Hmm, bit mixed on this one as it can feel a bit more like an impressive tech demo/port than a fun game, but I still found it to be a decent experience!
As said, I'm not too familiar with Pico-8, but from the little bits I've picked up over time, I'm sure putting together something like this within the limitations of the system was very impressive, even more so when you give the player all these fancy editing tools. Overall the game does seem to capture that Devil Daggers vibe decently, and it even adds its own little twists on the formula with these spiders and acid spewers and such.
However, as much as I wanted to get in a trance and dagger some devils all over the place, I did have a lot of issues that made the experience a bit rough for me.
*First and foremost, the default controls were a bit awkward. Not sure why the mouse sensitivity is so damn high by default, and I'm not sure why ESDF was used over the more commonplace WASD, especially since it doesn't seem to use the extra keyboard real estate to map any other buttons: maybe it's a regional thing? Also why do you only jump on releasing space instead of on pressing it? There was also a weird issue where I kept having to refocus the window by clicking on it when transferring between scenes, like between picking up the daggers and starting the game proper.
*Next, the gameplay felt a bit awkward in a lot of respects. Devil Daggers is great in how smooth, fast, and sharp it feels, and this felt like the exact opposite, unfortunately. The character feels like he moves much slower, the visuals are much more blurry and hard to parse, and the hitboxes for objects felt confusing in that I would miss thing I felt I was hitting spot on, or I would get hurt by enemies I thought didn't hit me (actually, most of the time it was the opposite, I'd actually not get hit by enemies I thought were gonna hit me).
*Couldn't tell if the audio was trying to pull off some sort of 3D audio to help me keep track of enemies around me since it felt like the sound just kept devolving into this crackly chaos.
Eventually I kind of got used to the different feel and had a good time, but still, a bit of an awkward first impression!