I played this game on my stream (VOD).
I'd watch someone else play the game on their stream so I had some sense of what to expect. However, I turned out to be way worse at platformers. My daughter, who is much better at Mario, did better than me. Overall, we enjoyed playing the game.
I don't know if having limited lives is necessary for the game though. I understand that in retro games (like Mario) there are limited lives, but running out of lives would be really sad and would stop me from replaying everything.
Another comment I had was that the jumping felt a bit strange at times. I tried to run and jump, and sometimes I went farther than other times. It almost felt like I could control the jump in mid-air and land short sometimes, which caused many deaths :)