like a worthwhile project, and I think that with a few tweaks it could be an incredible game. Great pixel art, great music and sound design, even great level design to boot. Just a few control fixes and things here and there can vastly improve this game.
(Also, I disagree with some of my fellow commenters, I kinda like that the axe takes some time to swing. It feels heavy and satisfying to use, and it force me to actually think about what I'm going to do in advance. I think it would be even better if it were possible to hold down the button to hold your attack, and have it swing on release)
Reviews for "Sanguine 2"
That was a fine game. It did take me a while to master the controls, but maybe that's the point of the game. I've noticed that a lot of gamers, mostly youtubers, would deliberately ignore the tutorial or skip practice just to get into the actual game play because they were "already a professional." The way I see it, they are not a professional unless they are playing a game that they have had prior experience and are familiar with. Playing a game they are not familiar with just means that they are new to the game, regardless of how skilled they think they are. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
But yeah. Thank you for sharing this game. Please do continue to make more games like this in the future.
Fun game. Controls are fucking terrible. WAY too loose.
Great idea it's just the controls.
The core of a decent platformer is having amazing controls and then applying them to a difficult stage layout. This game has extremely sub par controls, and introduces its challenge by making a stage that shouldn't from a layout perspective be incredibly challenging, but is damn near impossible due to the incredibly lacking control scheme. That is not how you make a good platformer. 1.5 stars for decent pixel art and background setting, but the control scheme makes this pretty much unplayable, so that doesn't really carry much weight.