This is a really solid entry! The star of the show is absolutely the central hook. The changing environments are very pretty, and I love the new elements hinting at where you should go next with your new ability. Signposting the save points is a nice touch as well. I also want to shout out the vertical boost you get when you room transition upwards, a small detail that makes a big difference.
Enemy and boss design were fun, very Hollow Knight (complimentary). The combat is decent, I like the healing, and I appreciate that enemies go from idle go aggro once they spot you. Hitting things feels alright, I think a tiny bit of player pushback and maybe a chunkier hit sound would help. Enemies can largely be ignored, which isn't necessarily a problem, that's true of many games, it just felt especially noticeable here. It usually felt safer to just jump / dash over them than try to engage, unless I needed health. The boss was enjoyable, though a few of the attack telegraphs felt a little too similar. But nice range of attack that all requires a different method to avoid!
The world design loops back onto itself to lead you into the next area in a very smooth way, which sounds like a good thing, but in practice, lead to the game feeling somewhat linear. Combine that with my avoiding most enemies, and the game kinda ended up feeling like just a gauntlet of spike traps. And many of them were nicely designed! It just got a little exhausting.
The jump felt a little weird for me. You have a nice even upward movement and hangtime, but then you fall *so* sharply and quickly, it was hard to judge a lot of the precision platforming. This was made worse when you needed to shimmy into a correct position on the wall-grab foliage to prepare for a jump, but then you bonk your head on a block and fall so rapidly into spikes. I think you spaced all the level geometry out really very, so none of the jumps every felt too demanding, I think the difficulty was tuned pretty well! It just *felt* harder than it needed to be because I felt very out of control making some of the jumps. I think slowing the fall speed, and probably the horizontal movement a bit would go a long way.
Again, I love the premise, but beyond that the game does feel very "standard" in terms of execution and abilities. And there's not much connection to the theme beyond the game having minimalist art initially.
I raised a lot of criticisms but it's only because I see a lot of potential in this project! I hope yall continue working on it, great job!!