Coming in from Mynah, I was expecting some nice additions to the fomula that GamesBySpinola has (if you haven't played Mynah, I'd recommend it!); I was pleasantly surprised by what I found in this game with how a lot of nice user-end features were added (more tutorials, interactive NPCs, bringing back the dash/jump tech), and with all this added, the game definitely felt like it was an upgrade to it's predecessor for the most part. One massive thing that I want to give praise to this game for is that the bosses force you to either get extremely good at whatever strategy you want to try to beat them with, or learn a completely new strategy altogether.
I want to emphasize the "for the most part" section I just mentioned; where this game definitely did take steps in the right direction, there were areas of it's gameplay that felt like it had regressed or could be improved on still:
- No I-frames when hit: enemies can stunlock you if they're grouped or you're up against a wall
- Double jump can drop when doing dash&jump tech (you only get one jump): this gets annoying during long spike sections where falling into a pit is a one-way ticket to getting stunlocked and dying
- Keybindings feel bad/mouse was unnecessary/Let players change the keybindings: adding a menu to let the player choose what buttons do what would make the keybinding scheme feel less clunky
- Punctuation/grammar in the story telling: this one's not too big of a deal, but it would definitely benefit from having another person make corrections
- No I-frames on any ability except Special 2: this is especially annoying when you get the first special attack as it locks you in place with an animation that enemies tend to just walk through and hurt you
- Thorns still stunlock: unless you're near a safe spot, falling into thorns (AKA spikes) will almost always be an insta-death. A good remedy to this is causing places to just automatically be placed at the start of the current screen upon touching the thorns (similar to Hollow Knight)
- Enemy attack hitboxes aren't properly matched with enemy attack animations: you won't notice this too much in this base game, but once you do the final challenge, you'll notice this is a huge pain
All in all, this was definitely an improvement, but somewhere along the process, a few things were missed or code needed to be updated to keep up with the scale of the game. Playing this does give me high hopes for what's to come from GamesBySpinola, so definitely follow this creator and support them if you can!
My playthrough: