i'm curious what you mean by "punitive." to me that implies something, well, punitive to the difficulty of the game; the example that comes to mind for me would be very long times between checkpoints a la dark souls.
for me the purpose of the very short levels with fast respawn times is to be difficult but not unfairly difficult. so i'm curious what specifically comes across as punitive to you.
tbh, the skip button was perhaps less well thought out than it could have been. oh well.
i do think i have yet to master the programming of platformer physics. i think the acceleration profile is not quite ideal. the double jump though does feel exactly how i want it imo.
thanks for playing!