Hello! Thanks for stopping by, love reading these.
The bass volume was something I had a lot of trouble with; I felt like I really wanted to be able to smoothly fade the notes out but I wasn't good enough at pico 8 production to get that to happen, so I just stuffed extra notes there with varying volumes, definitely not an elegant solution haha.
The jump / bonking on ceilings is also a bit of jank that I wish I had the tokens to fix. Glad it didn't take away from the experience too much. Room transitions was also on my "nice to have" list of features if I had the tokens for it, it definitely feels a bit jarring to go from room to room without any visual feedback.
On the final boss: When I make games I usually have a moment in my head that serves as the "seed" for the whole game; basically a moment that I use to build the rest of the game around. For this game, the final boss cutscene where he asks you why you're climbing was that 'moment', and the rest of the game kind of just emerged from that seed. Glad that moment felt good, it's my favorite part. Also the phase skip to phase 2 is something I'm really glad I added; multiple commenters have mentioned it being a nice QoL thing, so glad you found that helpful!
This game was definitely just a small side experiment, basically: "What if I made a soulslike but was literally unable to engage in feature creep (using pico 8 restrictions)" and this is what spawned from that. A decent amount of jank remains in the game partially due to some token restrictions, and partially due to poor planning on my part. Thanks a ton for playing and for all the feedback and kind words!