Okay, I love this so much, and it just has so much stuff that appeases to my platformer biases, it was really worth waiting the definitive version to play x3c
Aesthetics are super awesome, I really love me some psychedelic, abstract and colorful stuff, the sense of identity here is over the charts!! Granted, there are a few places here and there where the deco mixes in with the foreground, but they are very few, so no big deal. Some sounds are still way louder than others as me and some other people pointed out on discord already, like how for some reason the menu music is way louder than the in-game music, but oh well, it's surviveable. Speaking of music tho, that part is great too! I love it.
Gameplay is also all of good that there can be on a platformer honestly, altought it's not perfect sadly. Main offender here being hitboxes, that all feels very big, and sometimes even janky, altought there were few moments that was an actual issue, I think the bomb looking boss projectiles were the biggest outliers here, everytime I got hit by them it looked like they killed me before actually touching my char. Speaking of projectiles, It would have been really appreciated if you could actually differentiate the projectiles you parried from the ones you didn't, that was a genuine problem on the first boss since it's literally impossible to tell apart wich bombs are good and wich are evil.
The dash is definitelly the star of the show here, but it's a bummer that it didn't get a lot of time on the spotlight in the end, since there isn't enought space on most places to really use all of it's shenanigans, nor there were many challenges that actually used it after all (I understand this was the fault of lack of time tho). One thing that was very noticeable tho, mainly on the second-to-last strawberry screen, is that the dream blocks and high speed collisions were still pretty broken. That doesn't affect most of the game, but that room in specific felt very unstable, since a lot of times I would just phase throught the non-dream floor and hit a spike (Wich, for all the Celeste influence you got here, I wish you would also have gotten inspired by the fact on that game the spikes doesn't hurt you at all if you're moving to the direction they're pointing at, and there this is not exclusive to dream blocks).
Another minor thing worth mentioning, the switch on the robotic structure is really not intuitive, I had to look up your walkthrought video to know where to go, because for a moment I tought that weird crate I destroyed was supposed to give me the dash ability, but it bugged and the item didn't spawn (It REALLY didn't help that right next to it was a giant text telling to me dash onto the dream blocks lmao, it just made me EXTRA sure that box was bugged). Be sure to give a very clear indication as to when something important happens off-screen, otherwise your player will just be confused.
Lastly, I couldn't finish the game because I knockbacked the final boss to the limbo, and the save system is a lie, it doesn't work at all x)
But no worries, I'm more than willing to play this again later, I just needed to take a break and also didn't want the gameplay video to be too long. And speaking of wich, voilá!
Also, I really appreciate the addition of no-hit mode btw, I know it was a last minute thing, but still xDAlso, this comment might look very negative because I had a lot of things I wanted to nitpick on, but that's because this is the kind of game I wanna see strive, that's one of my personal fav entries here x)