I completed the demo and I have to say I think with some further polishing of the gameplay that there is something here. I really like how the game makes you pay careful attention to the the structure of the levels and in turn allows for organic discovery of new routes. Funny enough I'm working on a similar genre platformer right now called Clown Meat (not out, but has a steam page) and it was interesting to see some of the overlap in ideas in the design department. A big focus for me when creating levels was to add many different paths that were naturally hidden in the terrain. I found that it similarly created a great deal of replayability, opportunity to improve, and rewarded exploration even for players not super experienced with platformers.
A few critiques I have off the top of my very tired head:
- There is way too much opportunity to soft lock in this game. I understand that there is a button to solve this, but every time I realized that I was stuck it felt like an irritating walk of shame to have to initiate the games fail state for it. I believe most instances of this can be solved with intentional level design. One hole comes to mind that I got stuck in that could have reasonably be replaced with spikes of a bottomless pit.
- Some of the bottomless pits were really deep. I don't really have much to add to this one I just don't understand why some of them took like 5 seconds to fall down. Created similar frustrations to the soft locks.
- I personally felt that a lot of the vertical movement felt unengaging. The wall jumps give you very little height and the jump pads are just railroading the player in direction they're aimed at. Not the biggest deal if the game is strictly focused on horizontal movement (for the most part), but even in the speedruns that I saw those moments where you have to move vertically seemed to kill the pace a little bit.
Additional things that I liked:
- Sliding and maintaining momentum by hopping felt really clean.
- How you can dash through jump pads without activating them. Made them feel like secret obstacles that were engaging to precisely execute around and helped to distract from ledges that they were nearby (made me feel like I was discovering sneaky routes).
Overall, very cool game and best of luck on your development journey. I know you've given me at least a little bit to reflect about on mine : - ). At the minimum I wish I had given further consideration to mechanics that allow you to build up very large amounts of momentum.