A very thoughtful review! Thanks for playing my game and I appreciate the kind words!
I did make sure that you can beat it without any upgrades (but the vortex part did end up being harder then I meant for it to be, and a few double jumps go a long way to making it easier)
The vortex part is painfully-slow, or if you look carefully, there's a single platform that goes from the last light green area all the way to the last checkpoint before the ghost part. I've seen at least one person beat the final ghost area without any upgrades, but it's partially luck-based.
There is a bullet-time related bug though. I didn't notice until after it was posted, but I was debugging the bullet time upgrade (last upgrade I implemented before moving on to sfx) and you actually start out with it (Forgot to remove it from your starting build 🤷♂️)
The ghosts are supposed to be removed from play at the end though and while it did work (at least once) before I submitted it, it may have been broken by something else? It probably doesn't matter too much but they are supposed to disappear.
Thank you for the super review though!
I, for sure, have a lot of feedback items on my mental checklist from this game jam now that I've done one lol
Viewing post in Catch Your Death! jam comments
By all means, rate it whatever you think is fair!
But I agree with your mentality and I really wanted the game to have bonuses that were actually bonuses and not prerequisites for beating the game. In this case, it's the subtle difference between "death is required" and the actual given theme of the jam :)