Without a doubt this one heck of a novel and competent game. When it comes to capturing the essence of RE4 This game succeeds in spades. All of the villagers are immediately recognizable and accounted for and for a game jam game it's also mighty darn impressive. That being said, It feels as if more though was put into the aesthetics of the game than the design of the gameplay.
For the most part enemies are largely nicely designed, the female villagers are easy cannon fodder, the pitch fork dudes are a nice subversion of the established rules. The sickle guys are a good obstacle on paper.
The problem arises from the level design's interpretation of challenge. Enemies are largely placed in a way the doesn't provide an interesting challenge so much as its meant to maximize difficulty. Challenge and difficulty are not the same thing. I would consider headbutting a brick wall as hard as I can to be difficult but I wouldn't call it challenging.
Enemies are placed on more than one occasion in such a way that I am convinced there is no way to proceed with out taking any damage. This is compounded by the fact that the sickle guys take too many shots to kill before they start attacking again.
And the final boss, I managed to beat it, but nothing about the fight felt satisfying. The guy just mindless charges at you and barely gives you an opening to shoot him, I don't feel as if I figured out how to beat him, more that I was stubborn to find a way to reliably get a shot or two on him before he turned around.
All of these things are pretty terrible especially with discussing a game that wants to be a demake of RE4. RE4 was a pretty hard game but not too difficult, it was fair in it's challange. RE4 accomplished this not by making the enemies easy but by giving the player choices in how they dealt with every situation. you could go head shots or you could shoot them in the knee. From there you could melee the ganado or you could use the enemies pain state run away or past them.
One way that this could have been incorporated into the game is by say letting the player crouch. Imagine that the sickle guys when shot low fell over, Or if the boss would move the chain saw up and down depending on whether you were ducking or not giving you a small opening to to damage and make the player feel smart for figuring that out.
This is nice game but it's just too frustrating for no good reason. And this is come from some who loves games like contra and castlevania.