Quick update: got soft-locked 2 times in a row while in the middle of Panic Puppet's first boss, one of them was in my last life so i got a game over. Idk if it's because i'm playing it with a controller or not, but i can't even pause it to try to fix it.
Also idk if it was supposed to be like this but Eggman actually killed me off-screen once in this fight. I was out of rings, he started going down, hit Tails, Tails dropped me and while i was off-screen he killed me.