Wonderful review, and I'm glad you were able to kind of guess what's causing it. That's very helpful.
I'll definitely be updating this game and bringing it to it's fully optimized state post-jam. There's so many things I can do to optimize it, so hopefully first update after jam people will see some massive performance boosts. As a roadmap I als plan to add in a boss to each area as a way to practice making some cool boss fights; and add in 1 additional area that I didn't have time get into the game.
Thank you for trying to play it as much as you could haha.