I manually animated the shadow with Godot's animation player (tweened the frames with a duplicate of the Player's sprite until it looked somewhat convincing) so it isn't totally accurate to what the movement is (i really need to find a way to record my movements and play them back in an animation instead of spending 10 minutes hand-animating the motion lol)
Difficulty has been a common complaint x) I definitely should have added a heart or two to the health bar so it's more forgiving for people that have played less platformers than i have !
The first level's difficulty ended up being way harder than it should have so it's normal that you (and a ton of other people) struggled with it x)
Thanks for reviewing ! I appreciate it ^v^