This game shows promise but this feels like an incomplete and buggy build. If you press start too much during the intro cutscene, the nametable and attribute table get corrupted.
I was asking a few more people in the NESDev discord and they reported similar problems in other emulators, including the recommended Mesen.
This happened using an everdrive n8 pro, OS version 2.12, with G revision PPU and CPU on a famicom motherboard HVC-CPU-07:
Not obviously a bug, but from a game design perspective, it is awkward that key counts don’t reset after dying and that keys respawn after entering, leaving a room. Way too easy to get infinite keys.
After clearing what I assume is “level 1”, I was softlocked in this screen, with my character spinning around in the middle of it, and no further inputs worked.
If the developer can debug the game, this looks like it could be a fun platformer.