Ok, so I played the game up to Castlevania's entrance, and are at level 8 now. Few points I would like to make about the game so far:
Good Points-
1. The Graphics and music. They're good. And rather satisfying. The choice of music for each area is good. I like the areas you made before reaching the castle.
2. There are several ways to reach the castle, what is cool.
3. Quite a wide choice of items and equipment, what increases the RPG value of the game.
4. The orb system is in a single word- cool.
5. I like how you made obtainable abilities in the game. For now, I only saw two (jumping and moving rocks), but this gave me the feeling that you really did some efforts to make those little parallels to MetroVanias.
6. The breakable candles are a nice way to recover your hearts- and an original way to gain your money.
7. I like the Castle entrance area. It kicks ass in its similarity to that area in CV1 (and its remakes).
8. Allan is, overall, a cool character.
Points that require improvement-
1. The game could really use an area map. Too often I got lost in the areas while trying to find a particular place I missed. It doesn't have to be too complicated, a simple drawing of where the different areas are to each other would be enough.
2. What's that with only being able to gain 1 level per area? I know you're trying to take away the opportunity of players camping over a single area, gaining 999 lvls in one.
But that takes away all the fun of replaying an area. Once you gain a level in a certain area, you just avoid all the enemies because there is no more point of fighting them anymore.
3. And that brings me to the next problem- in each area, you have a certain number of battles to fight to gain a level. This means there is no real "experience" in the game. That's a problem, because you don't gain a different number of exp according to the strength or number of monsters you face. It doesn't matter if you fight a single skeleton, or three armor knights, you would gain the same number of "experience" (1 battle, to be exact). This motivates the player to avoid stronger enemies, beating weaker ones instead.
4. And then, there's this graphical thing I just find as lame: all the enemies in the game look the same outside of battle- like ghosts/phantoms. I just think it looks boring, at least have some alternatives to how they look like.
5. And the final thing, though I don't see this as a real problem... Some bosses in the game are just too powerful. I don't see a reason for me to use more than 1-2 potions per a boss battle. There must be some other way. I am at my maximal possible level as I fight this boss, have the best equipment available, powerful spells, and yet, it kicks my ass. That's absurd.