Played again. Beat the first two levels, made attempts on the rest.
I like more this approach to the game than the open ended experiment. This leaves it as "finish the level" as the main objective and "free the spirit/sun/egg" as secondary/harder one.
The game is still brutally difficult. I think that most of the difficulty comes from executing the main trick of the game, which is the double jump. The window to do it is so tight and so easy to fail that it warps the entire game around it. Imo, you could try moving the ending of the time window from "hook dissapearing from the screen" to "player landed". This way it would let the player jump anytime after the hook connects. It would make the game a lot easier and remove the feeling of unresponsiveness from hitting a wall before jumping.
You should do more of the simple trick of shooting to get somwhere horizontally without needing to double jump. It feels like something basic that the game almost doesn't explore.
The moving enemies are very difficult. I dread finding them because Im almost certain I will take damage.
The camera moving quickly when the character turns around is a bit too disorienting for me, specially when I want to move back to get a better spot to jump from.