Thanks for the honest review.
For sure we agree about the monkeys not having a real use, we wanted to have a bridge mechanic that allows you to cross 2 block wide gaps and nerf the jumping or entirely remove it, relying on the followers to cross gaps. The followers would sacrifice themselves to make a body bridge.
And another mechanic where the monkey can give you a boost up a cliff to go up one tile, kinda like just a step.
Unfortunately we ran out of time and had to just use them as a points system rather then an integral game mechanic. But if you dare complete each level saving all the monkey you will certainly find it challenging! (Due to some bugs not all levels are possoble to save them all)
Edit. About the animations it was quite a fuss hah, as our programmer waisted almost half a day on the animations alone trying g to get root motion to work, then scraping that as it wouldn't work and switched to a blend tree... which caused even more problems... and in the end used the simplest of approaches with no transitions by force calling it. So in short the final animation setup had to be rushed as we waisted enough time as it was. But hey, at least we managed to make it playable:D