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Came back to it and beat the game. I found that using the arrow keys wasn't viable because if you hold UP and LEFT at the same time, pressing Space doesn't do anything. Switching to WASD works, but then I kept trying to press Space to jump instead of W because that's how games almost always work. Ended up using WASD with my right hand and and crossing my left hand over to hit the spacebar, and that worked.

There's a lot of potential here, but between the awkward control scheme and the fact that you arbitrarily can't ground pound until a little bit after you start falling from the peak of your jump made it feel like all of the challenge of the game was fighting against the controls rather than the actual platforming itself. A lot of the gravity switch parts also felt like trial-and-error as it didn't give enough time to react on the first try. It also wasn't very clear what you are supposed to do against the boss, though I did like the concept of the boss mirroring your position.

Even though we have eased up on it since the original idea, the movement is designed to reward quick reactions and decision making. The idea with the bounce and slide is that you lose some control in exchange for using them, so they are not “free”. We felt that this is more rewarding for the player, and that it added replayability in the form of speedrunning and trying to minimize unnecessary movements. If a jump can be cleared without the bounce, it can be optimized. If a section can be past without interrupting the slide, it can be performed in a more clean way. The limitations of the movement give the player a puzzle to solve, and simply having every move be free would not be as fun, at least to us. If mouse could always jump with the speed of the bounce, or walk at the speed of the slide without losing any control, the game would just not be fun, or so we believe.

The weird hitboxes of the environment can be fixed easily after the voting period, and we are aware of some in stage 2 in particular.

For the controls, we kind of regret adding the option to play with arrow keys, as WASD+Space feels much more natural. A lot of people who initially tried playing with Arrow Keys + Space reported that the game feels a lot better with WASD.