This is a very challenging and rewarding game. The core mechanics are flawless, and the art is insanely consistent. This is nearly perfect all around except for the theme. I love the SHOOT TO SAVE feature and the SHOOT TO MULTI JUMP.

Hidden areas + upgrades + epic battles = WOW

Great work. Period. Not even considering this was made in 48 hours... this is just a great, simple game.

You should be proud.

This is a pretty sweet little game. The hidden lava pits, combined with the fact that you restart from the beginning when you die (and that lava kills you instantly) kept me from finishing it, though. I saw a load game feature, but no obvious save feature. Did I miss something?

Anyway, a fun game, I'll probably come back to it later.

There are save rooms in the game, about three total. If you aim up and shoot it, it'll save and tell you that it saved.
The hidden lava pits are definitely a reason to save, however, most you can find with a bit of caution because the lava still boils and spits up a little. Thanks!

Great game, though too hard for me, wen fighting the end(?) boss, I accidently startet a new game and my save was lost, didn't have the patience to start again. Great retro graphics and sound. definately reminds me of metroid and megamen. Will probably try again later.

There's 3 bosses total, the end boss is the largest one. Sorry to hear you deleted your save file! :/

Punishment overwhelming!

It wasn't until I came back to check SonnyBone's comments that I realized there was more to this than at first glance.

I hope too many players don't get put off by the game hiding a lot of its functions from them, because it's worth playing in the long run.

Congrats on a great submission.

Even after learning about the save function, I just am not good enough at this kind of game =) What I saw was fantastic, though, and it's definitely a very solid first entry. Good job!!!

I love the attention to detail in this game. I'm really impressed you managed to make such a great and polished game in such a short amount of time!

<jawdrop />

Magnificent enry, although the theme itself was perhaps not entirely at the core.

Everything from blog activity to game content is beyond expectations, I'd say. Your "metroidvania" hybrid is full on.

I'm - well - I'm just full of nice words. Let it remain at that.

Wow, I'm terrible at this game. Still, very addictive. Music would have made it perfect.

I was pretty bad at this game, but I wanted to finish it... so I hope you don't mind that I made the following changes to my saved game file :)
Clfoufroup=10
Rchickenlobananad=4
Hchickenbananalth=10
Shotgubanana=1
Chbananargchickengubanana=1

Couldn't finish it, died too many times. I liked what I saw of it, though. Nice arcade style difficulty and I liked the idiosyncractic names for the difficulty levels. I'll likely revisit this one when I have more time. Great achivement for 48 hours.

*spoiler*
.
.
.

I finished it, the last boss was a lot easier than the dude with the beard..

Was the second boss, that huge robot?

I have to say I'm highly impressed.
There were some jumps that were so beautifully planned. It seemed like a lot of thought was put into them.
The whole game other than the two last bosses was amazing.

Like others mentioned, it brings back memories of MegaMan and Metroid even though it is a new game with it's own style.

It did not have much to do with the theme? true. But it was dangerous.. and you did take stuff to help overcome danger.

This game is unbelievably amazing.

Awesome use of sound, I must say. Lots of neat details with different character effects. The bleeping legged robots are cool for instance. Gameplay is tough but fair, although I still had to quit my first session before beating the red guy. Seems like the save carries between runs though, which is very great. A few more attempts and I would surely have made it, but... I wimp out for now. The gun mechanic is unusual and works very well. Game world seems quite large too, feels like I've only seen a small part. One extra cheap touch you could have added though is color variation, or something else to signify "different locations". Just swapping out the base grey color of tiles to make 3-4 different atmospheres. Tends to give a nice feeling of progress and discovery. Overall though, very nice one indeed. I've wanted to make an honest metroid game myself at some point in these compos, but nope... never happened yet. Shame.