Thank you for the feedback!
The controls are probably the thing we got the most feedback on, and overall I wish we had more time to tweak it. I had to add a lot of edge cases to get it to work correctly and there are a ton more that needed to be addressed. The biggest issue was maintaining momentum when you enter a zone but not maintaining it in other parts of the game which added a lot of player states that turned the code into a big hacky mess.
I appreciate that you noticed some of the finer nuance to the mechanics to the game, it took a bit of work to get the mechanics to work together ‘smoothly’ and a lot of players gloss over it.
The booster zones also where just reverse gravity zones, you are correct that you have to stay in them for as long as possible in order to get the full boost. I realize that in other games with boosters they just add one single impulse to the players velocity which fixes this issue.
Making the game made me realize how hard metroidvanias plus platformers are to balance. Give the player too much and it just trivializes some platforming sections. We had a ton of cool upgrades but during testing players would miss them, which made the following sections harder. We had to limit just how much the player could get upgraded overall because of this.
Again thank you for the great detailed feedback!