Can confirm. All genuine bugs. There are more, but the scythe guys deserve any exploit you can find.
The sword is random loot, dropped by the central enemies, far too rarely as it happens. They respawn if you want to exploit that, when you yourself respawn at negative health.
I did a lot of reading about NES and CV2 and felt bugs were sometimes embraced.
It didn’t fit your understanding of metroidvania. My understanding was such games required retracing your steps once you had items to help (potions, armour, and weapons here). You can level up, which was supposed to unlock more powerful equipment (the strength stat), but I didn’t think anyone would want to play that long.
I thought I made a decent stab at development, and am grateful for you finding a catalog of bugs. I got lost with all the key remapping talk. Maybe next jam I’ll use predefined, established, sets, but wanted to leave the door open for controller players.
Thanks for putting in the time to play and review.