It's been a long, hard road, but after a year's work, I've finished the demo of Guardian Cry, a 16-bit Zelda clone. Check it out!

quagsire-pog nice! This must have taken a lot of hard work.

The artstyle rules. It makes me nostalgic for DOS games like Quest for Glory

Thank you! It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. I drew most of my inspiration from SNES aesthetics, but I'll gladly consider being compared to Quest for Glory a compliment.
- It def was a compliment, those games rule!

@Nakoichi@hexbear.net Please pin!

EDIT: Thanks to the mod that pinned!

Congrats on the launch!

Thanks!

The demo was really fun! The music has very Binding of Isaac vibes (good thing!).

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it! I sadly can't take credit for the music, though. It was (aside from the title/credits theme, which I commissioned) all kindly provided for free.
- Everything about it was cool. Using the dive ability to charge the lil wall guys felt very satisfying.
  
  I just singled out the music because I didn’t see anyone mention it yet.
  
  The lore is cool as well.
  
  All around very excited for the final release when it’s ready.

Play the demo y'all.

Thank you

As usual I am stuck on the part where it teaches you how to play because I am extremely shit at games. Can someone give me a clue?

how do I get past this screen? I need to press the second button but can't jump across the black area because it's too far. A box popped about diving. How do you do that?

Thanks for playing!

You dive by pressing the sword button mid-jump.
- thanks! i got through the tutorial. the hardest part of any game (I assume).

Oooh, by the way, don't call this a "zelda clone". This is not a clone, it's its own thing. Inspired by Zelda sure, but still your own creation. A clone implies you ripped off the other game, just swapped assets etc, all of which is untrue. "Zelda-like" is sufficient and sounds much nicer.

Nicely done! Some minor suggestions to make it even nicer:

add a grace jump/coyote jump/ledge forgiveness mechanic (different names for the same thing). This means that when there is a platforming section, you get a few frames of "grace" when walking off a platform to actually perform the jump, making platforming less frustrating. I constantly accidentally ran off platforms before jumping on the way to the "second" emblem haha
consider adding a boss health bar. This is more of my own personal preference and not a "must", and many games thrive on not showing this kind of information to keep the player guessing, but I personally would have enjoyed the fight more by knowing how well I am doing (my own health loss vs the boss's health loss), and how close I was to beating the boss on my failed attempts.
on the way to the boss, one of the chambers (4th one if you take the fastest route) requires you to wait for the flames to disappear before you can proceed. While good for teaching the player how the flames work (and in general, the dungeon is nicely built to teach the player the mechanics and enemy types without a tutorial), it stops the flow when you have to rerun from the beginning back to the boss and you need to idly wait to proceed without losing health. No other chamber requires that at that point, and it's only like two seconds, but if you die constantly like I did, it'd be nicer to just keep the flow going.
transition from the chamber with two arrows and all the blocks that need to be moved out of the way, back to the previous chamber puts you immediately next to a snake enemy, making avoiding getting hit extremely difficult, I think this is a slight oversight.
consider making the invulnerability window after getting damaged slightly longer, as it's easy to get thrown off the flow and damaged a few times in a row as it is now.

But these are just some suggestion, it was a cool experience reminding me of old DOS games, and congrats on the work!

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the game. I've made some redesigns to the dungeon since the demo that have addressed most of the points you've brought up. Still not entirely sure how to handle ledges, but you're far from the only person to have trouble with them, so I'm sure I'll try to come up with something.
- Also just so you know, I accidentally went into the temple without a tutorial at all, and did just fine, the temple design was great for teaching different mechanics on its own, very organic

Nice, some of my favorite indie games are Zelda like. (Blossom Tales, Little Dew, Turnip Boy)

Looks like an amiga game

Haven't heard that one before, but I'll take it!