It was an excellent call to make player death feel so juicy with the way the screen gets cleared, that really ties this game together brilliantly. The pacing never lets up, even beyond death the hedgehog slaying continues, and it feels great to do so! There's some really fun balancing here with the lack of ceiling on stat upgrades, and the fact that the end goal is visible from the every start, it immediately gave me a full sense of the game's scale and what I had to work towards. Had a lot of fun with this one!