Am betting other people will cover the fundamentals, wanted to say I really loved the attention to little details like making shielding feel like it had weight by slowing down your walk speed when you did it. :)

Phew! Okay, finally finished -- were you trying to dual-submit this game for 4-step level design while you're at it? :P Great work either way! The only place I really got caught was the end of level 2, which was fine because I felt amazing when I figured it out, but also a really tight jump before the long gliding sections of the last level because I couldn't quite recognize how wall jumping worked. I kept wanting to cling to the wall, but that kept short-circuiting the max jump distance which makes it impossible to climb the back-to-back walls with spikes on them. Finally stopped being so defensive and it worked fluidly, which helped when I got to the part that required wall jumps in the middle of the gliding over spike pits later. Thank you for your checkpoint distribution. :)