Wonderful art! Sprites were charming and well done. That (first?) boss was also REAL nice looking. The music was pretty nice although it got a bit repetitive after so many deaths lol.
A few things:
The switches were not intuitive to interact with. I figured out only that I could attack it by complete chance, and the hitbox on it is a bit too strict, since I tried striking it a couple times and it didn't activate. Some things I couldn't figure out at all, like the opening has the gravestone that asks "Behold Cursed Lands?" but doesn't seem to do anything at all.
Dying is very frustrating, I think a save/checkpoint system is essential (unless it was already there and I didn't figure it out lol) It is *especially* frustrating when you fall off a platform, since that's a one hit kill. Kinda brutal. I know you were aiming for a -borne, but it becomes a bit more of a grind to redo entire levels just to fall off the same ledge. Quite possibly the longest boss run of all. The one thing that would make it a bit less discouraging is dropping health; even if I do make it all the way to the boss I'm so low on health by that point I simply have no chance. Maybe make the collectibles go towards that? I'm not sure what they're for but that would give me a reason to actually collect them instead of dashing through the level as fast as possible just to get back to where I was.
I also had a bit of trouble because I used roughly the same control scheme (ZX+Space) for my game that also has a dash, attack, and jump, but mapped them all to different keys from you lol. Obviously that's not a real issue, I just thought it was funny. I wonder how we as devs pick the buttons we do.
Unfortunately after making it to the boss, I don't think I'm going to be able to beat it. It's simply too much to try and rerun the ENTIRE game without taking hits just to get back to the boss. Death truly did await. 😔