Yes, I completed the game... I think. I reached Mount Hop and started collecting story pieces, and then after it said there was no one left, it went to the "Do not despair" screen and reset the game.
Overall, this was an interesting idea and I was sufficiently intrigued to finish the game, but it was a long grind. The world is much too big for the amount of content, and most of it is just drab, empty areas. Finding the first few powerups can take forever and it's easy to get lost since everything looks so similar. Towards the endgame it gets easier to navigate but then it just feels like a slog to collect all the map coins.
Perma-death forces you to play cautiously but this also leads to a kinda boring playstyle. Any fancy maneuvers you can do with the powerups are just not worth the risk. However there are a few sections that are dangerous to navigate even with all the powerups, so you might spend hours slowly crawling around the world only to die in an instant from a single fumble. All of this can lead to a pretty frustrating experience which I think would deter most players from completing the game.
I also experienced a few issues which made the game more stressful:
- The game randomly hangs for a few seconds at random times, for no apparent reason. This could end a run if it happened at the wrong moment.
- If you press down while standing at a vending machine you can fall through solid floor and die. I also fell through walls a few times when using the rope gun or even just jumping downward through platforms in a narrow vertical tunnel.
- The rope gun is unpredictable when used in any way other than moving straight upward.
- I was unable to jump while pressing up + left/right on a ladder (possibly due to keyboard ghosting?), this can cause the player to fall when trying to jump between horizontal ladder sections.
- Sometimes when moving upward between rooms using the rope gun, the rope would disconnect and I would fall back down to the previous screen.
- Sometimes holding space with the double jump powerup would lead to a sort of wiggle-jump that went further than two normal jumps, but this was not predictable. Other times it seemed like the double jump did not work at all e.g. when trying to break out of a fall just before hitting the ground.
If I could suggest some improvements, I would make the world smaller and add a mechanism like map markers or a compass to help find the remaining items. (I know there's the ancient map scroll but I only found it on a single run out of all my attempts, so not a reliable help and occurs too late in the game.) It would also be nice to add some more variety to the visuals or add some random things to find throughout the world to liven things up a bit -- for example a special room layout, an optional powerup or item, or just an interesting visual that appears on a small percentage of runs.
In the end, the idea of a procedurally-generated exploration platformer is pretty neat and I'm impressed how far you were able to develop that idea, it just needs a little more polish to make it a really fun and engaging experience.