One whole month of demo!
Let's start with the bugs, cause unfortunately there's a couple. After the floating magician shennanigans from last time, I made sure to try and knock them in the pit this build, only to discover that they are now unkillable. After you deal what I presume is the amount of damage it would take to knock them off their broom, they just stop taking damage. If this is just due to a bug, sure, whatever, but if you're trying to pull an immense brain move where they're the same magician you fight later, and you're not supposed to kill them in that room, I'd suggest having them fly offscreen once you deal enough damage, so it's obvious that you beat them, but *they'll be back ooOOoo.*
As well as this, the apple(?) boss at the top of the tree has sort of the same problem that the tree boss used to, if you kill them while their fireballs are onscreen, the fireballs will stick around during the cutscene, and be able to damage the player as soon as it ends. While it would be a lot harder to take a cheap death here, the possibility remains, and almost happened to me.
Now for the new stuff, all of which I love. In particular, the ogre and tree minibosses are now fun and interesting, as opposed to being a minor annoyance. If you want to emphasize throws you might have to tweak them some more, but for now I think you've hit the sweet spot. Something that did happen with the ogre was that on my second run through it seemed like he only did the shoulder charge. Since both his attacks cover pretty much the same area you might want to add an attack weighting system or something to ensure that he varies his attacks a little more.
I noticed the ceiling got raised in the boulderman tunnel, big fan of that change. Also that the ground slam attack doesn't teleport up walls now, which is nice.
Making the trident gremlins shake is a real clever solution to the problems I was having last build, although it can still be a little hard to see them through my attack animations. However, since they're a really minor enemy I doubt that my inability to see is a big enough deal to merit more effort.
Inputs don't feel sketchy anymore, which is great. In particular, with the buffering I've never missed a wall jump in this build, which means climbing the tree is no longer annoying. The EX moves also don't feel like random chance. I'll probably give more in-depth feedback on them once the energy bar UI gets figured out, since it's gonna take a little while to get used to them in my gameplay, but I did a little running around with them and they felt pretty good to pull off in combat. I gave the kicks a little bit of love as well, and they feel a lot better to use since the last time I tried them, which, admittedly, was like 4 builds ago. I've been particularly enjoying kicking bombs back at the monkeys.
There's an options menu now, which is neat. I like that you put the music volume a little below full by default, a lot of software I use starts out at full volume and is still too quiet. While the sound volume you've got right now is fine on all fronts, I do think you should give the same ability to make SFX and Master louder than default, just in case someone like me who's picky about audio might want to.
Really looking forward to the full game, that cat looks almost too cute to stab!
...almost...
