Thanks for giving it another go!
Yeah, Poyo and Bucket put a lot of good work into the soundtrack, I'll be sure to pass that along to them!
(I feel a bit bad because we forgot to re-add the title screen as we just launched into the start of the game during testing, so you can't hear the intro track. It'll be added as soon as we can update the game again.
And yeah, I completely agree with your opinion on the Metroidvania aspect of that. (to be honest, Ste kinda did that without consulting the rest of the group first) To be fair, it was initially going to be much more of a Metroidvania with relics you could drop and pickup freely, but partway through I just had to admit that our plans for it weren't going to be doable in time (that and the prospect of dropping relics wherever not only led to a million possible softlocks it would just result in a lot of backtracking. I proposed the relic pedestal idea, and that helped designing go a lot smoother (though not softlock proof, we'll try and make contingency plans for those, sorry ^^;)
Had it been my call I wouldn't have submitted it there, as you said the current game is entirely linear, just with a few mandatory detours (and only keys as far as progression unlocks in a Metroidvania is kinda lame imo), but it is what it is. (it might have also been setup earlier to upload to both via Godot plugin, and seeing how late we submitted there wouldn't have been time to tick that box off ^^;;)
And yeah the ending scene is super cool. Flinigan whipped that up in like the last couple of hours or so too. Dude's crazy skilled, idk how he does it. Really solid fundamentals and a lot of practice I guess.
Thanks again!