Oh, you can dash vertically! That's what I missing.
I managed to make a quite a bit further. I got up to a point where the only way to proceed seems to be by beating a multi phase eyeball boss. Unfortunately it's a bit too tough for me, and my finger was getting sore from hammering the shoot button, so probably going to call it quits there.
Regardless, a very well made game! I can tell that a lot of time and effort was put into it. The story is nicely presented with the occasional animated cutscene being an extra cool addition. I especially enjoyed being to walk around and talk to all the villagers near the start. The environment looks nice - especially the background - and the characters are well animated. The music and sound effects are also great.
The basic platforming movement feels quite good. The dash is a really fun ability, but some aspects of it are a bit unintuitive. The vertical dash thing was mostly on me, but it could have been introduced better e.g. by doing the classic metroidvania trick of trapping the player until they learn how to use their new item. It also felt a bit weird that you can travel so much further by starting a dash chain from the ground. I'm used to jumping before dashing for extra distance in other games, but here that's the wrong thing to do. I did like that character changes colour to indicate whether you can dash, which alleviated some of the issues.
The combat is solid too. The gun is pretty fun to use - I like how you can shoot in 8 directions, and have a key to lock the diagonal aim. That said, I'm not really a fan of the "shoot as fast as you press the button" thing since it gets quite tiring to constantly mash - especially when most of enemies are quiet tanky. Using dashes to dodge attacks is cool, but I couldn't seem to get a hang of the parry stuff. The Undertale-style side of the combat system is really neat, with some cool attack patterns to avoid. I only saw a couple of those, but presumably there would be more if I got further into the game.
Overall though, fantastic job!