First time player but love to see some momentum based king shit in my platformers. The swinging had to be my favorite mechanic as an umihara kawase head , and the last level 'difficulty spike' was definitely my favorite in terms of how it pushes you to use your stars to retain your momentum. I managed to at least 2 star all the levels and I feel like the difficulty is just right. It was very unintuitive to me at first to shoot the star blocks by boosting away from them and it never quite became natural to me but thats a skill issue. The menus remind me of kirby 64 as well, which i appreciate.'m not sure if collecting stars serves a purposes yet but i like the way downwell does it of allowing you to unlock new color pallets/characters as you play. I dont have many suggestions because this is extremely solid as is.
Keep up the good work!