Very nice! A game with wonderful vibes and smart combat, its narrative elements feel personal and intimate and its audio and visual aesthetics appeal strongly to me specifically - plus there's something about Gender and D&B that just go well together, idk what it is. Some of my favorite points are:

• I love the way the dash works. Its fixed distance paired with the brief window of doubled-attack encourages the player to operate at a specific spacing in a way that feels unique and makes you feel sick as hell when you land Big Hits. 
• The enemy and gimmick variety are great! Enemy behavior across the board is always meaningfully different, almost every single one requires you to move or position yourself in a unique way or with a unique timing. 
• On top of this, each level has a totally unique feel to it, with EKI being more like a series of obstacle courses and the final level having a more cautious, maze-like pace. It's really cool just how much variety is squeeze out of such a simple set of mechanics, and it just about always feels well-considered, like each situation can be "solved."
• Checkpoint distance is juuuust right, just long enough to feel meaningful, not so long that significant loss of progress feels demotivating (the last one in EKI is like, slightly too long for me but idk it's really not a big deal)

Unfortunately, while I came very close to loving this game without qualifier, a few pain points held me back:

• I don't think the game feels that great when it restricts space enough that precise control of where you get sent after a bump is necessary. imo, this plays poorly with the way that bumping foes to the left or right of the player character produces a not-very-predictable counter-bump - I never quite figured out how to consistently tell if I would be sent upward, downward, or horizontally, nor to what degree. A few encounters make this property slightly obnoxious, but it's probably at its worst in the Firewall boss fight - due to some of this boss's weakpoints being at the left/right sides of the arena and near damaging corners, it's possible to bump a weakpoint, not realize you were positioned to get bounced upward in the heat of the moment, and get flung into the surrounding wall of flame. This boss fight is great otherwise and fit the level theming well, so it was a bit unfortunate that this specific aspect dampened it so much for me. I'm not entirely sure how I'd address this, either - I'd probably be tempted to make it so those specific weakpoints bounce the player backward from the direction they're facing (so, always bouncing directly Right if the player faces Left) rather than along the vector from the origin of the weakpoint to the origin of the player, but I could understand this feeling like it runs counter to the game's core design.
• Arbiter's fight was a little bit annoying for a couple reasons. One of them was because there were multiple times where I died despite it visually looking like the big fuckoff laser beam didn't actually touch me? The other was because I was accidentally making things harder on myself than necessary because it took me at least a few attempts before I realized that touching the Shoe restored my dash ability. In retrospect it makes perfect sense, but I think a number of factors came together to make it hard for me to realize the connection - for one, the boss fight has a lot going on and you're constantly in an "avoid everything state of mind" due to only having one hitpoint. For another, the "powerup" doesn't necessarily overlap the player, it'll just barely tap them and then fade away, which makes it feel like maybe it didn't make contact at all? And finally the HUD element just kind of unceremoniously scales back into place - again, a little tough to notice when there's so much going on. I'm sure there are plenty of players who would be able to make this connection immediately, but I doubt I'm the only one who wouldn't. Otherwise, this is a cool fight.
• Honestly just wasn't a big fan of the adds in the first phase of the final boss, I always found their movement weirdly hard to predict and while I did settle on a functional strategy for dealing with this fight before too long, the inclusion of these enemies felt a little, messy I guess? Fight's fine otherwise tho.
• The second phase of the final boss felt... a bit much? I think it didn't help that this was following several little bouts of frustration from the above situations but I found myself particularly annoyed by some of this boss's attacks because they restrict space in ways that feel unfair or feel quite difficult to react to. The attack where the boss lays out a curtain of bullet and then those bullets all move in the same direction together is just like. What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to find a position that keeps me safe regardless of which direction the wall starts moving in? The laser attack can sometimes get real awkward because of the way the laser appears to be treated as a solid object? Which caused me to sometimes phase through it and get stuck on the other side in ways I didn't expect - and it also is quite obnoxious that the heart will sometimes just, coincidentally end up in your way and failing to avoid it will cause you to get bounced back into the laser beam which just sort of feels Bad (my own temptation as a designer would be to just vanish the heart during this phase since it's almost impossible to get a decent hit in anyway). Then there's the spinning wing blade attack, which... I feel like an early patch may have fixed my issue with this but before that, I honestly had no idea how to reliably dodge the last swing or two because my dash would often still be on cooldown. Whether or not I dodged this felt random - in its current state, it still feels dicey and I still had one time where I got hit trying to get another dash to come out, but it felt more consistent at least. Other than that one, I'd say the spike wall attack is probably my least favorite of the bunch, bringing point #1 (issues with precision bumping) back to the forefront and combining it with a projectile (the tip of the tail) that's just kind of annoying to react to. It meshes especially poorly with the clap attack, which would sometimes unceremoniously drag me into the spike walls because the hands count as solid objects.

Anyway that's like. Honestly basically all I really had to complain about for this game. I know it looks like more than the positive things I've said in terms of volume, but the positive aspects I listed are, for one thing, game-wide and, for another thing, only a portion of what I enjoyed about this game. The list of critiques I provided is nigh-exhaustive and is largely focused on only specific pieces of specific content which were otherwise solid. 

The game's plot is well-written and doled out at a good pace, the soundtrack has a good internal variety and is very much My Thing, the core mechanics are elegant and the act of becoming better at the game feels great and uhhhh idk it's free what have you got to lose? But also I absolutely would have gladly paid $10 for this - I know because I ended up paying $15 instead :v