Game Review:
What a fantastic concept this game has - it's a fast-paced platformer with no running, wonderful controls, tight levels, etc. In general I'm not enamored with timed levels, but fortunately here the timers mostly felt fair.
I can't over-emphasize how much I enjoyed the game feel - the limited moveset has lots of tiny nuances (e.g. when you bump into a wall, you get pushed back a few pixels, which is crucial for traversal), and the overall game feel is as enjoyable as that of the best platformers out there. The game's absurd degree of polish and juiciness was just delightful.
Levels are well-designed, too. And for those who care about such things, the game seems well-suited for speedrunners.
However, there are a few designs I didn't love. The game is needlessly difficult, but that's part and parcel for the genre, and I did accept the challenge for the most part, so that's fine. Falling accelerates you, which made for some annoyingly precise timing challenges and lots of frustrating deaths, but again, fine.
But there were two aspects that infuriated me. First of all, the main environmental hazard consists of triangular spikes. And their collision detection is *terrible*, as becomes particularly apparent in the water levels. Maybe the spike art or the player sprite are significantly smaller than their respective colliders, or maybe the colliders are squares but the art is triangles (= the spikes) and circles (= the player mid-jump)... whatever the reason, the challenging levels naturally force you to jump close to spikes, and there were *tons* of situations where I died to those spikes without clearly understanding how exactly I collided with them, or how I would have to jump to prevent that. I'm amazed that this issue wasn't caught and fixed during development.
And my second misgiving concerns the final levels, beginning at world 4-2, which introduces "Gauntlets", levels which have a checkpoint halfway through. What's the point of checkpoints in a level-based game, you ask? There's none. Increasing the number of rooms in a level, rather than splitting it into multiple levels, artificially increases its difficulty. Once you add a checkpoint, you undo this, so the checkpoint is pointless. Except, to add insult to injury for us completionists out there, you can't get the timed star on a level if you die and respawn from its checkpoint. So the checkpoint doesn't even serve as a proper checkpoint, since you get punished for using it (?!?). The whole design is utterly flabbergasting. There's no excuse for not just splitting the levels at the midway point, instead of implementing those checkpoints. Not to mention that not all room transitions are entirely fair, and the game expects you to die at the checkpoints... only to, again, punish you for using them.
For this reason, while I loved the game in worlds 1 to 3, I consider the second half of world 4, 4-2, badly designed. And in level 4-2-9 and the boss fight in 4-3, all gloves come off, and these levels are just tons of rooms crammed in a single level to artificially increase difficulty. So there are no checkpoints, but the levels are still idiotic.
Despite its shortcomings, I loved the game. To get the most out of it, I recommend playing it and simply stopping after world 4-1.