Enjoyment 4/5: Game was good but marred by some bugs. I played the unfixed version. After one too many of the freezes during the chase, I then tried to switch to the fixed, and that was when I learned there were no hard saves for this game. (I tried both EXEs, but as this is serving as my rationale for not finishing the game fully before rating, it seemed fair to mention and not to factor into this further.)
The game plays well enough, though there are some decisions I might have made differently. Grappling through trapdoors feels great when it feels great and feels kinda awful when it doesn't. Grappling the regular hookable objects feels decent, grappling the greens feels great when you get it and passable otherwise.
Execution 3/5: Honestly it's mainly just all the bugs in the proper jam version doing this. I'm not sure grappling works consistently.
I don't know if being unable to hit things with the grapple sword after you've made contact is a bug or not.
Several areas should be looked over for an overabundance of frustrating or tricky obstacle placements.
Kudos on the first boss, and what I saw of the second.
Please do not make a crosshair an upgrade on anything the player aims. If anything, it should come with the aim-able upgrade, and removing that should be a "downgrade" item if you're doing an accessory system later. That said I thought the grappling was mostly intuitive enough I could've done without entirely in this game, at least, given I had a regular mouse cursor to look at.
Sensory 4/5: Game looks well enough, and the music is fairly fitting. Assuming based on the external assets only mentioning SFX that it's original music, kudos!
Metroidvania 5/5: This game had a lot of creative ideas about things that could subtly squeeze just a little more out of one movement mechanic. Honestly I thought it was pretty creative for jam-scope and I really thought it was embracing the spirit of the genre.
I gather you've already fixed a number of these things. I gave it a brief play (to the start of boss one) and noticed a couple things got introduced that weren't in the first game, though I trust a number of other issues were fixed.
In any case, though I'd initially hoped to finish the game on the fixed version, I don't know that it would be necessary to re-rate any factors based on a post-jam version that's as different as the dev-log implies. but I'm glad you took the time to make one anyway because I think this game needed a little more love and it's good to know it was gotten.
Overall a solid effort but a couple of particular design decisions and bugs brought down the overall experience for me. Please keep developing things, though. And as always, this is just my player XP as feedback. What you do with it, what solutions if any you think are exactly appropriate, are up to you.